Case Study 2

According to Skelly -

There are three separate motivations for affirmative action. (Everyone look up affirmative action in an encyclopedia.)

1. Remedial - to remedy past injustice.

2. "Aesthetic" - to represent an accurate sampling of society's makeup; and

3. Functional - to be able to carry out the required work better; this is where race, culture, or gender turns out to be relevant to the job.

There are three basic kinds of Affirmative Action strategy:

1. Tie-breaker - to be implemented to favor candidates from underrepresented groups only in the case where qualifications are simlar to the other applicant;

2. Double Standard - Where applicants from underrepresented groups are accepted by a lower standard than that used for other applicants; and

3. Quota - By this strategy, a goal is set to hire a certain number of applicants from underrepresented groups by a certain deadline, more or less.

When we discuss Affirmative Action, we must discuss it according to all its various forms and all its various purposes.

Keep in mind that it's not just about law. The private sector employs affirmative action in different ways as a sound business practice.

Businesses that interface with consumers practice aesthetic AA to appeal to their customers. This also turns out to be functional, since it helps companies succeed.

Also, even without any AA laws, no good police chief is going to hire a male officer to do what a female officer could do much better, regardless of other disparities in qualifications.

There are definitely harmful applications. The most harmful effect of AA laws, perhaps, is the fact that Companies don't want law suits, so in effect will institute a quota system of hiring to appear to be in compliance even when that was not the specified method they were supposed to use.

In most cases, a pure quota system is harmful because of the extent to which it requires us to ignore qualifications. But that is just one method of AA and the least favored, although enforcement of AA by law often forces AA to reduce to a quota system ion the way described above.