From: niepornt@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (David Marc Nieporent)
Subject: Re: Affirmative Action should be Dead
Originator: news@nimaster
Organization: Princeton University
Distribution: usa
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1993 09:00:18 GMT

In <1ic8jdINNfgg@transfer.stratus.com> jmann@vineland.pubs.stratus.com writes:
>In <1993Jan5.000031.7254@Princeton.EDU> (David Marc Nieporent) writes:

>> >No. Companies have concluded that, in practical terms, AA legislation
>> >mandated quotas because it exposed the employer to lawsuits if the
>> >'representative sample' was not present in the employee population
>> >(not just in the hiring pool, but in the set of those actually hired).

>> >Recent legislation (the 1991 civil rights act) now requires that
>> >employers be prepared to justify every hire that deviates from the
>> >representative sample in terms of overwhelming business necessity.
>> >It used to be that the plaintiff had to demonstrate that a violation
>> >had taken place; now the defendant must prove that there has been
>> >no violation, a definite shift of the burden of proof.

>> No, it didn't.  This is good conservative propaganda, but it's a lie.
>> It used to be exactly the way it is now.  The Supreme Court changed this
>> in 1989?, and the new Civil Rights Act changed it back.

>True, but this still leaves open the question as to whether this
>SHOULD be the way things work.  Much of this does smack of
>"you are guilty unless you can prove that you are innocent."

This might be true; I'm not going to argue that you're wrong.  But I
thought we should at least get the facts straight.  

Mainly because I think it provides a piece of evidence against your
point below.  Yes, there can be problems with regulation, and there can
be problems with these particular regulations, but I don't think that
past experience with these job discrimination regs bears out the claim
that companies are going to institute quotas all of the sudden.

>In theory, this way of doing things shouldn't be much of a problem
>if everybody is being reasonable.  Unfortunately, all too often
>people aren't. Quite often government regulators of various
>sorts take an adversarial attitude. They don't come into
>a company saying "we want to make sure there are no
>problems and want to help you fix any that you have" but
>rather "we know you are lying scum and we're here to smash
>you."  The EPA agent in the movie Ghostbusters was a very
>accurate portrayal of many government regulators.

You're not going to hear me defending the integrity of government
regulators, but I think it goes the *other* way much more often.  That
is, that they cozy up to the people they're supposed to be regulating.
Like, say, the S&L regulators.

In the particular case we're talking about, I don't believe that there
are any actual regulators for job discrimination.  I don't think you have 
agents like the EPA guy going around checking the books to make sure 
you've hired the right mix of people -- I think that only if someone 
files a complaint does anything happen.

And I think what generally happens (in real life, not the movies), is
that the company takes the EPA to court and delays any regulatory action
for years and years.

-- 
David M. Nieporent   | Is it too early to start making predictions for 1993?
niepornt@phoenix.    | Probably, but that never stopped me before.
   princeton.edu     | ALE: Baltimore ALW: Chicago NLE: Montreal NLW: Atlanta
Baltimore Orioles 93 | AL MVP: Cal Ripken  AL Cy Young: Mike Mussina
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