Minority Groups "Special Rights"

Archie Gemmill Goal said:
The solution is to strive for an 'artificial' numerical balance. I'm not so much interested in perceptions of society. Society perceived slavery to be fine and segregation to be A-OK for a hell of a long time.
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Er, no, society didn't, that's why there was a Civil War in the U.S. and massive social protests in the U.S. and South Africa.
 
Archie Gemmill Goal said:
So for example requiring a degree in sanitation engineering for a toilet cleaner might in and of itself be discrimination if the population of degree qualified sanitation engineers is 99% white. If you remove that requirement then you will get a lot of 'unqualified' candidates being hired to the new job and they will be used as evidence of how AA is a scam to favour incapable minorities over highly qualified white folks.
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A good example that came up here in Vancouver was that a woman applicant for firefighting came up short on a fitness test and it was brought to the city's review. The city concluded that the test wasn't testing what it claimed to test, which was cardio fitness. It was an incorrect proxy that disqualified people with less muscle strength, regardless of their cardiovascular fitness.

Basically, it was a very short distance run time, while a more accurate test would be maintaining a minimum pace for a long distance. Women perform less well than men on sprints, because they have less muscle power on average, and the test design was disproportionately disqualifying women for no good reason and deserved revision.


Another design example is commercial aircraft cockpits. They're designed to support a height range. Tall people and short people can be disqualified, which originally sounds neutral. However, the original designs were around male height distributions, which means that yes, they will disqualify equal numbers of tall and short men, but as women started to apply, they found a higher portion failing height qualifications. This is not a 'natural' feature of flying that makes women less qualified, but rather, an industry design choice.
 
Argumemnon said:
Still, I find it odd to throw this burden on the shoulders of employers, as if access was theirs to solve. Shouldn't public transportation be used to solve this?
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So, firstly, if you're talking about private transportation, we're already taking for granted that the market isn't providing for some reason.

If the idea is about publicly subsidized transportation, I think it's a good example of tax dollars at work to create fairness of opportunity. What conflicts with this, is the concept of fairness of proportionality ("if they want to ride the bus, shouldn't they pay for it, not the taxpayers.")

This was actually a hot topic for MicroSoft back in the 80s, as they were facing housing price inflation in Redmond and their staff were looking at longer and longer commutes from neighbouring communities. It became an expensive salary negotiation cost. ("I spend three hours in the car unpaid... I can go work for X at the same salary and get 2 and a half hours of my day back, how are you going to compensate me to persuade me to stay?") They were finding they were paying a lot more for less qualified people due to a deficiency in public infrastructure.

MicroSoft wanted Washington state to pay for a highway expansion. The state said they'd do it if MicroSoft paid a special assessment to underwrite the project. Negotiations stalled, and in one of those six degrees of skeptical separation things, they hired a disinformation company to pitch their case to the electorate... what was the name of this PR corporation posing as a grassroots think tank? Wait for iiiiiit... the Discovery Institute, later to be famous for picking up the Teach The Controversy contract.
 
Argumemnon said:
On the plus side they'll be hiring minorities.
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Since it is commonly done by industry, I don't think word "minority" applies...

Archie Gemmill Goal said:
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Yes, we put all sorts of increased costs of doing business on companies in the name of achieving social progress. That's why you can't employ kids to clean chimneys, or put people in dangerous jobs without proper safety equipment. That's why we have minimum wage legislation. The list goes on.

'We can't afford to be fair to people' is always going to be a losing argument with me.

Most great companies already realise that penny pinching on things like this is counter productive.
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There is a reason why I included "good reason". Children work, safety,... are all required as they are targeting problem. Employer provides shuttle service or has to ensure "proper" diversity are not. First one is wrong level unless talking about remote location or unusual time (like at night), second one just targets symptom of larger problem.

There is massive difference between "fair" and "discriminate toward right race or gender"! You so far argue for later, not former.
 
Is affirmative action aimed at protecting minorities? If the answer is "yes", how is it that where I live >50 million people are protected by affirmative action against <4.5 million?
 
LSSBB said:
Er, no, society didn't, that's why there was a Civil War in the U.S. and massive social protests in the U.S. and South Africa.
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After a hell of a long time.

Ideally you would act on something before civil war or massive social protests are required.
 
Orion said:
Is affirmative action aimed at protecting minorities? If the answer is "yes", how is it that where I live >50 million people are protected by affirmative action against <4.5 million?
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Technically, it's "protected class," not minority.

Here's how they phrase it:
"Protected Class: The groups protected from the employment discrimination by law. These groups include men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps."

It does not distinguish by numbers. Presumably, a black-owned business which refused to hire whites (based on race) would be illegally discriminating.
 
Klimax said:
Since it is commonly done by industry, I don't think word "minority" applies...



There is a reason why I included "good reason". Children work, safety,... are all required as they are targeting problem. Employer provides shuttle service or has to ensure "proper" diversity are not. First one is wrong level unless talking about remote location or unusual time (like at night), second one just targets symptom of larger problem.

There is massive difference between "fair" and "discriminate toward right race or gender"! You so far argue for later, not former.
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No. Its just you have a strange sense of fairness and good reason.
 
Argumemnon said:
I meant that they don't have anything to do with the employer being equal opportunity.
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Again I disagree. Its maybe not the employers fault but their circumstances disadvantage certain groups.my broader point though is that only by targetting increased representation would such underlying issues be examined and resolved one way or another.

It pushes employers to do better.
 
Argumemnon said:
Yeah, that's odd. I would think protection of the sort would apply to all.
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I think this is the core question about attempts to formalize and codify protection for segments of the population that are experiencing discrimination.

It's something I changed my mind about on a per-topic basis when I was in my 20s. For example, I had disagreed with a philosophy prof about the importance of the US proposal for an ERA (Equal Rights Amendment). It was an attempt to spell out in plainer words that 'equal rights for everybody' included women. I couldn't understand why additional legislation was necessary, 'everybody means everybody, it's already the law'.

But I observed that when my rival pays a black engineer 25% less than her equally qualified male counterparts, when I hire a black engineer at 100% in my firm, I'm not fixing the problem. Black engineers are still getting paid less. Multiply that by millions of transactions, and it's a demographic income suppression even if 90% of the hiring managers are like me and wouldn't even consider it.

The problem is: the number of active racists is above the critical mass or threshold required to accelerate racial differences in opportunities; there's too much inertia for there to be a satisfactory resolution in human lifetimes (an example being my dad's golf course above, but substitute with the 1500% gap in white vs black [family estates] and their connection to tuition affordability), and my modelling that shows that small differences will probably grow over time in an unregulated environment, despite a majority of fair citizens.

The critical mass thing is basic modelling. Sort of like how we don't need to worry about a few vaccination avoiders... but when it reaches a threshold, it becomes a public health hazard. Same with bigots. A few are a joke. Above a certain percentage, there's an inevitability that target demographics will have no equity, no standard of living in 10, 20 generations. That's because when you and I treat people fairly, they don't gain over the average; but when somebody treats them unfairly, they lose versus average. Over time, this accumulates, and it seems to be exponential (as they lose assets, they lose the capacity to preserve the remaining assets faster). Just being fair doesn't compensate.

It's one of those "this is why we can't have nice things" things. Protection applies to all. But there's people who disagree with that, we have to push back in order to achieve the fairness that is offered in the nation's vision.
 
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Archie Gemmill Goal said:
Again I disagree. Its maybe not the employers fault but their circumstances disadvantage certain groups.my broader point though is that only by targetting increased representation would such underlying issues be examined and resolved one way or another.

It pushes employers to do better.
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We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I simply don't see why this burden should be put on employers to work this problem beyond their own business.
 
blutoski said:
I couldn't understand why additional legislation was necessary, 'everybody means everybody, it's already the law'.

But I observed that when my rival pays a black engineer 25% less than her equally qualified male counterparts, when I hire a black engineer at 100% in my firm, I'm not fixing the problem. Black engineers are still getting paid less. Multiply that by millions of transactions, and it's a demographic income suppression even if 90% of the hiring managers are like me and wouldn't even consider it.
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How does making "women", for example, a protected class work better than, say, making "gender" a protected attribute?
 
Archie Gemmill Goal said:
Again I disagree. Its maybe not the employers fault but their circumstances disadvantage certain groups.my broader point though is that only by targetting increased representation would such underlying issues be examined and resolved one way or another.

It pushes employers to do better.
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Depends on the job

I wouldn't want a councillor still deciding their true gender councilling.

And I don't really want a dude in a wheel chair trying to save me in a fire

People treat the issue too broadly
 
Argumemnon said:
How does making "women", for example, a protected class work better than, say, making "gender" a protected attribute?
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You'll find that it already is, go and read what marplots wrote earlier.

"Protected Class: The groups protected from the employment discrimination by law. These groups include men and women on the basis of sex; any group which shares a common race, religion, color, or national origin; people over 40; and people with physical or mental handicaps."
 
Argumemnon said:
We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I simply don't see why this burden should be put on employers to work this problem beyond their own business.
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I dont think in my example it went beyond their own business. However if your asling about that then I think there is some level of burden or responsibility to their broader industry and the community/society.

I dont think most good employers would see these things as burdens and its the ones that would that I would be suspicious of their motives.
 
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