Comment by immibis
2 months ago
> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants
What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.
There are only so many black people in the country. Every skilled job has this problem; poaching can make you look slightly better but it does nothing overall and will make wherever you poached your qualified black applicants from look worse.
> There are only so many black people in the country.
The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a good outcome.
If 1/8 of the population is black and someone is trying to get 1/4 of air traffic controllers to be black, that seems like a mistake.
> Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black.
It doesn't mean that at all.
Well, depending on what you mean. It could just be that your premise is known to be false.
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Only if black candidates meet the criteria equally, are as interested to work as air traffic controllers as anyone else, have equivalent lifestyles and family support to allow them to do the job as effectively as anyone else, etc.
There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes?
As to if they are fair or not? Probably not. are you going to fix it, and if so, how?
We can argue about theoretical from birth path differences all we want, but no one on the hiring side has the time to deal with those or to control them - and if looking at things from a coarse population level - it just doesn’t reflect actual reality right now, yes?
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The article specifically talks about how the college courses were in community colleges, not bastions of privilege of any kind.
Ah yes, but that isn't guaranteed to work, and if someone is going to get in trouble if they don't make their numbers then they start making contingencies.
Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.
Which part of setting up a stall in a job fair in a more diverse part of town is "forcing blacks into the job"?
From what I saw, people did that years and years ago. What happens when that isn’t sufficient?
The problem, of course, is that due to "disparate impact" doctrine, this (and colourblind hiring in general) is de facto illegal, and DEI scale-tipping is de facto mandatory (even though it's almost always de jure illegal).
Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.
There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.
Curious to see if "disparate impact" criteria gets softened, i.e., impose requirement to find "intentional bias" (c.f. status quo)
What I think is weird is how many firms have this reason, but do it for other stated reasons and don't simply state this compliance nuance. I figure more people would accept your "paragraph three strategy" as an acceptable means to a required end. Maybe this threat is more of a "what if" that has lower probability of enforcement so in practice, getting hunted for this is not that likely.
What grandparent said wouldn’t lead to people dying though.
Depends if you are able fill the slots, and how quickly.
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