AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AFFECTS ON MANAGEMENT

Affirmative Action affects on Management

Affirmative Action affects on Management

Introduction

Affirmative action is an act, policy, plan, or program designed to remedy the negative effects of unfair discrimination. "Affirmative action" can remedy the perceived injustice of discrimination based on a person's race, national origin, ethnicity, language, sex, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or affiliation. As a civil rights policy affecting African Americans, "affirmative action" most often denotes race-conscious and result-oriented efforts undertaken by private entities and government officials to correct the unequal distribution of economic opportunity and education that many attributes to slavery, segregation, poverty, and racism.

What counts as affirmative action varies from one field to the next. Affirmative action in employment has meant seeking to hire a racially mixed and balanced workforce that includes a representative number of Americans of African, Latin, Asian-Pacific, or native ancestry, using the distribution of minority groups in the national or local population to gauge adequate representation. Self-described "equal opportunity/affirmative action" employers may voluntarily seek to hire African Americans, sometimes with explicit numerical goals and timetables in mind. For example, an employer whose workforce is two percent African American begins to hire additional blacks aiming at a workforce that will eventually include ten percent African Americans, three percent of whom will occupy management positions within three years.

Employers may base affirmative-action programs on the assumption that they can achieve racially balanced workforces through race-conscious hiring and promotion preferences. Preferential employment strategies involve affirmative action on behalf of a racial minority group when a person's minority race results in employment for which race is not otherwise a significant qualification. A person's race may sometimes be a bona fide job-related qualification. For instance, undercover police work in black neighborhoods may require black police officers; practical filmmaking about African-American history may require black actors. In such instances, preferring black workers is not affirmative action.

Discussion and Analysis

Not all racial preferences involve affirmative action, and not all affirmative action involves racial preferences. The change in practice is potentially effective affirmative action, but it is not preferential treatment in the sense of according blacks employment advantages over whites or other groups. However, if the same employer committed it to hiring blacks over similarly qualified or better qualified whites, or by exempting blacks from the adverse impact of seniority rules, one could describe the employer as according blacks preferential treatment as an affirmative-action measure.

Affirmative action in public and private education has focused on such race-conscious programs as "desegregation," "integration," "diversity," and "multiculturalism." Whether voluntarily or pursuant to court orders, to achieve desegregation in public primary and secondary schools formerly subject to state-imposed racial segregation, school officials have expressly mandated numerical goals, ratios, and quotas for faculty hiring and pupil enrollment. At some schools, voluntary affirmative action has meant allocating financial resources to recruiting and retaining minority students with special scholarships, curricula, and social programs. At others, it has also meant admissions procedures that de-emphasize standardized test scores and other traditional qualifications. Some colleges and universities have adopted legally controversial minority admissions ...