The columnist Clarence Page has an OpEd in today’s Washington Times on “Why Business Likes Diversity.” Let’s look at the reasons.
1. Creating a diversity-friendly workplace helps them recruit from a rapidly diversifying talent pool.
If the talent pool is rapidly diversifying, wouldn’t hiring the best talent lead to a diverse work force without the necessity of discrimination in hiring?
2. It helps them reach out to broader markets.
So if it hurt, it would presumably be O.K. not to hire them. The non-discrimination principle having been discarded as bad for business, according to the new diversity principle it would be legitimate for companies doing business with Arab or Muslim countries to refuse to hire Jews, for companies doing business with Japan to refuse to have women or Jews or blacks or, well, just about anybody in positions of authority. This principle has all of the moral grandeur of a balance sheet.
3. It also helps reduce turnover and other labor costs, which tend to be the biggest expenses in most businesses.
This one sounds like so much hot air. If anything, hiring talented minority workers might increase turnover as they, being much in demand, get hired away by the competition.
4. (My favorite!) Many companies fear their exposure to “disparate impact” lawsuits could only get worse, along with their labor costs, if they have a smaller pool of qualified black and Hispanic college graduates from which to hire and promote.
Hiring diversely is good for business, in other words, because companies are afraid they’ll get sued — and under the discredited disparate impact theory, no less — if they don’t! I’ve seen circular arguments before, but never one quite as round as this one.
Here’s another winner:
Programs that try to boost black, Hispanic and Native American Indian college enrollment for the sake of “diversity,” as Michigan’s does, are denounced in some quarters for “discriminating” against whites and Asian-Americans.
Note those quotes. If the snideness represented by the quotes around “discrimination” in that sentence strikes you as reasonable, then you’ll think the following slight modification reasonable as well:
Programs that try to boost Muslim, Methodist, and Missouri Synod Lutheran college enrollment for the sake of “diversity,” as Michigan’s does, are denounced in some quarters for “discriminating” against Jews, atheists, and Episcopalians.
I agree that there are no good reasons for businesses to like diversity, but the fact remains that many large businesses, like Microsoft, H-P, Ford and General Motors, have filed briefs in favor of AA in the Michigan cases. Why, do you suppose?
Aaron – Good question. I’d like to ask them. It’s of course possible that they’re public-spirited and think AA good for the country. It’s also possible that they believe what they say about needing employees of X race/ethnicity in order to relate effectively with X customers. Since they’re under constant pressure to hire more minority employees, I’m sure they’d rather have them from good schools. Finally, my suspicion is that they view filing a pro-preference brief as cheap protest insurance–keeps Jesse Jackson off their case, etc.
My company was up to its neck in the “diversity” business until about a year ago.
The reasons are simple and stupid. Our execs think that “diversity” is a wonderful sounding word that nobody but an ogre could oppose. It connotes compassion and good liberal feeling, and how can anybody be against that?
We were also hoping that the “diversity” crusade would cut down on the number of race and sex lawsuits. The company is a cash cow, and our employees are fully aware of this. The innoculation against lawsuit theory has, however, backfired. “Diversity” only increases the awareness of racial and sexual grievance, and thus encourages litigation.
The end of “diversity” is near at my firm, primarily because the workforce is absolutely uninterested. When my boss, a strident feminist, left the firm the “diversity” mania exited with her. The execs tried to get the workforce to volunteer for “diversity” projects, and got zero response.
In the embarassed aftermath, the word “diversity” is disappearing from our lexicon. Thank God.
The appeal of diversity in business is strictly bottom line. Hire to quotas or get your ass sued off. It’s risk management and public relations. It has absolutely nothing to do with broadening markets and everything to do with avoiding court imposed remedial plans and paying out millions in settlements and attorney fees.
in my extensive experience working as a consultant to many f500 corporations from coast to coast i see several consistant truths about diversity.
#1. like any other management buzzword, it comes and it goes. everybody gets different results.
#2. it is a hedge against lawsuits, absolutely no question about that.
#3. it is almost always initiated because some jerk in middle management lacks the skills to manage, motivate and otherwise inspire his non-white and/or non-male subordinates. most of the time this jerk is clearly racist or sexist.
#4. upper management believes that it’s better to have a program that shows diligence than to fire the racist jerk, especially when you can create a situation in which a non-white and/or non-male individual gets to publically boss around the jerk in question.
i’ve always seen right through this scam, but #4 is a permanent fact of life in american business.
now there are exceptional companies who, almost without exception have senior executives who are not white males, who have properly assimilated the values associated with ‘diversity’. their justifications are reasonable, primarily because they are preaching to the choir, but it is inevitable that companies who do not sustain significant populations of non-white non-male employees that diversity is derided.
Cobb –
Agree with most of your points but not #3. From my own professional experience a significant portion of discrimination claims are meritless nuisance litigation abetted by state agencies.
Can cite 5 instances where various claims,various meaning race, gender, national origin, age, were made when the only merit to them was the individuals representation in a protected class. In each case the plaintiffs either had no legitimate grievance or had been fired for legitimate reasons of non performance.
That’s not to say that there aren’t legitimate claims but I would hardly say that even a majority of discrimination claims are based on any mismanagement, unless you want to contend that all managers need to be vigilant against the potential liability of phony discrimination claims.
This is the argument that the big people are doing it, how can they be wrong? It hopes that no one will notice that the disparate impact policy was launched with selective enforcement against the largest firms, which still feel vulnerable, knowing that they will most likely be targeted again if they break ranks. It is no more to be taken at face value than a big company’s protestations of loyalty to the aryans and enmity towards the hate-objects of national socialism would have been under that regime. It is thoroughly amoral;’the big people are doing it’is not even remotely a moral argument. Stalin was big; is it moral to say his scale of operations justified his policies? In any case, no one should be intimidated that the big people are getting away with something, and especially not when the big businessmen in Japan and Korea and other countries that our business leaders need protection from are not even pretending to value diversity. If one is to argue practicality, their approach is practical, but our companies, such as those that subsidized what was called murder city (and its neighbor, which seemed to be trying to legalize rape, with indulgence from its corporate sponsor) is not practical. The sudetenland being given to a race-monger did not buy peace. Thirty-odd years of affirmative action have not bought peace and goodwill, but tens of thousands of murders and million-selling recordings of racial hostility. Not that the one policy in isolation must have yielded these results, but we were led to expect the reverse development. In any case, diversity cannot without contradiction be called a reasonable value, as is argued at length at the name below…