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Here in the US the application of Affermative Action principles very often results in thinly disguised quota's... that's why you're reading the negative comments. In an ideal world affermative action would level the playing field but this ain't an ideal world, and human administrators and HR people have to figure out how to IMPLEMENT the idealistic concepts that AA contains. Generally being no-nonsense people, they look for solutions that can be actually used (and are affordable) and this often leads you to the application of quotas (just about the simplest way to approximate the goals of AA with minimum subjectivity and maximum affordability/efficiency). That's just how it ends up working out.
from there it trickles down:
A Gov. Administrator is told he needs to fairly/equatably dole out building contracts... he looks at population data and 15% of his population are minorities, so he takes the easy route and dictates that 15% of contractor employees must be minorities.
When a contractor finds out he can't bid on a job because he only has 5% minority representation, what does he do when two guys apply for a job, one white, one minority? What CAN he do?
On the flipside, without dictating a 15% minimum, how could the Government administrator insure that minorities have a equal opportunity to bid on or work on goverment contracts?
Tough problem we're discussing, and there's no easy solution. Everyone complains about how quotas are bad (and they are), but for many circumstances they're the ONLY way to satisfy the requirements of Affirmative Action, and IMO AA was a necessary step... necessary to "shake up" the system. The real question is "when is enough enough?"... and I think that we're pretty much at that point in most places.
[ 12-03-2002, 11:44 AM: Message edited by: Thoran ]
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