You’ve probably never heard of Vanessa Caston LaFleur, and you’re not to blame for that. She’s new to the Louisiana legislature, having been elected last year to fill the District 102 House seat which came open when Ted James, the former head of the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus, ejected to take a job in the Biden administration.

LaFleur is an adjunct professor at Southern Law School. She used to be a government lawyer for the Louisiana Department of Revenue, but had to leave after she broke the rules on political advocacy by state employees, and later the Louisiana Public Service Commission. By all accounts that we understand, she’s a competent lawyer.

Which makes House Bill 283, a measure LaFleur is bringing which would absolutely wreck the hiring process in Louisiana, so perplexing.

From the bill’s abstract…

Abstract: Prohibits an employer from engaging in certain employment practices involving wage history, wage disclosure, and retaliation for disclosing wages.

Proposed law prohibits an employer from doing any of the following in order to inquiry about or rely on the applicant’s wage history:

1. Screening a job applicant based on the applicant’s current or prior wages, benefits or other compensation, or salary history.
2. Relying on the applicant’s wage history in deciding whether to offer employment to an applicant or to determine the applicant’s salary, benefits, or other compensation.
3. Refusing to hire or otherwise disfavor, injure, or retaliate against an applicant for not disclosing his wage history.

Proposed law prohibits an employer from discriminating, retaliating, or taking any adverse employment action against an employee, who inquires, discloses, compares, or otherwise discusses his wages, another employee’s wages, or aids or encourages any other employee to exercise the same actions.

Proposed law provides that the protections provided for in proposed law shall not be applicable when an employee, who has access to the wage information of other employees as a part of his essential job function, discloses the wages of other employees to individuals who do not have access to such information, unless the disclosure is required by law.

Present law provides that it shall be unlawful for an employer to interfere with, restrain, or deny the exercise of, or attempt to exercise, any right provided under present law.

Present law further provides that it shall be unlawful for any employer to discriminate, retaliate, or take any adverse employment action against an employee, who inquires, discloses, compares, or discusses his wages, another employee’s wages, or aids or encourages any other employee to exercise the same rights.

Proposed law retains present law and also provides that the protections provided for under present law shall not apply to an employee, who has access to other employees’ wage information as a part of his essential job function and who discloses the wage information to individuals who do not have access to such information, unless the disclosure is required by law.

We’re not even sure how much of this we need to explain. It’s pretty obviously an atrocious piece of legislation. Banning employers from finding out how much people are currently making before making a hiring decision? That this would be the government’s business is a patently nutty idea.

Let’s say you’re a manufacturer of widgets. And you’re considering building a new factory, with Louisiana – for some reason – included in the potential sites for your new widget factory. But along comes Vanessa LaFleur, the state legislator and adjunct law professor at Southern University, to tell you that when you hire Louisianans to work in that factory what you’re not allowed to do is ask them what they make at their current job or to try to verify what they tell you.

Is that going to make you more, or less, likely to locate here?

The other awful part of this is the business about retaliation. What that’s about is to protect union salts who come into a company’s workforce and rile up the employees about who’s making what in an effort to get them to vote to unionize that job site. Typically speaking, when you identify the salts you fire them if you’re an employer who wants to run a non-union shop (and Louisiana is a right-to-work state, so that’s it).

Making this, our Terrible Bill O’ The Day, an attempt to destroy the Right To Work protections in Louisiana law. Congrats to Vanessa LaFleur for bringing a bill which is both stupid AND evil, hitting the Democrat exacta in only her first legislative session.