Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study by Thomas Sowell

Author:Thomas Sowell [Sowell, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Tags: Business & Economics, Economics, General
ISBN: 9780300101997
Google: feoznwEACAAJ
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

THE EVOLUTION OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not only a law mandating equal rights for individuals, both the Congressional debates leading up to its passage and particular provisions of the Act itself explicitly repudiated the concept of group preferences or quotas. The term ‘discrimination’ which sometimes has very different meanings to different people, was specifically defined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to mean intentional actions by an employer against individuals, as distinguished from disparate consequences of particular tests or other criteria on different groups. The principal advocate for the Act, Senator Hubert Humphrey, put it this way:

The express requirement of intent is designed to make it wholly clear that inadvertent or accidental discriminations will not violate the title or result in entry of court orders. It means simply that the respondent must have intended to discriminate.15

While guiding the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the Senate, Senator Humphrey assured his colleagues that it ‘does not require an employer to achieve any kind of racial balance in his work force by giving preferential treatment to any individual or group.’16 He pointed out that subsection 703(j) under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act ‘is added to state this point expressly.’17 That subsection declared that nothing in Title VII required an employer ‘to grant preferential treatment to any individual or group on account of any imbalance which may exist’ with respect to the numbers of employees in such groups ‘in comparison with the total number or percentage of persons of such race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in any community, State, section or other area.’

While the Civil Rights Act clearly did not create affirmative action in the United States, it is much less clear just what specifically did. In part this is because group preferences and quotas arose and evolved incrementally and even surreptitiously. The very phrase ‘affirmative action’ meant different things at different times.

In the American context, there has been what might be called generic affirmative action, as well as highly specific affirmative action. Generic affirmative action is distinguished from a policy of passively adhering to a non-discrimination principle, while waiting to respond to particular problems as they arise. Thus the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 required employers to take ‘affirmative action’ to ensure that their employees had a free choice as to whether or not to vote to be represented by a labor union. Such actions might include posting relevant federal laws on the subject in the workplace and/ or announcing the end of any anti-union activities or policies previously engaged in by the management. In other words, it was not considered sufficient simply to ‘cease and desist’ from anti-union activity and passively comply with the new federal laws giving workers the right to choose collective bargaining, it was necessary to affirmatively proclaim that right and repudiate any pre-existing policies whose lingering effects might intimidate workers in exercising their rights.

Similarly, in the much later application of this principle to racial and other

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