Among the most feared federal regulators, and one created largely through presidential strokes of the pen rather than by Congressional blueprint, is the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP. The agency’s investigators go on wide-ranging fishing expeditions seeking evidence of discrimination at large companies, most of which hold federal contracts of one sort or another. “Instead of holding firms accountable when they engage in real discrimination against their employees, the agency has become a government arm for securing high-dollar settlements on dubious grounds.” In its audits demanding large back pay sums, for example, the “government fails to compare like employees to like, and it doesn’t control for perfectly innocent variables that explain pay differences.”
As OFCCP has turned into a combination social engineer and extractor of big-ticket settlements, few big companies are willing to fight back, given the breadth of arbitrary power the agency holds over them as well as the distant threat of debarment or other sanctions. But recently two big tech firms have stepped forward as exceptions: Google, in a dispute we wrote about in 2017 on demands for employee documents, and now Oracle, which is suing rather than accept what it considers an unreasonable settlement demand. [Veronique de Rugy, syndicated/Casper Star Tribune; WSJ editorial; Kate Cox, ArsTechnica; Anthony Kaylin, ASE; Pamela Wolf, CCH]
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