Vacations for all
Trump doing the end DEI thing.
President Donald Trump has ordered that all US government staff working on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes be put on immediate paid administrative leave.
The White House confirmed that all federal DEI workers had to be put on leave by 17:00 EST (22:00 GMT) on Wednesday, before the offices and programmes in question were shut down.
The executive order requires federal hiring, promotions and performance reviews [to] “reward individual initiative” rather than “DEI-related factors”.
It revokes a 1965 executive order signed by former President Lyndon B Johnson that makes it illegal for federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin” in their hiring.
What???
Why do that? Why not just stick to the “color-blind” mantra?
But also though – did the order signed by Johnson really cite “gender identity”? I don’t believe that. It wasn’t a category then.
The order also requires the attorney general to submit, within 120 days, recommendations “to encourage the private sector” to end similar diversity efforts.
To bully the private sector, you mean.
Update: sure enough, the 1965 executive order did not mention genner idenniny, or sexual orientation either.
Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson on September 24, 1965, established requirements for non-discriminatory practices in hiring and employment on the part of U.S. government contractors. It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
The existing protection was extended to LGB in 2011, T was added in 2012. But this rolls back all employment-related enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In short, they are ordered to hire and promote by merit (not a bad idea), and are allowed to discriminate against those they assume have less merit (a really bad idea).
That’s not really it though. It’s not necessarily about merit; it’s about dislike, disgust, aversion.
@Opelia:
Well, the point is that, immediately after the “The contractor will not discriminate against any employee …” sentence, the next sentence is:
The “will take affirmative action to ensure …” wording is notable.
Whatever the original intention, the combination of these two sentences has increasingly been interpreted (by the courts and government bodies) to mean that an employer must not only ensure equal opportunities (the first sentence), but also equal outcomes (the second sentence).
That is, if hiring is not pro rata with representation in the population, then the employer is held to be automatically guilty of violating the first-sentence non-discrimination requirement. At least, the onus is then on the employer to get themselves off this hook.
The courts have also done something similar with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was never intended to ensure equal outcomes, but which has increasingly been interpreted by the courts to require that. Of course the 1964 CRA cannot be rescinded by a stroke of the Presidential pen, whereas this EO can be.
The impact of such rulings has been growing. For example, New York required its school teachers to pass a competency test. Seems reasonable enough; we do want teachers to be competent.
But (quoting the WSJ) “at times, over 90% of white test takers passed, compared with fewer than 62% of Black test takers and 55% of Latinos.”
Upshot? The courts awarded $1.8 billion to prospective teachers who had failed the test.
And similar things were happening in many other areas of employment, driven by aggressive suits by Biden’s DOJ.
The problem is that, whenever one sets up a merit test, different racial groups will fail it in different proportions. And, if the automatic presumption is that that implies illegal discrimination, then employers are hamstrung, About the only recourse they have is to drop all standards of merit in employment decisions entirely (Google for how this effects recruitment for US air-traffic controllers).
Hence, people have been arguing for a while that in order to get merit-based race-blind hiring, they first need to nuke this EO 11246. What to do about interpretations of the 1964 CRA is less clear, but at least there one is only talking about interpretations, not the text itself, which does not include “affirmative action” language.
Of course, since the link was to the BBC, you wouldn’t expect them to properly report why the Republicans are against this Johnson-era EO. Instead the report tries to give the impression that the Republicans are against non-discrimination in hiring, whereas it’s actually the opposite: the only way to do non-discrimination in hiring properly, and to treat every individual fairly on their merits, is if one is not trying to hit quotas for all the different identity groups.
One can either discriminate over race, sex, etc, in order to hit quotas, or one can adopt individual-merit-based hiring and not care about “identity” outcomes. But one can’t do both, as this Johnson-era EO attempted to do.
It’s interesting how people almost always assume that ‘merit-based’ hiring means hiring white men. It is coded for that, of course, but I have been in many jobs, and found that the white men are not always the best hire. In spite of that, many of the jobs I was in found ways to manage to fill their staff with white men under one pretext or another. When I was working with disability, they announced once that all fifteen of the new employees they were hiring (all professional level) would be white men. Why? We were low on our quota of white men!
The reality? White men rarely stayed. When I was hired, the new incoming employees were 60% male; one of them was Black. The 40% females also had one person of color. All but one of the men were gone within a year. Why? Because most of them quit, getting higher paid jobs somewhere else (because they had more education? Experience? No…my education and experience was on par with theirs, and some of the women had even more). In addition, they were not meeting quotas, and some of them were not invited to become permanent employees. The one Black man was still there when I left five years later; he was the ONLY Black male in the pool of examiners. The one Black woman was still there. She was the ONLY Black female. There were plenty of people of color working there, enough to ‘meet quota’ – they were mostly working custodial and clerical positions.
White men had been the majority in every class of new employees that came through; only a few lasted out the first year. Of my class of sixteen, only two of the males were still there when I left. Some of them were promoted; white men were the only ones at the top, higher than the lowest level supervisor. Why? Merit? Actually, a lot of the men who were promoted had a lot worse accuracy and completion rates; they promoted them to get them out of the examiner pool because they weren’t good at it. Don’t ask me why white men seemed to be lousy at it; I don’t know. (To be fair, the one Black male often didn’t meet standards, either, but he did meet them often enough to keep his position.)
I have lost many jobs to lesser qualified white males. Yet all I hear is this mantra that we are hiring lesser qualified people because of affirmative action. There is nothing in the affirmative action program that says the employee in the protected category must be hired even if they do not meet the standards. I lost out on one job to a white male who didn’t meet the minimum standards…except for the fact that one of the standards was possession of a penis. I know, because I interned there for two years, and realized quickly that all the women in the office were temps or interns; they made ‘quota’ that way, because as I learned when I was in Human Resources, it was often just a plain count. Do you have the right ratio? Oh, yes, see? So while women actually outnumbered the men there at times, the number of men who were permanent employees was 9:1 woman. The one woman had been working there long enough to be hired before the director had been appointed. He was, by the way, not particularly qualified for the job. He was a friend of the governor.
Rubber band effect. The tighter it’s pulled, the more violently it snaps back.
They probably did a search on key phrases like “affirmative action”, which does appear in EO 11246. On the other hand, if I’m being entirely fair, one could quite easily argue that a policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of specific group membership (rather than in toto) isn’t per se colorblind. (The exception to this would be when the list of groups is exhaustive of all possibilities; e.g., “males and females”.)
As might be expected, the case Coel references in New York was not so simple. There were a lot of factors involved, including one that we are still discussing in education today (well, I’m not, because I retired, but I’ve only been retired a year, so I still know what’s going on). What do the tests measure? Do they measure effectiveness in the classroom? Since the subject matter tests that teachers took didn’t show the same racial disparity, it might be that the failure was due to questions that had nothing to do with what they were teaching. A second-grade math teacher, for instance, really doesn’t need to be able to interpret Andy Warhol’s soup can paintings (hell, I can’t do that and I’ve got more degrees than are good for me. I nearly always fail anything having to do with art, unless it’s something like who painted the Mona Lisa).
There is no agreement on how to measure effective classroom teaching. Measuring student outcomes would seem to be more effective than whether or not teachers know who Andy Warhol is, but I can tell you from experience that there is no agreement on how to measure that, either. Every testing measure for student outcomes I’ve been involved with has been a joke; I suspect most of the teacher exams are the same, but since I taught college, I wasn’t required to take special tests beyond the zillion and a half tests of varying kinds I took to get through school.
And as of 2023, the money hadn’t been paid out, so like the majority of these lawsuits that conservatives get all hot and bothered about, there may never be anyone who collects, and the school district may get to keep their money. I know in environmental violations, it is rare for any huge payout to be made, though they are always breathlessly announced in the press. It’s rare to get the follow up that shows you how the amount was whittled down to nearly nothing, which often still doesn’t get paid out.
Yep, it’s all AOK for Coel and me, after all, we are the default standard – white male, and we do not see discrimination because it never happens to us.
However, if we are honest, and if we have friends or even acquaintances who are not white males, and if we pay attention, we can see that what is easy for us is almost insurmountable to others. Let’s not employ women lest they get pregnant, cannot employ Blacks because even though “we’re not racist”, maybe our customers are, and the way that Gay man dresses is just too far out. Remember that Lesbian we employed who shaved her head and then claimed she was “just supporting her sister during cancer treatments”?
Yes, Coel, you can be as “color blind” as you like to pretend, but there are all sorts of subtle ways to ensure only straight white males get the best jobs. Even with DEI programs, Coels will find a way around.
iknklast:
I’d say it’s less a matter of crypto-racism/-sexism than it is that the job market is a zero-sum game. In that context, affirmative action policies that are pro-X are logically equivalent to anti-non-X. (For example, a requirement that at least P% of employees be X is anti-non-X.) The only time that such policies restrict merit-based hiring is when the currently best-available candidate is non-X. Necessarily, then, the request for more merit-based hiring is a request to hire more non-X candidates. (NB: This assumes there aren’t also numerical minimums/quotas/percentages regarding the hiring of non-X candidates.)
There’s something intrinsically iffy about trying to do a Fourier transform on discrimination and cancel it out with its inverse function, especially when we don’t know what the ideal, unbiased output actually looks like and couldn’t measure it if we did. We can guess, but our guesses are usually ideologically informed.
Rev:
You, I’m pretty sure, don’t know Coel’s biography. It’s more than a little presumptuous to declare that he’s never experienced discrimination.
@iknklast:
Really? Who does that?
Interesting, I’d not gathered that bit. Can you give a link?
Student outcomes is a very bad way of assessing a teacher, since it’ll be mostly about the student (good students with a bad teacher will do way better then poor students with a good teacher).
I agree with you that evaluating who is a good teacher can be hard, though we do need some merit-based standards for teachers.
@Rev David Brindley:
If you’re trying to insinuate that I’m not actually in favour of merit-based hiring, but just want preference for white males then: (1) you are wrong, (2) you have no honest basis fior attributing that to me, and (3) I note your nasty cynicism.
Yes, you picked out part of what I said. I referred to all attempts to measure student based outcomes during my tenure as a joke. In other words, I agree with you, except you left out the crucial control group – good students with good teacher, poor students with bad teacher. In that case, I suspect your poor students with a good teacher will do much, much better than poor students with a bad teacher. Life often doesn’t divide so nicely into a dichotomy. As for the link, I will get that for you, but I am racing off right now to take care of business. Check back tonight or tomorrow.