Chapter 10: Discrimination
A. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
a. Lists general guidelines as steps to affirmative action
b. Under these steps firms must:
i. Issue a written equal-employment policy and an affirmative action commitment
ii. Appoint a top official with responsibility and authority to direct and implement their
program
iii. Publicize their policy and affirmative action commitment
iv. Survey female and minority employment by department and job classification, and
where underrepresentation of these groups, firms must develop goals and timetables in
order to achieve these goals
B. Affirmative Action: positive measures beyond neutral nondiscriminatory and merit hiring employment
practices. It is an aggressive program intended to identify and remedy unfair discrimination practiced
against many people who are qualified for jobs.
a. Preferential Hiring- an employment practice designed to give special consideration to people
from groups that traditionally have been victimized racism, sexism, or other forms of
discrimination.
b. Quota Hiring- sometimes ordered by courts for a specific organization that had expressly refused
to hire certain groups, until some appropriate balance could be achieved.
c. Individual vs. Collective approaches
i. Individual being discriminated against vs. collective race being discriminated against in
the past that set the race back
ii. Individual is not discriminating but not doing anything about it. Only hiring on
qualifications.
iii. Collective approach, unfortunately discrimination can be institutional or unintentional.
Not only should we not discriminate, but we should enforce with laws that eliminate
discrimination. Hiring based on affirmative action.
C. Types of discrimination
a. Intentional/unintentional: knowingly vs. unknowingly
b. Individual/ institutional: one person making an assumption vs. business, company, corporation,
profession, system doing it
c. Reverse Discrimination- unfair treatment of a majority member (usually a white male).
D. Beauchamp:
a. Problems with individual approaches
i. Two Polar Positions
1. We’re going to have equal opportunity. If you can prove you’ve been
discriminated against, we will try him. But we will not have quotas or certain
amounts of minorities.
2. Sets standards of affirmative action. In the future who will be discriminated
against?
b. Voluntary corporate affirmative action policies
i. Improved Work Force: more diverse, well rounded wore force
ii. Bias -free corporate environment
iii. Congenial to managerial plannin
E. Wasserstrom:
a. Internal consistency of affirmative action- intellectual inconsistencies, back when racism and
sexism was big, those people were held back and now that they are not big facets of everyday
life, it is inconsistent with the past. Therefore he says that reverse discrimination is not wrong
because we are not trying to discriminate against the white male, we are just trying to
compensate for previous setbacks of minorities.
b. Qualifications of employment- generally, the idea that so long as you’re qualified, that is enough
to become that. Qualifications are what matter, so long as the candidate meets all of the
