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Preface
This is an analysis of HR law and its costs, but readers familiar with post 410, “The ‘Elites’ Want to Kill 4/5ths of Us,” will recognize the architecture beneath it. The Club of Rome, founded at the Rockefeller estate in 1968 and backed by Rockefeller money from the start, explicitly advocated reducing industrial capacity, food production, and living standards as tools of population management. HR compliance law does all three. It does not do so with a smoking gun or a signed memo, but the effect is the same: productive enterprise is taxed, burdened, and made adversarial, while a class of credentialed intermediaries, lawyers, consultants, and HR vendors, collect the transfer. The same foundations that funded population-control NGOs by the hundreds also funded the legal clinics, advocacy organizations, and law school programs that built the employment-law apparatus. The Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and their satellites poured money into the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the National Women’s Law Center, and the labor studies programs that produced the generation of attorneys and academics who designed this system. Pattern recognition is not a conspiracy theory. It is how power works.
The small, independent business owner is the enemy of consolidated globalist control. Small businesses hire based on judgment and fire the same way. They pay in cash, build local loyalty, and answer to no institution. HR law targets them with special ferocity: statutory thresholds of 15 or 50 employees trigger the major federal mandates, making growth itself legally dangerous. The result, as documented below, is that employers stay small or convert workers to contractors to stay below the tripwires. A workforce of atomized gig workers, estranged from managers by mandatory processes and from colleagues by individual rights frameworks, is one that cannot build loyalty, cannot organize outside approved channels, and depends on government legal structures for any redress it receives. That is not an accident. The people who built this system are not fools.
Note: if you find this subject dull, read the Postscript, “My HR experience,” first.
Summary
• HR departments and their legal scaffolding grew from a handful of federal civil rights laws in the 1960s into a $250-billion compliance industry that now consumes 1–3% of payroll at most large American employers.
• The legislative architects were almost entirely from the political left, though Nixon’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and Bush’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) added Republican fingerprints.
• Employment litigation has exploded: the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) receives roughly 73,000 complaints per year, and each one that reaches trial costs the defending employer $100,000–$300,000 in legal fees before a verdict is reached, win or lose.
• State-by-state variation in employment law has created a labyrinth so dense that national HR firms struggle to track it, and compliance consultants bill handsomely for the effort.
• Other first-world countries cover similar ground with national-level statutes, works councils, or union structures that cost less in overhead and generate less litigation.
• The cumulative effect is a system that inserts a costly, litigation-minded bureaucratic layer between managers and workers, raises barriers to hiring and firing, and transfers wealth from productive enterprise to lawyers, consultants, and HR vendors.
How it started: a short history of a long con
The story begins honestly enough. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifically Title VII, prohibited workplace discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota shepherded it through the Senate. The EEOC came with it, charged with enforcement. At this point, the goal was simple and defensible: stop employers from refusing to hire Black Americans, women, and members of religious minorities for reasons that had nothing to do with their ability to do the job.
From that reasonable starting point, the apparatus grew relentlessly. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act followed in 1967. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was established in 1970 under Nixon. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) landed in 1974. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978. The Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) in 1988. The ADA in 1990. The Civil Rights Act of 1991 added punitive damages and jury trials to Title VII claims. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) arrived in 1993 under Clinton.
That is nine major federal statutes in 30 years, each adding reporting requirements, protected categories, and new litigation hooks. After 1993, the states got busy. California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts layered on their own expanded protected categories, pay equity statutes, predictive scheduling laws, bereavement leave mandates, and salary history bans. As of 2024, California alone has more than 40 distinct employment statutes, several of which have no federal analog and some of which conflict with one another.
An acquaintance who works at a 2,000-person national HR firm reports that the laws vary widely by state, making it hard for staff to keep track. It is not a design flaw; it is the point.
The money: what compliance costs
The U.S. HR management market was valued at roughly $32 billion in 2023 and is growing at about 12% annually. Add the legal services attached to it: employment law is one of the fastest-growing practice areas in American law, generating an estimated $15–20 billion in annual revenue for attorneys. Then add HR software vendors (Workday, ADP, BambooHR), compliance consultants, diversity training programs, and third-party investigators. The full ecosystem is estimated to touch $250 billion annually.
At the firm level, HR costs roughly 1–3% of total payroll, according to surveys by the Society for Human Resource Management. For a 500-person company with an average salary of $70,000, that is $700,000–$2.1 million per year spent on compliance, administration, and risk management before a single productive thing gets done. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the world's largest professional association for HR professionals, found in its 2022 benchmarking survey that the average HR-to-employee ratio is 1.4 HR staff per 100 employees. A company of 10,000 people employs 140 people who produce nothing except protection from lawsuits.
Litigation costs are harder to pin down because most employment disputes settle confidentially, but the available data are ugly. The EEOC received 73,485 charges in fiscal year 2023 and secured $665 million in monetary relief through administrative resolution alone, before a single case went to court. The average jury verdict in an employment discrimination case exceeds $200,000, and defense costs for a case that goes to trial routinely run $100,000–$300,000 even when the employer wins. Wrongful termination cases are the single largest category of employment-related insurance claims. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform has estimated that employment litigation adds roughly $3,000 per year to the cost of employing each American worker.
No comparable study has cleanly isolated HR waste as a percentage of gross revenue, but back-of-envelope math is instructive. If compliance costs average 1.5% of payroll and payroll averages 30% of revenue for a mid-size manufacturer, the drag is roughly 0.45% of gross revenue each year, with no productive output. For a company earning $100 million, that is $450,000 gone before anyone builds a product or serves a customer.
The political pedigree
The left did not invent HR, but it built the regulatory house in which HR lives, and it keeps adding rooms. Title VII was a Democratic bill. The FMLA was a Clinton priority. The ADA crossed party lines, but its expansion under the ADA Amendments Act of 2008 was a Democratic Congress project. The state-level explosion of protected categories, from gender identity to criminal history (ban-the-box laws), to salary history, to predictive scheduling, has happened almost exclusively in blue states.
The theory of the case, as articulated by its architects, is benign. Workers need protection from powerful employers. Discrimination is real, and its costs fall on those least able to absorb them. The EEOC, OSHA, and FMLA protect people who have no other recourse.
The practice is different. What the regulatory framework actually does is create a class of lawyers, HR consultants, diversity trainers, and compliance officers who profit from the complexity they help generate and lobby to sustain. Every new protected category is a new theory of liability. Every new state statute is a new billable hour. Every new EEOC guidance document is a new training seminar. The beneficiaries of this system are not, in the main, the workers the laws were written to protect. They are the professionals who administer it.
Senator Ted Kennedy, architect of the ADA, said it would cost almost nothing to implement. The Congressional Budget Office estimated its compliance costs at $1–2 billion annually. Four decades later, the ADA generates roughly 25,000 federal lawsuits per year, including thousands of ‘serial plaintiff’ filings by a small number of attorneys who target small businesses for technical violations of accessibility standards. One Los Angeles-based attorney filed more than 1,200 ADA lawsuits in a single year. Kennedy’s ‘it’ll cost nothing’ turned into a cottage industry for greedy psychopaths in suits.
HR as a wedge: how the department estranges managers from workers
Here is something no HR professional will say in a seminar, but every experienced manager knows: HR does not work for the employees. It works for the company, specifically to protect it from employees and the government’s theories about what the company did to them. When a worker goes to HR with a complaint, they are talking to the company’s legal defense team. The notes from that conversation will be used in the company’s defense if the case goes sideways.
This is not a cynical opinion; it is the structural reality. HR’s primary function in a litigation-saturated environment is documentation and risk containment. The performance improvement plan, the PIP, exists not to improve performance but to create a paper trail that demonstrates the employer followed the process before terminating someone. The mandatory harassment training exists not because it reduces harassment (studies show it doesn’t) but because it reduces damages in the event of a lawsuit.
A 2019 study published in the journal Human Resource Management found that workers who reported problems to HR rated its help in resolving them as helpful only 22% of the time. A 2021 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 58% of employees said HR prioritized management interests over employee interests. The workers know what HR is for.
What this means at the ground level is a permanent buffer between the person doing the work and the person supervising it. Managers cannot have direct, honest conversations with employees about performance problems without risking a discrimination or retaliation claim. Terminating an underperforming worker requires months of documented warnings, Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs), and HR sign-off, and still results in lawsuits at a rate that drives up insurance premiums for every employer in the sector. A supervisor who tells an employee ‘you’re not cutting it; let’s fix this or find you something else’ is now a legal liability. The conversation has to go through HR, which translates it into a PIP that satisfies the process but destroys the relationship.
Gary, a construction company owner in Ohio, described firing a 23-year-old who showed up drunk twice. ‘By the time HR and legal were done with me,’ he said, ‘I had spent 14 weeks documenting, warning, and managing that one kid’s termination. My foreman, who’d been doing his job fine for eleven years, spent six of those weeks watching me go through the process instead of running the job. The drunk kid got a $22,000 settlement to go away quietly. My foreman quit three months later because he said the whole thing made him feel like he was being watched too.’
The state-by-state labyrinth: complexity as a product
The Byzantine complexity is real. California requires separate rest and meal break compliance, with a private right-of-action under PAGA (the Private Attorneys General Act), which allows any employee to sue on behalf of the state and collect 25% of penalties for purely technical violations. New York City mandates that employers post salary ranges in job listings, conduct bias audits for AI-assisted hiring tools, and provide predictive scheduling notice to hourly workers. Colorado has its own paid medical leave system that runs parallel to and sometimes conflicts with the federal FMLA. Illinois added requirements for hiring notices involving artificial intelligence in 2024. Washington State has its own long-term care insurance mandate.
The result is that a 500-person company with employees in 10 states operates under 10 overlapping sets of rules, many of which are inconsistent. A policy legal in Texas is actionable in California. A severance agreement standard in New York needs modification for New Jersey. The 2,000-person HR firm that the acquaintance works for sells a service that tracks this maze. Its product is the complexity itself.
Law firms know this. Employment practices liability insurance (EPLI) is one of the fastest-growing lines of commercial insurance in the U.S., with premiums up roughly 40% between 2019 and 2023, according to Marsh’s annual insurance market reports. The premium reflects not just the risk of discrimination but the sheer cost of defending any claim, meritorious or not, through a process designed to make defense expensive.
The view from abroad: what other countries figured out
The U.S. employment law model is an outlier, not a template.
Germany operates under a co-determination system. Workers elect representatives to company supervisory boards and works councils. Disputes go through specialized, fast, and cheap labor courts. The average German employment case resolves in weeks, not years. Germany has extensive worker protections, stronger than most U.S. equivalents in many respects, but the mechanism is institutional representation, not individual litigation. The legal costs to employers and workers are a fraction of American equivalents.
The United Kingdom consolidates employment rights in a single Employment Rights Act and adjudicates disputes through employment tribunals rather than general civil courts. Filing fees were introduced in 2013, generating controversy, but the basic architecture keeps cases out of expensive general civil litigation. The U.K. does not have an ADA-style statute producing 25,000 annual lawsuits; it has the Equality Act 2010, which covers similar ground with far less serial litigation.
France is often cited as the over-regulated extreme, with its 35-hour workweek and strict redundancy procedures. But even France’s labor law, administered through the Code du Travail and the “labour inspection system,” generates less litigation per employed worker than the U.S. system, because French courts are specialized and the process is faster and cheaper. The Code du Travail is famously thick, but it is consistent. A French company with operations in Lyon and Marseille faces the same rules in both cities.
Canada sits between the U.S. and Europe. Federal employment standards apply nationwide, with provinces adding provincial codes. The jurisdictional complexity exists but is managed through a two-level system rather than the fifty individual models in America, with one for every state. Canadian employment litigation rates are substantially lower than those in the United States, and EPLI premiums reflect that.
What the international comparison shows is that worker protection does not require a system that generates 73,000 federal charges per year, costs employers $3,000 per worker annually in litigation overhead, and employs 140 compliance specialists per 10,000 workers. Other countries protect workers adequately with a fraction of the overhead. The U.S. model maximizes legal fees, not worker welfare.
Is the system malignant?
A system designed to prevent discrimination has, over 60 years, been converted into a mechanism for extracting money from employers through a litigation process so expensive that settling without merit is often the rational choice. When a plaintiff’s attorney can file a discrimination complaint for free, trigger $100,000 in defense costs, and then offer to settle for $40,000, the employer pays $40,000 not because they discriminated but because $40,000 is cheaper than winning. This is extortion with a civil rights label.
The HR apparatus that grew up around this system is not neutral. It creates documentation practices that protect the company, not the worker. It interposes a process between managers and employees in ways that destroy the direct relationship that makes workplaces functional. It transfers authority over personnel decisions from line managers, who know the work, to HR generalists and employment attorneys, who know the liability. Risk calculations replace competence assessments.
The people who designed this system, the legislative architects and the lobbying coalition of employment lawyers, union leaders, and academic labor theorists, are not all cynics. Many believed they were building a fairer workplace. But the incentive structure they created rewards complexity and conflict over resolution and clarity. Every ambiguous statute is an opportunity for a lawsuit. Every new protected category is a new revenue stream for plaintiffs’ attorneys. Every state variation is a consulting contract for an HR firm.
The estrangement is real, not imagined. Every study of workplace culture in heavily regulated environments shows reduced manager-employee trust, reduced willingness of managers to give direct feedback, and increased formalism in what were previously direct relationships. A 2020 Harvard Business Review analysis found that the introduction of HR processes in growing companies reliably predicts a drop in employee satisfaction scores, not an increase. Workers get more forms, more mandatory trainings, and more processes, and they like their jobs less.
The political left built this. Their system serves its administrators better than its supposed beneficiaries. This has made American employment law the most expensive and litigious in the developed world, and has inserted a layer of bureaucratic intermediaries between employers and employees that neither side asked for and both pay for.
The HR layer does not make workplaces fairer. It makes them more expensive, more formal, more adversarial, and less honest. The honest conversation that could fix a problem or part ways cleanly is replaced by a process designed to generate defensible documentation rather than resolution. The worker who should be told ‘this isn’t working; let’s find you something better’ instead gets a PIP, a 90-day clock, and a severance offer negotiated by HR attorneys. Nobody wins except the attorneys.
Globalist fingerprints: the deeper architecture
The conventional account of employment law is that well-meaning liberals built a system that grew too large. That story is incomplete. The institutional money behind the legal infrastructure that created and expanded HR law traces directly to the same foundations documented in the population control network described in post 410 of this Substack.
The Ford Foundation, which shares board interlocks and funding lineages with the Rockefeller philanthropies, became the primary funder of civil rights legal advocacy in the 1960s and 1970s. It bankrolled the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU, and dozens of law school clinical programs specifically designed to generate employment discrimination litigation. These organizations did not just react to Title VII. They lobbied for it, drafted its enforcement mechanisms, and then used foundation money to test and expand it through the courts. The Ford Foundation spent more than $300 million on legal services and advocacy programs between 1965 and 1975 alone.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Carnegie Corporation ran parallel tracks, funding labor studies programs at Columbia, Harvard, and Berkeley that produced the academic class who wrote the regulations, staffed the EEOC, and trained the next generation of employment lawyers. This is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a description of how institutional money shapes legal culture over decades. The same network that funded population control initiatives through a thousand NGOs, as documented by NSSM-200 and the Club of Rome record, funded the legal infrastructure that now burdens American enterprise with a $250-billion annual compliance cost.
The Club of Rome’s Jay Forrester wrote in 1971 that reducing industrialization was a legitimate tool of population management. Employment law, whatever its stated purpose, reduces industrialization. The compliance burden falls heaviest on manufacturers, construction companies, and small businesses, exactly the sectors that employ working-class men, build physical things, and generate independent local wealth outside the financial system. The sectors least burdened by HR law are finance, consulting, and technology, which are concentrated in globalist institutional networks and produce no physical output that competes with consolidated control.
The ADA and Title VII apply to employers with 15 or more workers. The FMLA applies at 50. WARN applies at 100. These numbers are not arbitrary. They create a cliff at each threshold where adding one more employee triggers a cascade of new legal exposure. The rational response, well-documented in labor economics research, is to stay below the threshold or convert workers to contractors. The practical effect is a structural barrier to small business growth, precisely the growth that builds the independent middle class that globalist consolidation requires to dissolve.
None of this requires a signed conspiracy. The Rockefeller and Ford foundations did not write memos saying ‘fund employment law to burden small business.’ But institutions with shared personnel, shared ideology, and shared long-term goals produce consistent outcomes regardless of explicit coordination. David Rockefeller said publicly, as quoted in post 410, that he stood ‘guilty and proud’ of conspiring with others to build a more integrated global political and economic structure. An integrated global structure has no room for 50,000 independent manufacturers making their own hiring decisions. HR law is one of the tools that makes those decisions costly, risky, and ultimately untenable.
The diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus that was grafted onto HR law in the 2000s and 2010s completed the picture. DEI training programs, now mandatory at most large employers following a generation of EEOC guidance documents and court decisions, are administered almost exclusively by vendors and consultants trained within the same institutional networks that shaped the original law. They import into the workplace the same ideological framework, group identity over individual merit, systemic discrimination as the default explanation for any disparity, that serves to atomize the workforce, generate grievance, and justify ever more administrative intervention. A workforce organized around competing group identities cannot build the horizontal solidarity that threatens consolidated power. It can only produce litigation.
Synthesis
The trajectory here points toward continued deterioration. States are adding protected categories faster than employers can track them. AI hiring tools have become the next litigation frontier, with at least a dozen states having passed or proposed audit requirements for algorithmic screening. The plaintiff’s bar has discovered that private right-of-action statutes like California’s PAGA and Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act can yield class actions worth hundreds of millions of dollars from technical violations that cause no individual harm. And the EEOC has prioritized systemic discrimination investigations, which are expensive to defend regardless of outcome.
The rational response for a small or mid-size employer is to hire fewer people, keep headcount below the thresholds that trigger major statutes (50 employees for FMLA, 15 for ADA, and Title VII), and rely on contractors rather than employees. This is exactly what the data shows: the growth of independent contracting and gig employment correlates with the intensification of employment regulation. Employers are voting with their organizational charts.
The HR industry will not reform itself. Its revenue depends on the complexity it manages. Employment attorneys will not simplify the statutes they litigate. The academic labor law establishment will not critique a system that funds its journals and conferences. Reform requires political will that does not exist on the left, which views every additional protected category as moral progress, and is opposed on the right primarily through rhetoric rather than legislation.
The most honest prediction is that the system will continue to grow until a combination of economic pain and political realignment forces consolidation. Europe’s more functional systems offer a template: specialized labor courts, national-level standards that supersede state variation, and institutional representation replacing individual litigation as the primary enforcement mechanism. None of that is coming soon. In the meantime, every employer in America is paying a protection racket with a legislative charter.
Postscript: My HR experience
My wife and I ran a business that employed between 5 and 18 employees. We had an HR contractor that was expensive but paid for itself by negotiating economical group health insurance rates. We delivered as much service as we could, so our overhead for our California surgicenter-office combination was insane—up to 85% some months. We had other problems of all kinds; a few are below.
Two of our employees, one married, started an affair. They were discreet enough that no one but my telepathic wife and her sister could tell. Nothing came of that for us, but the man’s wife made him pay the inevitable steep price.
Another employee started smoking weed in the back of the van on a 2-hour road trip to a remote office. I know what it smells like; I was a dopehead for six months in college. When I objected, she insisted on being put out at the next gas station. We never heard from her again, and in retrospect, she might have been an illegal alien.
My wife’s sister worked for us for 20 years. She was utterly trustworthy, and we all loved her, but she couldn’t stop talking. I looked at the phone bill once, and she had several two-hour calls to her native Trinidad during work hours. In those days, these were expensive, but she was family, and I knew I would be fired before her.
My last war story involved a woman who had been with us for a decade and had just cashed out a nearly six-figure retirement account we had built for her. Because of the laws about older employees, we had to be this generous if we wanted a tax-deferred ERISA plan for ourselves. She didn’t deserve this sort of bonus, but she was willing to sit outside the hyperbaric chamber and chat reassuringly to the occupant for hours. Most other employees would have died of boredom. She was super nice, always tried hard, and I was fond of her, so funding her plan was less painful than it might have been.
The problem started when she brushed past another person and said, “Excuse me.” He gave her ass a pat and told her he thought she said “Squeeze me.” She marched out, lawyered up, and it cost us $40,000. I miss her more than the money—almost.
If you ask me who did the squeeze, I would tell you what some of my ethnic friends said about O.J.'s wife’s murder: “I don’t think he did it, but I think he knew something about it.”
Selected references
1. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Annual Report FY2023. Washington, D.C.: EEOC, 2023. Available at the EEOC’s official website.
2. Society for Human Resource Management. SHRM HR Benchmarking Report 2022. Alexandria, VA: SHRM, 2022.
3. U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. Lawsuit Climate Survey 2023. Washington, D.C.: ILR, 2023.
4. Marsh. Global Insurance Market Index 2023. New York: Marsh McLennan, 2023.
5. Dobbin, Frank, and Alexandra Kalev. ‘Why Diversity Programs Fail.’ Harvard Business Review, July-August 2016.
6. Grand View Research. HR Management Market Size, Share and Trends Analysis Report 2024. San Francisco: Grand View Research, 2024.
7. Berrey, Ellen, Robert L. Nelson, and Laura Beth Nielsen. Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Law Perpetuates Inequality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.
8. Zatz, Noah D. ‘Working at the Boundaries of Markets: Prison Labor and the Economic Dimension of Employment Relationships.’ Vanderbilt Law Review 61, no. 3 (2008): 857-958.
9. RAND Corporation. ‘The Costs and Benefits of Employment Regulation.’ Santa Monica: RAND, 2018.
10. Harvard Business Review Analytics Services. The State of Human Capital 2020. Boston: HBR, 2020.
