Discriminating in Favor of an Ethnic Group

Great Debates
21

But the thing is, g8rguy, would you turn down a women tenor with the same abilities and qualifications as a male tenor who showed up at your door, looking for a job?

It seems like the example is not 100% analogous because you can easily “test” the worthiness of potential employees by giving them an audtion. How do you audition someone based on how hard they work, as in the example in the OP? You can’t.

From the OP, I gather IzzyR would turn down a non-Mexican candidate in favor of a Mexican, based solely on the belief that the latter has intangible qualities that the former doesn’t have. To me, this is no different than hiring white people over non-whites because white people are perceived to be smarter or more trustworthy. Why is one assumption OK to make but another one isn’t? It’s not.

22

No, of course I wouldn’t. And I completely agree that if he were to make race a criterion for hiring it would be wrong, just as it would be wrong for me to make gender a criterion for hiring in my rather absurd hypothetical.

What I’m trying to suggest is that so long as the hiring decisions are fair and the advertising is sufficient that people who might want the job are given a decent chance to learn about it, I’m not sure why it wouldn’t be okay to spend additional time or money advertising among communities that I think are most likely to produce the kind of worker I’m looking for.

If I made being a Mexican immigrant a condition of employment, that would be wrong. If I only told Mexican immigrants that I was hiring, that would be wrong. It’s not so clear to me that it would be wrong for me to hire the best available candidate but advertise more to Mexican immigrants than to, say, white suburbia.

23

No and yes (though I’d change “only” to “primarily” in the second statement).

And now, a study in contrasts:

Don’t know what to make of this.

So in essence, you think if you stacked things so that 80% of the applicants (& hence hires) are Mexicans it’s OK, but if you upped it to 100% it’s not. I don’t see a distinction.

24

The perceived personal qualities that you believe drive the OBN do not work independent of favored group membership, though. Where do you think the perceptions are coming from? White guys tend to like other white guys more so than, say, black women, because they believe that other white guys are more likely to share common values and interests. So white guys (in such an OBN set-up) become the favored group. Whether or not the mission statement of such a company blantantly advertises the fact that white men are more sought after, doesn’t really matter if management only recruits among people that fit the “right” type.

This is not too far different than making Mexicans the favored group because you believe them to have a good work ethic. Screening process is the same.

25

** you with the face**

You are using the term “old boys network” differently than I have been. You appear to be using it to mean simply favoring those of your color. I am using it to mean getting your uncle’s brother-in-law who knows someone in a position to hire you to recommend you.

26

Oh, I just call that plain ole networking.

27

Well, I’m starting to make more sense, I think, but that’s not quite what I’m trying to get at yet. To me, there are three possibilities in hiring here:
[ol]
[li]All your hires are from a particular group, such as Mexicans.[/li][li]Your hires are exactly representative of the population as a whole.[/li][li]Your hires are neither exactly representative nor solely from a particular group.[/li][/ol]

I think we can all agree that, barring some really unusual circumstances, the first is not an acceptable situation. I don’t think the second is really an acceptable situation either, unless it happens by chance; it’s laudable to have exactly proportionate representation, but it’s not IMO okay to do so by means of a quota system.

That leaves only the third as a realistic option, to me. I think it’s unlikely that you’ll be in the odd circumstance in which it really is true that your best applicants are always Mexican, and I think it’s equally unlikely that you’ll be in the odd circumstance in which it really is true that the composition of your best applicants mirrors the composition of the population as a whole. And this doesn’t really bother me too much, because that’s the way the world seems to work. Hire who you want to hire, but do it fairly.

Okay, so I’ve established to my own satisfaction that if the population is 20% Mexican, it’s okay to have 25% of your workforce be Mexican, it’s not okay to have 100% of your workforce be Mexican. Where do I draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable? Do I ever go out of my way to avoid hiring Mexicans because I’ve got too many already? Can I justify discriminating in this way?[sup]1[/sup]

Now then, if I accept that it’s okay to have, say, 40% of my workforce be Mexican in this same city, and if I find that 40% to be unusually productive, and if I find that more of my Mexican applicants are well-qualified than I would otherwise expect, why am I not justified in trying to get, say, 40% of my applicants to be Mexicans? Admittedly, I’d have to be a bit odd to think that being Mexican is the reason that this 40% of my workforce is superior, but ignoring that, why would it be okay to have an imbalance in my workforce but not in my recruiting?

Again, this is not to say that I should make race a criterion for my job, and this is not to say that I should not bother recruiting outside of a particular group, but if we accept that it’s okay to not have a perfectly balanced workforce, it’s not entirely clear to me that we can condemn not having a perfectly balanced applicant pool.

This is again an imperfect analogy, but if I’m hiring for a position in which, in my experience, having a college education is a plus, I would be well advised to do more of my advertising on college campuses than I would otherwise do. Is this immoral?

[sup]1[/sup]My answers to these questions, for what it’s worth, respectively: I don’t know, no, and I can’t.

28

Gr8guy asks some great questions.

I’ll add another situation to the mix. My college was overwhelmingly white, to the point that while I was there, they greatly increased their efforts to recruit black students. They hired a guy specifically for this job, and spent time and effort reaching out to the black community, etc. They did not want to impose a quota system or change standards, they just wanted to increase the number of black applicants. This IMO was a great idea; but it is clearly “discrimination.” They decided to spend time looking for applicants of a certain ethnicity. I don’t think any white person could complain, because the door was still open. But for blacks, the door was open, and we were yelling “c’mon in.”

IMO, the OP is the other side of the same coin. If some guy finds that he can get workers simply through word-of-mouth in the maexican community, should he be required to put an ad in the paper?

29

As a matter of fact it is plain ole networking. The reason it has acquired a pejorative connotation is because someone who is highly qualified but not well connected can be put at a disadvantage compared to someone who is less qualified but better connected. Further, in a larger group sense, the use of plain ole networking tends to work out better for middle or upper class White guys - who tend to have better connections - than for members of various minority groups.

But there is a significant difference between having 20% of the population be Mexican and 25% of the workforce if it happened purely by chance and having this situation come about by deliberate effort on your part. I would say this is more significant than the difference between 25% and 100%.

30

But it is by chance, Izzy. As you said yourself, you’re hiring the very best candidate available. You’re not trying to get the very best Mexican available, you’re trying to get the best person available, period. If the best people available have historically been Mexicans, and if I genuinely don’t think that this is coincidence, I would say it’s perfectly acceptable to recruit more heavily among Mexicans than I otherwise would, because logically that increases my chances of getting the best person for the job. I’m not recruiting them because they’re Mexican per se, I’m recruiting them because I think they’re more qualified, and my end goal is to get the best employee I can get at the price I’m willing to pay.

This distinction is admittedly academic to the other people who might be getting shafted by this policy, and I am still discriminating on racial grounds.

As I think about it, my college analogy above was exactly what I was trying to get at. Given a genuine belief that a college education is correlated with being a good employee, logic dictates that I recruit more heavily among college students, and there’s not really much of a moral issue here assuming I take the most qualified person irrespective of level of education. Similarly, given a genuine belief that being Mexican is correlated with being a good employee, logic dictates that I recruit more heavily among Mexicans, and there’s not really much of a moral issue here assuming I take the most qualified person irrespective of race. The moral issue is with my assumption that being Mexican is correlated with being a good employee, not with my desire to get the best employee available.

31

But presumably if you recruit all people equally, the hard-working Mexicans will naturally be best suited to the job. Natural selection (many of the best people happen to be Mexican) is okay, artificial selection (skewed recruiting practices) is not. And because natural selection IRL doesn’t follow ethnic lines very closely, you would not be expected to get a disproportionate amount of Mexicans. It would cast suspicion if you did.

32

g8rguy, I may not have made myself clear. You said:

From which you go on to say:

I say that one does not follow the other. Because while the unlikelihood of a perfect mirror establishes that it is OK for random chance to produce a mismatch, it does not establish that it is OK to deliberately scheme to produce a mismatch. (Of course you are free to argue that it is OK based on other grounds - I am merely saying that A does not follow from B). What you seem to be doing is to say that because random fluctuation would allow a certain amount of mismatch, such a mismatch must be tolerable even by deliberate effort - it is only when you get past the point that might be randomly produced that you get into problems. Again, I think the distinction is between actively attempting to skew the pool or just letting the chips fall where they may.

33

Yes, as I’ve said multiple times in this thread, there is a fallacy in assuming that one group in particular is more likely to be well suited to a given task. I’m not trying to claim otherwise, and I’m not trying to defend recruiting based on this fallacy as an intelligent thing to do. I am trying to defend the logic and morality after the fallacy has been made. I have a set of assumptions. I am trying to argue that given those assumptions, something follows. I am not trying to argue that those assumptions are correct, because they aren’t.

Evidently, either I’m a complete bonehead and am missing something that is blindlingly obvious to everyone else, or I’m completely incapable of explaining what is blindingly obvious to me. So let me see if I understand what you’re saying. Basically, you contend that it is not permissible to recruit more heavily among group X even though you honestly think that people in group X tend to be better qualified. To me, this makes no sense.

Yes, if people in group X really are more qualified, I’ll probably wind up hiring one of them. But I want the best employee, not a decent employee, so I want to make sure that I can select from the best candidates, not from decent candidates. And so, if being a member of group X is a job qualification, I recruit more from group X. The fact that IRL being a member of group X is not a job qualification has nothing to do with the matter. If it were a job qualification, why ought I not to treat it as such in my recruiting process?

To digress briefly to Izzy, I’m not deliberately scheming to produce a mismatch at all. I am deliberately scheming to produce what I think will be the best work force, and if this work force has a mismatch, fine. If it doesn’t, fine. If it winds up being composed entirely of lesbian atheists from Venezuala, fine. If it winds up being composed of rednecks named Bubba, fine.

And if I discover that lesbian atheists from Venezuala are for some reason unusually qualified, I want to make sure that the lesbian atheists from Venezuala (LAFV) are aware that I have a job opening. Ideally, I’d also like the rednecks named Bubba (RNB) to be aware, but if I find that LAFV are unusually well qualified and RNB are unusually poorly qualified, I’m not going to recruit the two identically because it would be inefficient. If, of course, a particular RNB is better than all the LAFV who apply, great, now I have an RNB on my staff.

So I ask you both to refer to my college example again, as it gets at the heart of what I’m trying to say. Because I think that Harvard grads are usually more qualified than high school drop outs, I would like my applicant pool to contain more of the former than of the latter, even though I may ultimately end up with a high school drop out. So I’d like to pose the following questions:[ul][li]Have I done anything wrong in recruiting more heavily at Harvard than not? If so, what was it, and why is it wrong?[/li][li]If recruiting more from Harvard is okay, and if being a LAFV really is a job qualification in the same sense that being a Harvard grad is a job qualification, is it wrong to recruit more heavily among LAFV than among RNB? If it is, what’s wrong here, and why is it not wrong in the Harvard example?[/li][li]If it’s okay to recruit more amongst LAFV when they really are more qualified, why would it be wrong to recruit more amonst LAFV when I only think they are more qualified?[/li][/ul]

34

I’m putting the moral issue aside for the moment, and discussing the legal context for employment, under U.S. law.

Discrimination based on race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, age (over age 40), or disability is prohibited, under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Age Discrimination Act (1967), Americans with Disabilities (1990), Equal Pay Act of 1963, and various others.

There are exceptions permitted under the law. These main exception is a bona fide occupational qualification (“BFOQ” in the jargon). Thus, if you are casting a movie and want someone to play George Washington, you may justifiably exclude a black woman actress who applies… even if she is a better actress than the white male you select. Your example of hiring for a basketball team would be similar, you can prove that height is a relevant qualification. If you wanted to hire a rabbi for a congregation, Izzy, you would NOT have to accept Catholic applicants.

Other exceptions include seniority systems, national security, and a few others. The courts have interpreted these very strictly.

The situation with persons with disabilities is complex, but you basically can’t discriminate if they can perform the essential job functions, perhaps with accomodation.

Saying that you want to hire primarily Mexicans and therefore are discriminating “in favor” of a group, not against a group, is a ludicrous argument. Suppose I want to hire primarily whites. It’s discriminating against all other groups.

Now, it is not enough to claim that you do not discriminate in hiring, but you “just happen” to have excluded some ethnicities or races. It is called disparate impact, and it is also prohibited. The prime example is an employer who only hires people who live within a 10 or 15 minute drive from the office, and happens to be located in a white neighborhood and thus has no black employees. There is no specific exclusion of blacks in the hiring practice, but the geographic restriction creates “disparate impact”. In this case, the courts have ruled that the employer cannot specify driving time to work as a condition for hiring (unless it can be proved that it is a bona fide occupational qualification.)

In short, g8rguy, if your workforce turns out to be “composed entirely of lesbian atheists from Venezuala”, then you better be prepared to prove that there is not discriminatory practice going on when a well qualified Catholic male from Hindustan sues on the grounds of disparate impact.

Your defense against such a suit cannot be “it just happened that way.” Well, OK, you can try such a defense, but you will almost certainly lose the case. You would have to prove that there was absolutely no bias in your hiring, that on some objective measure you ALWAYS picked the most qualified candidate withour regard for race, gender,e tc. No jury will believe that by sheer dumb luck, you just happened to wind up with 100 employees who are all “lesbian atheists from Venezuala.”

Your primary defense against such a suit would have to be to show that being a lesbian atheist from Venezuela was a bona fide job qualitifcatin. Good luck.

35

One further point: **g8rguy, ** your example of “recruiting from Harvard” is irrelevant. That’s not a protected class under U.S. law. The protected classes are race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, age (over 40), gender, and involvement with unions and “concerted activity.”

You can hire only Harvard grads, if you wish, as long as that does not produce disparate impact (that is, if the group of Harvard grads somehow excluded some of the protected classes.) For instance, if you had some all-male or all-female school, you could NOT hire only graduates from that school – that would produce disparate impact.

You can discriminate against smokers or non-smokers, against overweight persons, against ugly people (“We want our receptionist to be attractive”) or against any other group that you want… as long as there is no disparate impact. (For instance, if your standard of “attractive” excluded non-Venezuelans, there would be disaparate impact.

36

Well damn. I had a long reasonably polished post, and then it vanished when my connection timed out. Let me try again.

I had hoped I’d been quite clear on some things which I apparently have not been. So let me say them now, for the official record.[ol][li]I am not arguing that one should make hiring decisions based on race, gender, and so on.[/li][li]I am not arguing that it is morally acceptable to do so on the basis of “I just like it that way,” or some other such pretext.[/li][li]I am not arguing that gender, ethnicity, and so forth is actually a job qualification.[/li][li]I am not arguing that I would not be in a heap of trouble, legally, if all my employees happened to be “lesbian atheists from Venezuala,” even if this truly was random chance.[/li][li]I am not arguing that hiring Mexicans because you think they make better employees is not discriminating against everyone else. I am fully cognizant that it is discriminating against everyone else. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, I’m not quite that out of it.[/li][li]I am not arguing anything about points of law, since ignorant twit though I may be, even I am aware of the basic ideas here.[/li][/ol]There’s probably other things I should have said but haven’t thought to. In essence, all I’m trying to argue is that I have done nothing morally wrong in trying to hire people who possess quality X under the mistaken belief that quality X is a BFOQ (thanks for the new jargon, by the way!), regardless of whether quality X is “has a Harvard education” or “is from Sri Lanka.” Blame me for idiocy in thinking that being from Sri Lanka, or being Mexican, or being white, or being male, is a legitimate qualification, because I would deserve it, but don’t blame me for immorality, because I wouldn’t. And that, Dex, is why I respectfully suggest that my Harvard example is not irrelevant at all. It’s just another example of what someone might think is a BFOQ, no more and no less.

Since my desk is showing signs of damage due to being hit repeatedly by the stone-like substance of my forehead, and since I rather suspect that this ailment is spreading to desks across America, I shall absent myself from this discussion at this point, unless there’s some compelling reason for me to do otherwise.

37

I guess in the end the problem is that ethnic differences do not in the vast majority of cases correlate with performance in the workplace. Because you are starting from a fallacy (something you freely admit, I’m not knocking you there), anywhere you end up cannot be justified. Now if you based this on something that did correlate, such as level of education achieved – well, it is perfectly legal to discriminate on that basis, because that is an aspect that does correlate with performance in the workplace.

38

Same thing. You are indeed scheming to produce a mismatch. What you are saying is merely that you are doing so not out of any great love for Mexicans or antipathy for anyone else, but out of a desire to improve your workforce. But you are seeking to improve your workforce by increasing the number of Mexicans in it. This is not analogous to a case where you have no motivation at all to increase the number of Mexicans, but it happened to work out like that through a random fluctuation.

The main difference between the Harvard example and the other cases is that in the case of Harvard the Harvard education is itself the quality that you are looking for. Either because you believe that a Harvard education is itself something that will useful in employment, or because you believe that Harvard has screened its entrants to allow only the best and the brightest in. By contrast, in the other cases, people’s ethnicity is not a useful quality in employment - you are only using the stereotype as an indicator of other qualities. The morality of using ethnicity as an indicator is at issue here. Even assuming that it has a basis in reality.

I’m not going to argue any legal issues.