As most Americans were born long after affirmative action was implemented, they have to rely on establishment histories to learn about it. But I am one of those old-timers who was around ‘before and after’ this massive federal overhaul of our country’s organizations. I personally witnessed affirmative action’s beginnings; how it worked and how it was propped-up.
My experience with affirmative action was quite different from those who were on the receiving end of these government-mandated preferences. It was also very different from social scientists who viewed it from a distance while safely ensconced in their academic cloister. I had first-hand knowledge of these programs from the inside of an affected corporation. I saw it as it was, not through rose-colored glasses.
At the outset I must confess that although I was acutely aware of the flaws of this intrusive program, I went along with it in my workplace. My justification is that I had a family to support, so I had to place job security above integrity.
Today, affirmative action is firmly established. It is a common experience to learn that a less qualified candidate got the job or promotion that you interviewed for. Being turned down for a job or promotion is bad enough, but it is demoralizing when you realize that your rejection was based on politics rather than qualifications. Although these dubious government policies are still in effect, the public’s support for them has largely faded.
Government bureaucrats have learned that even immense and ongoing propaganda cannot indefinitely prop up questionable practices; i.e. its efforts to sell affirmative action programs to the public. Many Americans rejected these programs years ago when they encountered their drawbacks in the workplace. And during the last three years, even the gullible diehards have turned against these programs as they witnessed affirmative action policies on the national level.
The main problem with affirmative action should have been obvious early as exemplified by this quote by Lyndon Johnson: “ We seek not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.” Washington bureaucrats, without considering differences in skills and abilities, literally believed that organizations could be forced to produce equal staffing outcomes. Providing equal opportunity is reasonable, but demanding equal outcomes goes against the natural order of the human race. Differences in such things as abilities, energy, and intelligence have existed ever since prehistoric man emerged from caves. And government’s fiats cannot change this fact. (Consider the dismal failure of public schools’ attempts to instill artificial self-esteem in students.)
Of course, over a short period of time, coercing organizations to make outcomes equal caused little disruption. After all, we were led to believe that affirmative action programs would only be temporary. But fifty years later there has been no let-up in the government’s attempts to force equal outcomes. This has wreaked havoc within our society, especially our economy.
The major source of income for the corporation that I worked for in the latter part of the 1960s was from a federal contract. In order to keep the contract the company had to adhere to the government’s contract compliance program. To determine compliance, Washington required quarterly reports detailing the staffing mix at various levels of management. If the reports didn’t reflect the diversity that Washington bureaucrats wanted to see, the federal contract was in jeopardy. Not only were these reports subject to governmental audits, but also severe penalties were exacted if data in the reports were determined to be false.
Naturally, this put companies in a dilemma: to keep the lucrative government contracts they had to maintain strict “diversity” in management positions at all levels, even if there wasn’t always a sufficient number of qualified minority employees for those positions. So organizations did what they could legally do to make the reports reflect the data that placated Washington bureaucrats.
Here’s how the game was played: Even though not adequately qualified, a minority would be promoted into a management or supervisory position while another employee, one with superior skills and experience, would essentially perform the department’s actual management duties. Both the counterfeit manager and the covert manager had to be given increases in salary. Of course, the covert manager couldn’t be paid as much as the counterfeit manager or even given a managerial title because that would distort the reports to the government.
As a department head I was forced to go along with this program. My integrity was further eroded when it came time for periodic employee evaluations. Foolishly, I first evaluated employee performance as accurately as possible. But that practice quickly resulted in unpleasant closed-door meetings with top management during which I was strongly “requested” to consider revising negative evaluations of minority employees.
Eventually I followed the advice of a fellow employee, who had been around a lot longer than I had. After enduring similar censures from top management, he decided to “level” all evaluations of his staff. All of his employees, regardless of performance, were rated basically the same with only slight variations. No one was ranked too high or too low. When he learned that top management didn’t question these political evaluations, he continued them.
Numerous other companies with government contracts were also ‘cooking the books’ with their employee evaluations, and this resulted in an interesting incident. As part of her research on affirmative action, a young female reporter visited the state’s personnel office to review summaries of employee evaluations from companies involved with the government. In her article she happily noted that the skeptics had been proved wrong, that employees promoted to achieve diversity were performing equally as well as other promoted employees. Of course, she had no knowledge of the extent of fabricated evaluations.
Inevitably a situation would arise where an employee had to be terminated. There was usually no problem if the employee was not a member of a minority group. But the termination of a minority usually required elaborate documentation that could be submitted to the government: - The same government that classified minorities as ‘protected classes’. So additional employees had to be added to our personnel department to deal with situations involving “protected classes”.
My company, like other companies, hired specially trained attorneys to make sure that terminations of protected classes would pass muster. Whenever I had to terminate a minority, it had to be approved by the manager of the personnel department as well as one of these attorneys. This involved a meeting with an attorney, the personnel manager, and myself, and would often involve additional documentation. These special attorneys were kept on retainer and were in addition to our regular corporate attorneys, also on retainer.
The expense of extra attorneys plus the cost of all the additional employees along with the immense increase in paper work was passed on to customers in the form of higher prices. Other companies, all across the nation, who were under affirmative action directives, also passed their increased expenses to the general public in the form of higher prices. In fact, when economists analyze price inflation since the 1970s, affirmative action is usually identified as a contributing factor. The extra expenses of complying, or feigning compliance, with these coerced social policies probably helped influence the decisions of companies to relocate to other countries.
My scurrilous employee evaluations from those long-ago years were brought to mind by the media’s reporting of Barack Obama’s presidential performance: - always favorable with no criticism. This is affirmative action on the presidential level. Because Obama didn’t have the skills or experience needed to perform presidential duties, the establishment, especially the media, had to pretend that he did. The media’s glowing reports on Mr. Obama’s performance are eerily similar to those specious employee evaluations my colleagues and I were compelled to prepare.
Long ago, America’s workforce experienced the downside of affirmative action policies and turned against them. Likewise, today’s skewed reporting by media, always favorable to Mr. Obama, has lost credence with the general public. The desperate conditions of our economy cannot be reconciled with media reports admiring Obama’s job performance. Countless families are now suffering severe financial hardships as a result of the Obama administration’s ineptitude. It should be obvious to any thinking person that Barack Obama cannot do the job he was elected to do, and no amount of slick semantic journalism can convince us otherwise.
