The affirmative action can be termed as positive implementation of polices to foster balanced diversity and compensate the minority groups in the education, employment, business and other government sectors while considering representation in terms of color, race, religion, gender and national origin. Once implemented in any country, affirmative action (positive discrimination) will result into both positive and negative impacts.
The main purpose of positive discrimination according to (Rubenfeld, J, .1997) is to promote equal opportunity by ensuring that the minority groups within our society are included in our societal setup. Some societies or governments, like India, have employed quotas to ensure balance in sharing the opportunities, while others may create a set number required for each minority group. Since affirmative action have exclusive preferential consideration for socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, equal employment opportunities have tremendously improved the employment rates, income earnings, promotion and occupational attainments to the minorities as performance of organizations have been also improved effectively. Has been also positively braking down the barriers e.g. has been encouraging the minority to venture into fields previously dominated by majority for example women venturing into men dominated discipline or blacks venturing into white dominated field. Affirmative action perpetuates diversity as it encourages greater ethnic representation hence reducing human conflict, racism and miss understandings. This will improve efficiency in terms of decision making as diverse magnitude of different skills, culture and background is better at solving complicated problems than group of experts of the same professional qualifications thinking alike. Affirmative action can richly diversify learning institutions as institutions of higher learning gain in enrolling and graduating the disadvantaged group as contended by (Sander, H. Richard, .2004).
Positive discrimination can be a good tool in bringing justice to less privileged to compensate the wrongs they might have undergone. This is possible when the privileged groups are asked to scarifies by taking unequal burdens in ascertaining common good. That’s why bodies such as the United Nations or other human right organizations have come up with measures that require state parties to take affirmative action which help to reduce conditions that perpetuate discrimination prohibited by the covenant, with the states specifying actions to be taken to correct the conditions prevailing when certain part of the population impair enjoyment of human rights. That’s why there are legislations that give explicit charter permitting affirmative action, how ever much the charter may not require preferential treatment. This consequently put pressure on institutions to comply with the non discrimination of the civil rights.
Affirmative action has been a subject of numerous court cases as many have been questioning its legitimacy. The question arises about whether the governments should integrate equal employment opportunity and affirmative action policies. Equal opportunity contradicts the spirits of meritocracy as affirmative action creates situation where race, ethnicity, regional balance and gender is given first priority when employing and rewarding individuals. This promotes mediocrity when other considerations are preferred exclusive of merit discouraging the best brains from working harder and achieving their goals. At long run, less productive individual may end up being employed as employers may be forced to hire unqualified staff just because they come from minority or disadvantaged group. More costs will be incurred in training the unqualified staff due to expenses such as seminars, lectures and other training programs given to the unskilled minority staff. Encourages inconsistent labor turn over due to equal opportunities with the minority feeling not the inner member of organization quitting first. The discriminations are inerter-generational and disparate treatment of individuals and impact of procedures on demographics may be considered discriminatory. It will be unwise to punish one generation (majority) at the expense of compensating another group (minority) who never suffered personally. The affirmative action may not be reconciliatory approach as it replaces past injustices with new wrongs. The reverses discrimination may cause generational tension resulting into serious conflicts mostly when two or more persons can not see one another causing derogatory comments, stereotyping, ethnocentrism and cultural clashes. Encourages people to identify themselves as the less privileged or minority yet they may not e.g. the less fortunate among the majority.
The critics of affirmative always insist that affirmative action is discriminative whatever action plan is taken, either the aggressive strong preferential plan where less qualified individuals from minority group are proffered to highly qualified from the majority or opportunity enhancement plans which is a proactive mechanism of identifying and recruiting larger representation of minority or limited preferential trend whereby more considerations are given to gender ,race and region as additional advantage to evaluate the qualification of applicants who posses equal academic merit.
Affirmative action should therefore be aimed at bringing up a society of diversity with values of true objectives of its purpose entrenched in its perspectives breaking down ancient patterns of discriminations based on gender, racial and ethnic stereotypes. It’s upon managers to reconcile competing goals, promote quality representation in operations, planning and top management through enactment policies and standards to advance upward mobility of disadvantaged groups.
References
Martin, Terry (2001), The Affirmative Action Empire: national and nationalism in Soviet Union, 1923-1939, retrieved from http://books.google.co.ke/books?id=rdlSX2hsb1kC&pg=PA394&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false
Rubenfeld, J (1997) Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository- Affirmative Action retrieved from http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2562&context=fss_papers
Sander, H. Richard (2004), A SYSTEMIC ANALYSIS OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN AMERICAN LAW SCHOOLS, retrieved from http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/rubinfeldd/SanderFINAL.pdf
WORLD Bank Report, IMPLIMENTING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION-Comparative Administrative Practice, retrieved from http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/bnpp/report%20012405.doc
