by Matt Barr

Maybe they just don't want to hire the kind of people who sue to get their way

Originally posted at Begging To Differ

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit in federal court in Los Angeles on behalf of aspiring waiters whom Lawry's won't hire because since 1938 they've only employed female servers.

"Men must make do with lower paying jobs such as busing tables, the commission alleged in the suit, which seeks class-action status." This is undoubtedly true. I don't know about Jakarta and Singapore, but in Lawry's U.S. locations, Beverly Hills, Chicago, Dallas and Las Vegas, there are no other restaurants around who employ male waiters.

This takes me back to the EEOC's crusade against Hooters:

The EEOC spent five years investigating and threatening the Hooters restaurant chain. Hooters, which has been described as a "Playboy Club for rednecks," sells titillation and flirtation along with its greasy burgers and fries. The restaurants hire only women as bartenders and waitresses.

Eagle-eyed EEOC investigators visited eight Hooters restaurants and surveilled the interaction between the staff and the customers. The EEOC issued its preliminary ruling on September 16, 1994: "The Commission finds [Hooters's] long-standing policy of excluding men from the server, bartender, and host positions to be evidence of reckless indifference to federally protected rights." The EEOC decreed that the business of Hooters was food, not Hooters girls, and that "no physical trait unique to women is required to serve food and drink to customers in a restaurant."

The EEOC informed Hooters that it owed at least $22 million in back pay to guys who had never even worked at its restaurants. The EEOC also demanded that the restaurant chain revise the concept of Hooters and make it gender-neutral. The agency eventually backed down after the restaurant chain's propaganda counteroffensive proved too embarrassing. But the fact that the EEOC avidly pursued Hooters symbolizes how civil-rights enforcement has moved from crusading to allow blacks to sit at lunch counters to crusading to allow government employees to dictate the cup size of the person who serves the lunch.

Lawry's, it would appear, hasn't even Hooters' claim to be selling the, um, experience of the waitresses as part of the deal. (As far as I know.) It's not too late! What Hooters should have done and what Lawry's ought to think about doing is "dimm[ing] the lights, bar[ing] the waitresses, and cut[ting] the menu down to nuts and nachos," as Ralph Reiland might suggest:

[A] bureaucrat or a court can grant a BFOQ, a "Bonafide Occupational Qualification," to cover a discriminatory practice. What is and isn't a BFOQ is up to the government.

"In defending themselves against a lawsuit claiming gender discrimination," said [an EEOC] spokesman, "Hooters claimed that since they were providing vicarious sexual recreation, female sexuality was a BFOQ, but all along they were primarily a food business."

Within the EEOC paradigm, then, Hooters was considered too mainstream, too upright, too legitimate, to be permitted to discriminate.

"[I]n the name of diversity," Reiland concludes, "the EEOC is saying that every staff must look the same, unless the business makes the sexual composition of its staff its central service. Wouldn't freedom of association be a better alternative for everyone?"

Get out of here! Now you're talking gibberish.

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