Lots of Reasons, One Bad Result: It's not just racism, but black job ...
This notion, long a staple of civil rights rhetoric, turns out to be dismayingly accurate. Indeed, according to the lead story in TuesdayÛªs Wall Street Journal, blacks were the only racial group to suffer a net loss of jobs during the 1990-91 recession. Everybody elseÛÓwhites, Asians, His-panics, womenÛÓgained more jobs than they lost during that period of restructuring, relocation and downsizing.</br></br>In an impressiveÛÓand deeply disturbingÛÓpiece of computer-assisted journalism, the Journal analyzed the employment records of 35,242 companies that file reports with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. These companies employ more than 40 million peopleÛÓabout a third of the national work forceÛÓso the findings are of proiound significance.</br></br>Sorting out the causes and cures of the trend may take years of investigation and analysisÛÓno doubt beginning with Congressional Black Caucus FoundationÛªs 23rd annual legislative conference.</br></br>But some things already are clear, including the fact that EEOC filings on "minorityÛ employmentÛÓbecause they include statistics for all minorities and womenÛÓtend to hide the specific work force problems of blacks. For instance, Dial Corp., which takes pride in its diversity program, was able to show an impressive increase in "minorityÛ hiring, thanks to the recruitment of Asian-Americans and American Indians and to the fact that a disproportionately small percentage of white women were laid off. But blacks at Dial lost jobs at a rate two-thirds higher than for the work force as a whole.</br></br>It is also trueÛÓthough not discernible from EEOC reportsÛÓ that blacks still suffer from racial discrimination, both unconscious and deliberate. Job qualifications unrelated to the actual work to be performedÛÓsubjective assessments of their ability to get along with their co-workers, general but unsubstantiatable notions of their overall competenceÛÓall work against blacks at the personnel office. (Test-case experiments involving white and black applicants of identical age and qualification consistently show employers preferring whites.)