Affirmative Action Is the Nation's

Affirmative action is the nation's most ambitious attempt to rectify its long history of racial and sexual discrimination. Affirmative Action was born of the civil rights movement three decades ago, and calls for minorities and women to be given special consideration in employment, education and contracting decisions. The prevailing discriminatory practices during the sixties, whose targets were working people, women, and people of color, were appalling. Although some progress has been made with affirmative action, defenders claim that the playing field is not yet level.

Thereby, granting some advantages to minorities and women is more than fair, given decades of discrimination that benefited whites and men. In its modern form, affirmative action can call for an admission officer faced with two similarly qualified applicants to choose the minority over the white, or for a manager to recruit and hire a qualified woman for a job instead of a man. Affirmative action decisions are generally not supposed to be based on quotas, nor are they supposed to give any preference to unqualified candidates.

In addition, affirmative action should not harm anyone through reverse discrimination. While many minorities and women support affirmative action, a growing number say its benefits are no longer worth its side effect, which is the perception that their success is unearned. Overall, minorities and women are in substantially lower paying jobs and still face active discrimination in some employment sectors.

A recent study released by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute (TRPI) demonstrated that significant gaps persist between the levels of employment and income of White, non-Hispanic males and White females, minority women and minority men. Among other points, the study reported the following; Mexican-Americans represent approximately 18% of the nation's workforce, but less than 7% of the managers in 11 of the 12 industry groupings examined. In 11 of the 12 industry groupings, White women are compensated at salaries less than 70% of their White male counterparts.

African-Americans comprise less than 4% of managerial positions in the Wholesale, Construction, Manufacturing, Business and Repair, Personal Services and Entertainment industries. For every young Mexican-American male manager with a college education, there are over 30 White, non-Hispanic males of the same age and with the same education doing the same job. Middle- and working class African-Americans experience racism in the form of racial discrimination and segregation in employment, housing and education. A broad-based employment-opportunity program that would include job creation, job training and free or subsidized childcare is needed.

The continued subordination of blacks in the work place is due to persistent discrimination at all stages of the employment process, from recruitment to interview, job offer, and promotion. Studies conducted in the 1990's by the Urban Institute in Chicago, show significant levels of discrimination in the labor market against black and Hispanic job applicants. The discrimination that previous generations of blacks experienced in the labor market also harms modern blacks' employment prospects today. An important aspect of the labor market disadvantage suffered by African-Americans is their high unemployment rate.

Unemployment rates for African-Americans are twice as high as those are for whites. The problem is particularly bad for eighteen- to nineteen-year-old blacks, which suffer unemployment rates above 30%. In a study conducted by the Urban Institute of Chicago, researchers found that young white men were offered jobs 45% more often than the young black men were. This result reveals that some employers were not treating male minority job seekers equally with white males of similar qualifications. Additionally, whites received 52% more job offers than the Hispanics.

The inflation-corrected wages of white women have been on a downturn since the mid-1970s. However, white men have not lost their superior position in the labor market: a substantial gap remains between their wages and those of white women and black men and women. Modest reductions have been made in that.