Bergmann, Barbara. In Defense of Affirmative Action . New
York: Basic Books, 1996: 53-9

The continuing high levels of discriminatory segregation in the nation's workplaces indicate that the task of improving access for women and minorities to all jobs for which they are qualified has by no means been accomplished. But why has affirmative action, which has aroused so much resentment on the part of white men, not done more to mitigate the effects of white male privilege? Is it true that affirmative action has not worked? One obvious answer is that there are many workplaces where affirmative action has not been seriously implemented, where it has not been given a chance to work. Serious implementation of affirmative action is difficult, riles many people, and requires major behavioral changes by those who will make such changes only grudgingly. A serious effort to change may well prove disruptive, at least for a time, to a firm's personnel and operations. Many white people are angry about affirmative action, so opposition to a company's affirmative action plan can be expected. Some of that opposition may come from the most valued and experienced employees, who are likely to be older white males. As a result., many firms are not going to make the effort that a successful affirmative action program failures unless they have top executives devoted to expanding opportunities for women and minorities or they are given a vigorous push by government.

Unfortunately, the OFCCP, the main government agency pushing affirmative action in the workplace, is understaffed, has few effective ways of encouraging compliance, lacks vigor, and has probably been poorly managed. Firms doing more than $5(),U00 worth}l of business with the federal government are require(l to report annually to the OFCCP their utilization of' women and minority workers by major occupational group, and to compare that utilization with the availability of such workers. Firms are also required to have an affirmative action program with numerical' goals and timetables for eventually utilizing these workers roughly in accordance with their availability.

The OFCCP might have mounted a vigorous and well-targeted program to promote integration by race and sex. Since it is not limited to responding to complaints, as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is, it can take on a proactive role. The OFCCP could choose to concentrate on the most egregious offenders among the larger coroporations, where the most impact might be made. However, that potential impact. has been largely unrealized. The OFCCP's 1995 budget of $59 million and its staff of 918 provide minuscule resources for its task of supervising nondiscrimination in the 150,000 workplaces of federal Contractors, which employ 28 million people, one-quarter of the nation's workforce. It makes about 4,000 compliance reviews a year, a rate at which it could investigate each workplace in its purview once every 38 years.

While the OFCCP has probably been somewhat more influential in changing corporate practices than the EEOC or the individual plaintiffs who have brought lawsuits charging race or sex discrimination, it has nevertheless been of quite limited effectiveness. Its main sanction is the debarment of a corporation from the approved list of federal contractors. Only forty-one firms have been debarred since 1972, out of the thousands whose long-term performance has been unsatisfactory. As negligible as the rate of debarment has been during Democratic administrations, debarment virtually ceased during the Reagan-Bush era. Debarment is too severe to be used very often. A particular defense contractor may be the only source of a product the Pentagon wants. In addition, the debarment of a very large corporation would exact considerable political costs. Of the companies debarred since 1972, only four have been large corporations: Prudential Insurance, Firestone, Uniroyal, and Timkin Roller Bearing. All were debarred during the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter. None of those debarments lasted very long; all four companies were reinstated within three months. We can judge the effectiveness of the OFCCP by looking at
how well large government contractors have integrated their workforces by major occupational group. Table 2.3 shows the share of managerial and crafts jobs held by women and African Americans at a group of large government contractors. I note that companies report employment to the EEOC and the OFCCP only by broad occupational category; the figures do not tell us about segregation at the level of specific jobs. The North Carolina data showed that segregation at that level is pervasive, even in work laces where broad job categories are integrated.

The figures on the utilization of women are relatively easy to interpret, because women are almost half of the workforce in all localities. Table 2.3 shows that different industries treat women very differently, and that within industries, companies differ considerably. Overall, the automobile industry has made very little use of women managers, but within that industry, General Motors has almost three times as many women managers as Ford does. In the oil business, Mobil and Atlantic Richfield have twice as many women managers as Union Oil. Manufacturers of food products, whose customers are mostly women, have done relatively little to allow women into management roles; within that industry, George A. Hormel and Company is an outstandingly bad performer. On the other hand, women are well represented among managers at financial firms and banks. All of the firms listed in table 2.3 have affirmative action plans. There is no obvious reason why their utilization of women managers differs so broadly. Many managerial functions are similar from one industry to another, and women are now well represented among business school graduates everywhere in the country.

In examining different companies' utilization of African Americans, the proportion of blacks in the population in the areas where the companies have their facilities, shown in the table's last column, must be taken into account. The differences in the utilization of blacks as managers shown in table 2.3 between McDonald's and the other retail businesses listed cannot be explained away that way, however. Companies differ in their toleration of segregation in their individual limits. In the Boston metropolitan area (7.3 percent black), where many NYNEX facilities are located, 2,213 people were employed at one location in 1992; only 38 of them were African American. In a number of smaller NYNEX facilities in the Boston area, African Americans had only 1 or 2 percent of the jobs. Among one such facility's 116 employees, none were black. Southern New England Telephone Company, on the other hand, had substantial numbers of blacks in all of its facilities in urban centers.

What the company data confirm is that the OFCCP has done very little enforcement. Firms have been allowed to do pretty much what they feel like doing. In the private sector, affirmative action has been largely voluntary. Some firms have made progress, but others that have chosen not to do very much have not been called to account. A rational management of the OFCCP would have targeted the laggards such as Ford and NYNEX for close attention.

Overall, the verdict must be that government enforcement of prohibitions against discrimination and encouragement of integration have made some positive difference in corporate behavior, but that for many workplaces the government impact has been limited or nil. Perhaps the major impact of government affirmative action programs has been to familiarize the management of large corporations, if not the population at large, with the idea that no race or sex group has a legitimate monopoly on any set of jobs, and that a corporation that allows any jobs to be monopolized by white males looks bad.

As bad as the record of some larger firms is, progress has been even slower or nonexistent in most smaller firms. In small firms, the informality of procedures leads to continued recruitment from segregated sources, such as friends and relatives of the firms' own employees. There are 6.2 million places of work in the United States, excluding government agencies. Of these, 6.0 million have fewer than 100 employees; these small workplaces employ 56 percent of those working for private employers. A program intended to hasten the end of segregation by race and sex in such workplaces would have to emphasize the education of their managers and customers rather than enforcement through sanctions. Government sanctions should obviously be concentrated on the larger firms. Integration of the larger firms would provide a seasoned and experienced workforce balanced by race and gender, and some of then would eventually be employed in the smaller firms.

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Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu