Senators Sam Brownback and John Kerry introduced the Workplace Religious
Freedom Act earlier this week. The idea is to require employers to
accommodate the religious practices of their employees, within reasonable
bounds and without creating "undue hardship." Employees couldn't be made
to work on the Sabbath if their religion commanded them not to.
Some of our readers may be surprised to see Brownback, a conservative,
sponsoring a bill to increase the EEOC's caseload. In his defense, it
should be noted that he believes himself merely to be putting teeth in
existing law: The Civil Rights Act already requires employers to make
reasonable accommodations, and, says Brownback, "[t]he problem is that our
federal courts have essentially read these lines out of the law by ruling
that any hardship is an undue hardship."
But why should the government be involved to this extent in the personnel
practices of private enterprises? Brownback notes that freedom of religion
is the "first freedom," upon which this nation was founded. But by his own
account religious freedom was not held for most of American history to
entail regulation of how nongovernmental actors treat a person's religion.
It's a free labor market: Nobody has to work for any particular business,
and job applicants can review employer policies up front. (For the same
reason, if a small business owner wanted to begin each work day with a
prayer, he should be allowed to do that, too.)
"Surely we're still generous enough, and God-respecting enough as a
nation, to support others in the genuine expressions of their faith," says
Brownback. His sentiment is a laudable one. But if he's right, religious
believers ought to be able to find some employer willing to make
reasonable accommodations for them-without the coercion of the law.
The U.S. Census Bureau's annual report on income and poverty in the United
States, released yesterday, will probably have the Left buzzing for weeks
about income inequality. But according to a recent analysis of last year's
report by Heritage Foundation analysts Robert Rector and Rea Hederman, the
bureau commits several methodological errors that overstate the level of
inequality.
To measure income distribution, the Census Bureau ranks households from
highest to lowest incomes, then separates American society into five
"quintiles" and determines the share of total income received by each one.
What the Heritage analysts point out is that "the Census quintiles
actually contain unequal numbers of persons, a fact that greatly magnifies
the apparent level of economic inequality." (Households in the top
quintile tend to be two-parent families, unlike those in the lowest
quintile.) In addition, the bureau's income figures are incomplete,
omitting many types of cash and non-cash income. Neither do the Census
figures account for taxation, nor for the fact that people in the top
quintile tend to work longer hours than those in the bottom one.
Correcting for these flaws, as the Heritage analysis does, alters the
picture considerably. According to last year's Census Bureau report, the
top quintile of society in 1997 had $13.86 of income for every $1.00
received by the bottom quintile. Rector and Hederman calculate that the
ratio is closer to $3.18 for every $1.
