This man (and the governing body who passed this...bill) are suffering from a case of terminal stupidity.

Here's hoping they have their asses handed to them by their constituents.

(And doesn't this bill violate the Lilly Ledbetter Act?)

FAIL

ME

The bill was passed on straight party-line votes (another reason to never again vote for a Republican for any office whatsoever).

If Wisconsin can't get rid of this woman-hating, union-busting scumbag after THIS...there's reason to check if they're using Diebold voting machines.

So they're getting started early in providing her with issues to build her platform on, ones that will give her a significant advantage? Yes, that sounds like a typical Republican strategy.

[Link fixed. -- JDM]

Walker is a fucking scumbag.

Walker's attempt failed, fortunately.

I'll be voting.

The bill's sponsors and the language of the bill appear under the left link. There are people who actually want to put their name on this.
The amount of lobbying time spent on this bill was 245 hours FOR discrimination with impunity, 3 hours AGAINST discrimination with impunity.

For ease of further searching, it appears to be Senate Bill 202, entitled "elimination of compensatory and punitive damages for acts of employment discrimination or unfair honesty or genetic testing."

Unfair honesty testing? Unfair genetic testing? There are so many ways to engage in employment discrimination.

From what I can gather from the name of the bill, it appears that while discriminating against various groups (gender, sexuality, religious, racial) in hiring practices will still be illegal, as will unfair honesty tests or unfair genetic tests, the maximum penalty for same in the state of Wisconsin is now a slap on the wrist, a scolding from Hizzonner (or Herronner) delivered to the company's hired attorney, and a warning Not To Do It Again.

Quite how this is supposed to discourage unlawfully discriminatory hiring practices is beyond me, but presumably the various political brains of the Wisconsin state assembly can enlighten us.

We've never been questioned, but our insurance providers use non-demoniational hospitals. I have a partner (f) and my spouse (m) and we are all in a triad. They assume J is r's husband so don't ask. And when i took her to the er because of a surgery problem, no one asked me a damn thing, except about what was going on and her care.

The availability of back-pay will be of questionable use to someone who was not hired due to unfair practices.

That issue of committing crimes with impunity appears to be a growing trend here, in recent years. Various crimes get scrubbed or settled, from the financial (the mortgage fraud scrubbed) to the blood-drenched (what happens in Iraq--stays in Iraq, with special notes about Falujah), from the citizens' level (the stand your ground laws) to the government (what's that about our gov't training members of an organization that it has on its own list of terrorist organizations?)
I think that rolling this trend back--returning both a sense of fair play and a sense of rules being rules--is of critical importance in healing our culture.

By "busy with the fallout" I do not mean "repealing those laws" or even "attempting to repeal those laws."

Although (with a recent GOP resignation) there is now a 50/50 split in the state senate instead of the handy GOP majority Walker had, and several GOP senators are also up for recall (which may and likely will result in a Democratic majority), the state assembly is still solidly GOP at least until November... and may remain so. Under those circumstances, Walker's changes will remain in force.

Nonsense, Dena Shunra. Complainants can still recover back pay, reinstatement, and attorneys' fees, as was the case before the 2009 Act. Like all forms of discrimination, compensatory and punitive damages are no longer available for Wisconsin’s Fair Employment Act claims.

http://www.wisbar.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=InsideTrack&Template=/CustomSource/InsideTrack/contentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=109534

Making misbehavior cost so much discouraged it. Cheapening the cost emboldens the offenders.

Drat.

Their purpose in life seems to be to make phrenology look like hard science by comparison.

arhooley's own quote in #20 refers to the same removal of financial penalties [i.e. punishment] ("compensatory and punitive damages are no longer available") that Dena Shunra in #15 had both specified from the bill title ("elimination of compensatory and punitive damages") and alluded to as allowing "discrimination with impunity."

IOW, arhooley mayn't know the words' etymology well enough to realize it, but he himself documented her point.

(Redundantly, since she'd already done so once, but ironically nonetheless.)

IOW again, arhooley contradicts himself: if you do believe him about the words quoted above, as he presumably does, that just supports Dena Shunra.

So you, TexAnne, don't have to choose between them.

If, that is, he feels he can make any coherent case that just having to pay what you owe to the person it's owed to (no compensatory or punitive damages added) is in itself a "punishment" for wrongdoing.

In which case I suppose we none of us need pay any of our debts including taxes, loans, credit card bills, etc., except as "punishment" and after all due process in court, right? (And even then, no fines or late fees added!) Or is this a special parsing of the law just for employers?

Why yes, of course it is.

Ok, in reality I've only seen the honesty test nonsense in news articles; it probably hadn't been invented the last time I had a retail job, which was also before they'd thought of testing job applicants for politically incorrect drug use.

As long as these tests are no better, and no worse, than random selection of the candidates for a desired quality, they can be used to reduce the candidate pool to a more manageable size. Retailers in my part of the world have had several hundred applicants for each job. Spurious automated multiple-choice tests that can reduce that number are worth having.

As long as they reduce the pool in a reasonably equitable fashion. A spurious test that happens to cut out the applicants of a particular group (gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, etc) would be somewhat less worth having.

But it's not against women, you see, because a Democrat once said something inexact about Ann Romney. (Hmmm...will Mitt ask her to change an 'n' to a 'y' to try to get the Ron Paul vote?----but how many people would support Any Romney?)