awwww, the poor little college grad

AssHatZombie said:
Youre completely full of shit.

The facts are that it's race/gender discrimination. How else would it work?

Can it function without collecting race/gender data?

Then it's using it for something. That something is discrimination.

The best person is often passed over due to AA discrimination. You're just living in a delusion.
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It collects data to ensures that the "best person" is allowed the opportunity. (just the Opportunity). AA is used as a stepping stone. AA gets your foot in the door in many instances. It is up to the individual from there, as unqualified or less qualified people simply are NOT hired over qualified. That is probably the biggest myth out there about AA. Opportunity does not exist in a vacuum. The mere existence of a specific tangible opportunity does not make it equally accessible for all. When people talk about opportunities being equal, they are talking about those tangible opportunities...however we also have to take into account the potential opportunity one has to achieve/attain that tangible opportunity. Let's not forget that people have personal biases and those personal are the main reason AA was enacted in the first place. If there were somehow a computer program that was created to hire, promote, fire, recruit, etc. based upon a certain given criteria (without regard to race, sex, etc.), this wouldn't be an issue. It's the fact that PEOPLE are not subjective that AA exists at all. If you have a prejudgment about people with numerous tattoos, for example, that prejudgment does not just disappear when the time comes for you to make your business decisions. People are influenced by their beliefs. if you want to get technical, it's a numbers game when it boils down to it. HOWEVER, those numbers act ONLY as a guide to let employers know what sort of workforce is available to them. The issue relates to "good faith" efforts. If a company makes a "good faith" effort to NOT discriminate, there is no problem whatsoever, even if said company has a very small minority/women percentage of employees at given levels. About the only time there is concern and potential legal action against a company is if discrimination is found to be CONSISTENT - and it takes a heck of a lot to be considered consistent. In reality, most of the benefits and potential problems center around merely examining company data, not in any actions by that company with respect to hiring, firing, etc. Yes, if it appears that problems exist, the company's HR person in charge of EO (or an outside contracted EO officer of some sort) will sit down with the AA consultant (or a member of that consulting company, generally the "head" of the consulting company in my experience) to discuss potential discrimination issues. These are merely an act of forewarning companies about potential problems that can almost always be easily fixed by minimal things (VERY rarely having to do with hiring, btw) - for example, one might post "want" ads in a Veteran's publications in order to let Veterans know of the potential job opportunities. Those little things are almost always all it takes to ensure that discrimination suits cannot be substantiated (if one were to be filed). In all honesty, discrimination may still be taking place (very obvious pay differences, etc.) even though the companies are in compliance with federal regulations.
 
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AssHatZombie said:
When affirmative action is nothing but discrimination




By Stuart Taylor

National Journal, September 23, 2002





Dennis Worth had been working happily and winning high performance evaluations for 16 years in the Department of Housing and Urban Development's St. Louis office when things started going sour. In 1994, he was turned down for two promotions for which an independent merit-staffing panel had rated him "highly qualified." By 1995, it "kind of hit me," Worth recalls, "that minorities and women were being promoted and advanced, and white males were not."



Worth checked this impression by doing a tally: Of the 43 people who since 1986 had been hired or promoted by his division, 42 were black or female; only one was a white male. Worth compared notes with colleagues elsewhere. "We started understanding that there was a very deliberate effort coming from somewhere to exclude white males from getting positions. It replicated itself over and over again to the point that [by 1995] it was blatant and flagrant."



Since 1994, all but one of the dozen or so promotions and transfers that Worth has applied for have gone to black or female applicants whom he considered no better qualified than he, and in most cases less qualified, because they had far less relevant experience and seniority. Some of them had little or no college education. (Worth has a B.S. from Washington University.) He and similarly demoralized friends would ruefully remark that HUD "may as well put 'white males need not apply' on the job vacancy announcements." This pattern, which Worth initially attributed to the Clinton administration's passion for racial and gender preferences, continued into the Bush administration. Since 1997, only one of the 16 hires and promotions in Worth's division has gone to a white male.



Now the 55-year-old Worth is the name plaintiff in a nationwide class action against HUD and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The suit alleges unconstitutional discrimination against white males both at HUD and throughout the government. Filed in August by the Washington-based Center for Individual Rights, which boasts a string of groundbreaking legal victories, this potential bombshell claims that the EEOC has perverted its mandate and become the primary architect of a racial- and gender-based spoils system that has trumped the congressionally mandated merit selection process.



The lawsuit seeks no monetary damages, but rather a simple court order telling HUD and the EEOC to stop discriminating. It also puts the Bush administration on the spot: Although the administration has strained mightily to duck affirmative-action controversies, it may have a hard time finessing a lawsuit that plausibly accuses agencies that it now administers, and that it represents in court, of pervasive discrimination against a group that happens to be part of the president's political base.



Some caveats are in order: Allegations in legal complaints tend to be one-sided; white males are no more immune than anyone else from the temptation to blame their disappointments on sometimes-imagined discrimination; statistics can be manipulated to mislead; "overrepresentation" (to borrow from the EEOC's lexicon) of minorities may not extend to the highest-paying jobs and may be explained to some extent by the demographics of the Washington area, where HUD is based; and the government has not yet presented its defense. (HUD declined to comment.)



But the evidence cited by Worth's attorneys consists mainly of HUD's own thick, EEOC-approved "affirmative employment plan" for women and minorities, together with the government's own statistics on the racial and gender breakdowns of its employees and of the relevant labor pools.



Among the lawsuit's statistical claims: Racial minorities as a group have a larger percentage of jobs in every one of the 40 departments and agencies listed in a federal Office of Personnel Management report last year than their percentage of the qualified labor force. Minorities have roughly twice as many federal jobs as they would under a system of proportionate representation of qualified workers in all groups. With only 15 percent of the relevant labor pool, minorities make up 46 percent of HUD's workforce and 61 percent of the EEOC's workforce. And yet all of these agencies still enforce EEOC-mandated "affirmative employment plans" for minorities as well as for women.



The more-detailed HUD numbers show that in all four of its major job categories, the department employs disproportionately large numbers of women and most minority groups and disproportionately small numbers of white males. (The categories are "professional," "administrative," "technical," and "clerical.") The affirmative employment plan nonetheless requires racial and gender preferences for minorities and women in a wide range of employment decisions, in effect pushing to reduce even further the number of already-under-represented white males. This despite the fact that no pattern of discrimination against minorities or women has occurred at HUD since it was created in 1965.



A little law: The 1964 Civil Rights Act bans "any discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin" in government personnel actions. The Supreme Court has held that governmental job preferences are unlawful except when necessary to redress past discrimination or (perhaps) to reduce a "manifest imbalance" in "traditionally segregated" job categories. HUD's plan and the EEOC's regulations purport to require preferential hiring or promotion "goals" only when the percentage of blacks, Hispanics, other preferred minorities, or women is so disproportionately small relative to their percentages of the workforce as to amount to a "manifest imbalance."



So how can HUD justify continuing to give preferences to women and to minority groups that are already overrepresented in its workforce? It does so, the Center for Individual Rights asserts, by manipulating the numbers in at least four ways, producing an intricate formula for evading the law while aggravating the already dramatic under-representation of white males.



First, HUD subdivides its major job categories into so many narrowly defined sectors that women or specific minority groups are statistically under-represented in some of them even though they are overrepresented overall. For example, HUD's plan claims that there is a "manifest imbalance" among its construction analysts because black females are statistically under-represented -- even though black females have four times as many jobs in the "administrative" category (of which construction analysts are a subset) than they would have under a system of strict racial and gender proportionality.



Second, HUD classifies even the tiniest statistical under-representation either of women or of any of several preferred racial groups, in any job sector, whether or not "traditionally segregated," as a "manifest imbalance" requiring use of preferential goals. For example, when HUD calculated in 2001 that the number of Asian males in its "professional" job category (3.4 percent) was lower by one-tenth of 1 percent than the number in the relevant labor force (3.5 percent), it set a preferential "goal" of hiring more Asian males. This seems likely to come at the expense of white males, who are already under-represented in the "professional" category.



Third, HUD's plan explicitly provides that the under-representation of white males is of no concern and has no bearing on the requirement of preferences for women and minorities in each and every corner of the department in which they are under-represented. Thus HUD is happy to have white males, who make up 36 percent of the relevant labor force, compose only 5 percent of the 1,200 employees in the broad "technical" job category.



Fourth, in especially bold defiance of Supreme Court precedents, HUD continues to use preferences even after any under-representation of women or minorities in some sector of its workforce has been eliminated, if necessary to maintain proportionate or supraproportionate representation indefinitely.



Like other agencies monitored by the EEOC's race-and-gender cops, HUD provides powerful pressures for its managers to meet their preferential racial- and gender-based goals. HUD documents state that managers are "held accountable for utilizing every hiring, promotion, reassignment, and employee development opportunity for meeting the Department's goals." Those who fail "to take the necessary actions" risk poor performance ratings and thus reassignment, demotion, or removal.



Legal issues aside, this lawsuit raises a fundamental question of policy for President Bush and his EEOC appointees, who could end official job preferences in the federal government with a few strokes of the pen: Why should the nation's largest employer, which has been running a system of preferences for women and minorities for decades, perpetuate that system even though the white males against whom it discriminates are now under-represented in its workforce?



http://www.cir-usa.org/articles/147.html
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This is just blatant, unsubstantiated, third-party, anecdotal hearsay...NOTHING MORE.
 
AssHatZombie said:
The EEOC and Affirmative Action are both real programs. Their very intention is to discriminate against white men.
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Actually, their intention is to stop white men from discriminating against women and minorities.

It's no wonder white men dislike the EEOC and Affirmative Action. it forces them to hire someone other than their "good ol boy" friends.
 
ZappasGuitar said:
Actually, their intention is to stop white men from discriminating against women and minorities.
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And they accomplish that by GUARANTEEING discrimination against white men, in a blatantly unconstitutional manner.
It's no wonder white men dislike the EEOC and Affirmative Action. it forces them to hire someone other than their "good ol boy" friends.
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All white people are not friends. White privelige is a myth.
 
AssHatZombie said:
But specifically, what part is in err? in your opinion?
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See, the REAL problem is that for a century or more, white males didn't have to worry about competing for jobs with minorities and women. They knew they were a shoo-in thanks to the "good ol boy" network.

Now though, laws have been passed that make simply bypassing minorities and women during the interview process, illegal.


And THAT is what has got so many white men upset...they saw the ease with which their grandparents just cut right to the front of the jobs line, sidestepping any minorities or women on their way to the front, and it angers them that they won't get the same chance to cut in line.
 
ZappasGuitar said:
See, the REAL problem is that for a century or more, white males didn't have to worry about competing for jobs with minorities and women. They knew they were a shoo-in thanks to the "good ol boy" network.
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Race and gender discrimination is not a solution to race and gender dicrimination.
Now though, laws have been passed that make simply bypassing minorities and women during the interview process, illegal.


And THAT is what has got so many white men upset...they saw the ease with which their grandparents just cut right to the front of the jobs line, sidestepping any minorities or women on their way to the front, and it angers them that they won't get the same chance to cut in line.
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It's not the interview line, it's getting HIRED.

Revenge is no basis for public policy.
 
AssHatZombie said:
Race and gender discrimination is not a solution to race and gender dicrimination.


It's not the interview line, it's getting HIRED.

Revenge is no basis for public policy.
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AA is based on the notion of making sure that companies aren't NOT hiring/promoting members of protected classes simply on the basis of their race. There is a HUGE difference between being singled out and rejected SOLELY because of your race and having a program that encourages companies to be aware of their own demographics and to make sure that they are making a 'good faith effort' to not exclude anyone based solely upon one category. Basically, without AA, white men would likely have continued to hire other white men (that's the premise behind the original legislation/action), thus AA was born.

I think people would greatly benefit from reading up on AA before jumping to conclusions based on talking points and media misrepresentations. It's easy to not feel the need to research AA, though...unless you work in the field, it doesn't effect most of us on a regular basis and we tend to think we know how it works because of anecdotal stories and media blurbs. Not trying to knock anyone here at all, I'm just saying it certainly helps when you have a working knowledge of what Affirmative Action is about. Beside that, AA is about monitoring promotions, pay, firing practices, and even the ways in which the company advertises its open positions. There are just so many misconceptions about AA out there thanks to the media's sensationalism about it (making it into a black/white issue, for starters).
 
AssHatZombie said:
And they accomplish that by GUARANTEEING discrimination against white men, in a blatantly unconstitutional manner.

.
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I don't know how familiar you are with the workings of Affirmative Action, but based upon your above assertions, I can only assume not at all. Race is NEVER the primary characteristic used to determine one's qualification. The ONLY time that a person's 'protected class' status might override other qualifications is in the construction field as a result of actual quotas (not perceived quotas) for WOMEN.

Affirmative Action is not just about race. I honestly don't understand why we're still of the mindset that it's a black/white issue when that's just not the case. I'd urge everyone to read the following AA fact sheets/informational links:


http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/statutes/ofccp/eo11246.htm

http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/regs/compliance/ofccp/fs11246.htm



http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/regs/fedreg/final/2000028693.pdf


http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/regs/compliance/ofccp/aa.htm
 
Southern Chicken said:
I don't know how familiar you are with the workings of Affirmative Action, but based upon your above assertions, I can only assume not at all. Race is NEVER the primary characteristic used to determine one's qualification. The ONLY time that a person's 'protected class' status might override other qualifications is in the construction field as a result of actual quotas (not perceived quotas) for WOMEN.

Affirmative Action is not just about race. I honestly don't understand why we're still of the mindset that it's a black/white issue when that's just not the case. I'd urge everyone to read the following AA fact sheets/informational links:


http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/statutes/ofccp/eo11246.htm

http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/regs/compliance/ofccp/fs11246.htm



http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/regs/fedreg/final/2000028693.pdf


http://www.dol.gov/dol/esa/public/regs/compliance/ofccp/aa.htm
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It's race AND gender. Together. I printed your information sheets and wiped my ass on them.
 
AssHatZombie said:
Because im against race/gender discrmination I have a stick up my ass?

Ok. whatever.
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No it is because you wont actually research the affirmative action program before you formulate an intelligent opinion/observation about it. It is more than evident from your post(s) that you lack knowledge concerning it.
 
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ZappasGuitar said:
So is discrimination against white men...
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"Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them."
--Mary Frances Berry, Chairman, US Commission on Civil Rights.

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