Affirmative Action and Full Spectrum Diversity
Affirmative Action is a government program designed to correct past discrimination against minority groups. It requires employers and educational institutions legally to provide equal opportunities, so that everyone, regardless of their race or ethnic origins, has a chance to develop their abilities. Businesses cannot discriminate in their hiring practices, wages and pay, promotion, training, or firing of employees. The law also allows government agencies to favor women and minorities when they award contracts and not award contracts to businesses that do not make genuine efforts to hire minority owned businesses for subcontracting work. Although Affirmative Action has helped women and other minorities (we see women in police work and the military now, for example), opposition to the program has been great since its inception -- on the basis that it discriminates unintentionally (makes a "disparate impact") against white males.
Full spectrum diversity responds to the problems of Affirmative Action with a more multicultural approach -- one that recognizes the advantages and enrichment of diversity. It seeks to enhance group diversity and individualism in the workplace and in educational institutions. The emphasis is shifted. Instead meeting compulsory affirmative action principles and strategies, the full spectrum diversity approach focuses on creative ways to achieve more diversity.
Instead of being driven by something external (as Affirmative Action was by the government), the new system uses internally-based incentives to accomplish full spectrum diversity. Companies that are committed to full spectrum diversity change their organizational structure in order to encourage minority success. They try to eliminate the weaknesses in affirmative action practices and to view diversity, not as an unpleasant requirement the company must comply with minimally (the "token" black receptionist, for example), but as an asset to business that should be enhanced and developed for the benefit of all. Programs, policies, orientation, and corporate culture all reflect this change in attitude and approach.
Affirmative Action The American Civil War ended an African holocaust that had lasted almost three centuries, devastating generations of human beings. It took most of the next century for decedents of the Africans enslaved in the American States to enjoy any of the actual freedoms and rights that were supposed to have been guaranteed to them after 1865. In many respects, contemporary American culture still features residual consequences of Slavery in
Both the liberal democratic and the business rationale need to be clearly articulated in a coherent communications strategy. 5) Statistical data. Detailed statistical data is needed to pinpoint which groups require positive action and to evaluate the impact of programs that incorporate targets or timetables for such groups in quantitative terms. 6) Contract compliance. The experience from the U.S.A. (and to a lesser extent Canada) suggests that contract compliance is an
Instead of pretending that racism and its effects no longer exist, we need to strengthen affirmative action and devise a new set of policies that directly tackle the racial gap in wealth." (Derrity, 1). That, in a nutshell, is the position of this paper. America has not given affirmative action enough time to act. Moving forward, we should continue our affirmative action policies, but with an end in mind. Economists
The film handles the subject of diversity very well, staying with the most important component of diversity i.e. race. The film doesn't use stereotypes in the typical fashion. It gives us a new picture of a young black man who is highly educated. "By making the black man an eminently qualified and desirable suitor at the top of a professional class to which only the smallest minority of blacks
OCR recognizes that colleges and universities are under a lot of legal and political pressure to stop using racial and ethnic factors in admission," Clegg commented. "[In response,] the agency wants to intimidate colleges and universities to continue using these preferences." (Black Issues in Higher Education, 1999) The National Association of Scholars, while raising doubts about the reasoning behind the OCR document titled "Nondiscrimination in High-Stakes Testing," pointed to what it
This is important because it reflect the certain difficulties the government has to stimulate the employment of veterans in a line of work of their choice. Other statistics mention that not only do a large number of veterans have a disability related to their position but rather the fact that they are part of a system which has a rate of unemployment too high for the United States. More precisely,
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