What is Affirmative Action?
Affirmative action program refers to a designed management tool to enhance equal employment chances. A core evidence essential to affirmative action is that a contractor’s workforce, absent discrimination, and overtime will in general reflect ethnic, racial, and gender labor pools profile from which the contractor selects and recruits. However, there is a misconception that affirmative involves hiring people that are less qualified compared to other applicants in order to balance on gender, or race. This is not true, before a consideration of race and gender is employed, an applicant must be qualified. Other misconception is equating affirmative action with diversity and civil rights. There is also a misconception that a company can get a person of color of different gender from a pool of unemployed individuals if their finalist pool does not satisfy the diversity requirement of the federal government. This is just a myth since these individuals are not supposed to be favored, they must be competitive. Discrimination only occurs when the aspects of disqualification are based on discriminative aspects such as gender or race (Messerli, 2010).
The affirmative action has been used to offer a higher preference to the minority groups such that in a pool of qualified applicant, a minority is given a higher privilege over others, especially if the organization has not meet the federal government diversity requirement. The program also offers scholarship to the minority groups as a way of uplifting their academic level of qualification to make them more competitive in the job market. Affirmative action also dictates on how university should enroll its students, with much emphasis being provided on increasing the enrollment of students from minority groups which include female and non-whites racial. This meant to increase their level of competitiveness in the job market in the future (Civilrights.org, n.d.).
Affirmative action may not directly benefit those who used to experience discrimination, however, plays a great role in ensuring diversity and inclusion in an organization. In this regard, every employee in the organization can benefit by sharing new ideas, knowledge. Diversity is related with high level of organization creativity and innovation and thus, it can indirectly help them to grow professionally.
What is Affirmative Action as a social policy?
An affirmative action as social policy is a directive that is created for purposes of promoting the welfare of minority and the disadvantaged groups through consideration of the fact that all individuals were created equally and, therefore, deserve equal treatment (Beckman, 2014). An affirmative action contains a set of guidelines, administrative practices, policies, and laws that have an intent to eliminate and correct the impacts of particular forms of discriminations.
What were the goals of Affirmative Action? Has it been successful?
The main goal of affirmative action is to dissolve barriers and any other forms of hindrances that could either be seen or unseen, to equalize the playing ground, and ensure that every person is treated with fairness. Even though the affirmative action does not aim at guaranteeing equal results, it aims at ensuring that disabled people, women, African American, and other groups that are at the risk of facing discrimination realize opportunities and be represented in educational institutions and work force of the nation (Beckman, 2014). Most of these goals have not yet been achieved because the society is witnessing high levels of income-based inequalities.
Basic Arguments for and Against Affirmative Action
The basic arguments for the affirmative action are as follows: affirmative action is an effective approach of ensuring achievement and maintenance of diversity in schools as well as workplaces; it is an effective way of compensating races that suffered oppression for many years; and finally, the affirmative action assists disadvantaged groups to realize opportunities that can enhance their advancements (Beckman, 2014). On the other hand, the basic arguments against affirmative are as follows: affirmative action is a converse form of discrimination; it spoils the vision of meritocracy; it strengthens racism and stereotypes in regard to the previous oppressions; and finally, having people of all races in the workforce does not imply diversity in opinion. The side that I find most convincing is the one arguing for the affirmative action because of the successes that have been realized in terms of college admissions and representation in the workforce.
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