4 ms·
It seems pretty clear cut to me that if your company hasn't been found guilty of discrimination in the past, then it's illegal for the company to institute "aff
by ipnon 5y ago
It seems pretty clear cut to me that if your company hasn't been found guilty of discrimination in the past, then it's illegal for the company to institute "affirmative action."
That being said, it's usually the company that receives penalties in these situations, and not individual employees. If a lawsuit is made, and the lawsuit is successful (a big "if" in itself), it's not a guarantee that you will be held personally liable.
Ultimately, the whole thing stinks. I have worked in companies before where hiring based on discrimination was applauded. This was because individuals were being judged on the most superficial merits, cogs in a startup machine to be slowly ground into a fine dust. Ask yourself if you think this is a moral thing for a company to do, and if it's moral for you to go along with it. It's easy for talented people to get new jobs in our industry.
- mrkurt 5y ago> It seems pretty clear cut to me that if your company hasn't been found guilty of discrimination in the past, then it's illegal for the company to institute "affirmative action." That's not what United Steelworkers v. Weber established though. The supreme court said: > An affirmative action plan has to be (1) necessary (2) aiming to correct a statistical imbalance (3) not result in an absolute bar to hiring non-minorities (4) temporary, with an end date or goal (5) allow flexibility for hiring non-minorities. There's no bar for "has been found guilty in the past".
- lolinder 5y agoYou're right, but point 3 means that even under United Steelworkers v. Weber the policy in the original question may be illegal. "Must be female" is an instruction to bar the non-minority completely from this position, so as another comment says it depends on if that bar on complete bars applies to individual positions or whole departments.
- lokar 5y agoConsider you are going to hire 10 mid-career SWEs this year (as a generic pool) and you set aside 2 slots for females, because the current org of 50 is all male.
- lolinder 5y agoYeah, this is why I think it would be irresponsible to comment on the legality of OP's org's policy. We simply don't have enough info about the wider picture.
- raxxorrax 5y agoIt is a very stupid judgement as it is. What does statistical imbalance even mean? If you look at the pipeline of computer science the trend is pretty obvious. Same with construction workers really. Meanwhile there are no such rules for teaching which slowly becomes more and more female dominated. A purely statistical analysis might work for jobs that require no qualification at all with severe caveats at least as a lot of them have a skewed gender ratio. A state should focus on real discrimination. By creating whole bureaucracies around this topic you have created a class of unproductive people that will mainly be driven by self-preservation of their job. You need a bureaucracy to ensure that rules are followed to ensure accessibility for example. But racial and sex quotas should surpass their mandate. Additionally people in public service rarely have an understanding about competition in the labour market. The mechanisms that pit people against each other by skin color seem to completely elude them. For them it is a matter of representation as if they are dealing with 8 year olds. And even those have a more differentiated view.
- Volundr 5y agoObviously IANAL, but I don't read "remediate past failures" as requiring a guilty verdict in court to institute affirmative action.
- sonotathrowaway 5y agoYou’d need to get a running start to make that leap of logic.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoI think the company in question would need to have a document titled something like "Affirmative Action Plan", where they outline the failures and talk about what they're going to do, as well as set an end date. I'd bet a lot of money the company in question does not have this.