Affirming nondiscrimination; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 3/16/16

Robert Hill, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Affirming nondiscrimination:

"Affirmative action does not give someone a job or a place in school. Rather, it embodies two main related aspects: taking action to ensure nondiscrimination and establishing plans designed to improve the diversity of a workforce or college class through analysis and goal-setting.

Established as federal employment policy in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, Executive Order 11246 prohibits federal contractors (receiving more than $10,000 in a single year) from discriminating based on race, religion, national origin and gender (since 1967) in employment-related decisions. Sexual orientation and gender identity were added in 2014.

Larger federal contractors (51 employees; $50,000) are required to establish annual plans aimed at increasing the employment of people who are not white males if analysis reveals such folks are underutilized by a contractor. Hiring goals, not quotas, emerge from the plans.

Compliant contractors proactively engage in a multiplicity of activities — properly described as affirmative action — to broadly make known the availability of job opportunities, to even-handedly consider all candidates who apply and to remove from the hiring process non-job-related criteria that may have the effect — if not the intent — of eliminating otherwise qualified candidates. Over the decades — largely attributable to high visibility Supreme Court cases — affirmative action has come to be most commonly and infamously associated with public college admissions decisions.

Far from assigning preferential treatment in hiring or admissions to any particular class or group of applicants based on race or sex, affirmative action provisions and the 1964 Civil Rights Act actually prohibit it."