By PEGGY BOYER
is a free lance journalist living in Springfield.
Her primary interest is in Slate government.
How to achieve "Affirmative Action': registration agency program is an example
Plan undertakes to find
if discrimination has
occurred; if so, to
take 'additional
efforts to recruit,
hire, and promote
qualified members of
groups formerly
excluded'
IN OCTOBER, 1973, Governor Dan Walker issued Executive Order Number 9 mandating Nolan Jones, director of the Department of Personnel, to establish an Affirmative Action Division within his agency to monitor its progress. Within the Department of Personnel Rose Geter was appointed to carry out the Affirmative Action Program. Submission of programs by the directors of the 45 agencies under the Governor's jurisdiction, Geter concedes, has been sluggish. Part of the reason for this slow response lies in the difficulty of determining just what affirmative action (A/A) is and how it can be achieved. One agency head whose program has been accepted, Ronald Stackler, director of the Department of Registration and Education, says, "I don't believe there's a lack of commitment so much as a problem of time and priorities."
Geler defines A/A in the following way: "It is first of all federal law. Title VI 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, amended in 1972, sets up five protected classes, including minorities and women. It is clear on what an employer can and cannot do." What Title VII does, in fact, along with Illinois' own Fair Employment Practices Act, is to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion and national origin. It does not mandate affirmative action per se.
Quotas not the answer
"Yet," says Geler, "the law is strong,
and numbers in and of themselves are
enough to indicate discrimination." The
law measures results, not intent, and the
burden of proof always rests on the
employer. Affirmative action is his
positive commitment to find out if
discrimination has occurred because of
past employment practices and his
willingness to undertake "additional
efforts to recruit, hire, and promote
qualified members of groups formerly
excluded" (The Supervisor's Equal
Opportunity Handbook).
The stress, however, is on "qualified," not "quotas." " We don't believe in quotas around here," says a staff member in Geter's office. Stackler doesn't' either. "Preoccupation with numbers." he says, "while it might be the easy way out, is counterproductive. If you have 100 people working for you and suddenly six blacks are hired who know nothing about the job, those 100 employees would just work around them. Pretty soon you would find that all the six are doing is silting around talking to one another. The other 100 people would be carrying on the work of the department. It's an insult to the minority group in question."
Geter bristles at the suggestion that affirmative action will bring the death of the merit system. "All affirmative action means is that qualified women and minorities will be given equal access to jobs and promotions."
Written plans are needed, the Walker administration feels, because where A/A has existed in the past, it has often been a haphazard affair, with no clear method for measuring progress. The system established by the Governor requires the submission of quarterly reports by each agency to the Affirmative Action Division, which reports directly to the Governor.
The first job of each agency's A/A officer in constructing his plan is to collect employee information: dale hired, dale of birth, sex, and date and type of last salary increase (merit or
Illinois Issues/February 197 5145