I’m so behind today. But when I see an article like this about political correctness and affirmative action, I have to respond.
Here’s the article:
When does good management become a hostage to political correctness?.
Here’s a quote
When confronted, the team member did not deny the scheme. Easy decision for the manager, right ?
Now consider this. The employee was female, a member of a visible minority group and visibly pregnant. The manager was older, white and male.
The team member threatened to sue for age, gender, minority and pregnancy discrimination if she were terminated for cause. She suggested she would widely broadcast her dispute with the company on social media, damaging the company’s brand and highlighting what she felt was its “politically incorrect” behavior.
However, if the company chose to make its side of the story public first, it would surely be castigated for poor supervision, poor use of shareholder’s resources and poor management of suppliers.
This was my response:
I don’t know how this works in Canada ( I know Sam is Canadian, but I don’t know where you’re from Don.)
But if this happened in the US, the company isn’t bound, by law or by policy, to cave to the threat of a lawsuit, for political correctness or any other reason. So if you follow the law, the first question is moot, because 1- at no time should good management be hostage to political correctness, and 2- this has absolutely nothing to do with political correctness.
As to the right thing to do, I’ll come back to that. First I want to explain my answer from the perspective of what political correctness and affirmative action is Supposed to be about in this country, and why it shouldn’t interfere with good management. It should BE a part of good management in the first place.
This issue isn’t about political correctness, which wouldn’t even exist if people could be trusted to always treat issues with fairness and justice.
Regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc, the intent of political correctness, as well as affirmative action policy, is to treat *everyone* fairly and equally, that includes what happens when someone does something wrong as well as when someone does something right.
If the employee was always treated with fairness, and there’s no pattern of the company doing otherwise, there’s nothing to fear from a lawsuit. Yes, the loss of money fighting the suit is an issue. But this isn’t the only kind of nuisance lawsuit that happens to a business. If they don’t have enough evidence to support their cause, they’d have a hard time finding a lawyer to even take the case.
If she wasn’t, the company could look into its record, perhaps with the help of an outside agency that has no stake in the outcome. Then just fix whatever is wrong with the company in the first place.
The problem isn’t political correctness or social justice, it’s how people *view* what is correct or just, especially in cases of affirmative action. The way the law is supposed to be applied isn’t to give anyone an unfair advantage, it’s to make the opportunities equal. Two people offered the same job, with everything else equal, the person who is most qualified gets the job, regardless of race or gender.
Now that, in and of itself, could be unfair, and that’s where the problem is. But I’ll come back to that.
There’s an assumption that the job is supposed to go to the minority and some companies have adopted that as a policy. If that is a company’s policy when it’s no required to be? That’s on the company, not political correctness.
But check the law. They aren’t *Required* to do so. A private or public company is free to hire whom they please as long as they don’t discriminate against applicants. Same goes for HR policies affecting family leave, pregnant women etc.
From the DOL website:
“For federal contractors and subcontractors, affirmative action must be taken by covered employers to recruit and advance qualified minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and covered veterans. Affirmative actions include training programs, outreach efforts, and other positive steps. These procedures should be incorporated into the company’s written personnel policies. Employers with written affirmative action programs must implement them, keep them on file and update them annually.”
Just because you’re required to take the action of attempting to recruit or advance minorities does Not mean you have to do so in a way that causes further injustice.
If your policy is to hire and advance the best, you must make it policy to include minorities in that search. If you see that as unfair, then you’re assuming that no qualified applicants exist, which is in itself, the reason why the policy exists.
Because if you make the attempt to recruit, and find no eligible applicants exist, you aren’t breaking the law, as long as they really don’t exist. To compensate for the prior lack of opportunity, you’re required to take the ACTION of advancing QUALIFIED minorities, women, etc.
If qualified people of all backgrounds are properly advanced, you still haven’t broken the law. The law is meant to keep people from hiring Because of race, not to require people to hire because of race.
If you look at the law and the fact sheet, you’ll see that first, private companies are only held to their own policies and not breaking the law. And on top of that? Even for companies that have to align with governmental policies to accept contracting funds, they are not bound to quotas etc.
These policies fall apart in practice when assumptions are made in companies about what constitutes fairness. Displacing good workers for bad ones isn’t fairness, that’s just dumb.
The reason why issues like these make people so uncomfortable is that one- people assume they know what the law is, instead of actually looking to see what it says, and two- policies to correct inequality are injected and overlaid into practices that weren’t fair to begin with when they were created.
Hiring has never been fair. But the argument against affirmative action was, “we hire the most qualified applicant.” So the assumption was taken from that opposition that the job goes to the most qualified person, at least on paper. But even that is not the actual law or 50% of Fortune 500 company CEOs would be women, minorities or people with disabilities.
When was the last time you even Heard of a disabled CEO of an enterprise company?
The point is, fair hiring policies were not the case before the attempt to fix hiring and promotion practices came along. Sometimes people were hired because they’re the best fit. And it’s hard (but not impossible) to figure out how to draw that line.
So how do we fix this, going forward? By realizing that we can’t fix this one corner of job equality and then neglect to correct for the bad practices that were already present there and in other parts of the company.
So to your second question.
If the company in question is blameless, and has fair HR practices, so what if someone looks to sue? It won’t be a fun experience, but if there was never any problem to being with, the lawsuit is moot.
If there IS a problem, it’s only a matter of time before a dispute like this can lead to an unrelated but deserved lawsuit anyway. So the company might as well clean up its act. If they are sued, the attempt to fix what’s wrong could affect the outcome.
In either case, if an employee has committed a fireable offense, the employee should be fired, period.