** "The Digital Divide"
Topics: AA
11 May 1998
From: "DG ervan@iname.com"
Really from: Ervan Darnell
Last Monday's San Francisco Chronicle ran a front page article on the
presumed racism in Silicon Valley computer firms [1]. It was a liberal
hatchet job that ignored both reality and reason in an attempt to smear
hi-tech firms as being racist. It makes an interesting case study in
some of the usual fallacies employed.
Ultimately, they only have one piece of hard data. They use it to start
where most AA arguments end, a quota:
> Employment records for 33 of the leading Silicon Valley firms show
> that their Bay Area staffs, on average, are about 4 percent black and
> 7 percent Latino -- even though blacks and Latinos make up 8 percent
> and 14 percent of the Bay Area labor force, respectively.
This is not a datum about the percentage of qualified individuals nor of
even applicants. As a direct population number, it says only that these
companies didn't meet their quota.
There is an interesting statistical trick buried in this: draw the circle
just the right size. They didn't list the numbers for just Silicon Valley,
in which case they wouldn't have looked so disproportionate. Instead, they
included the "Bay Area", which grabbed Oakland with a larger black
population, even though it's at the outer limits of a tolerable commute (40
minutes in good traffic, 1.5? hours in rush hour, and no connecting public
transit from Oakland to Silicon Valley).
Of course, the reality of Silicon Valley is just the opposite, it draws
from all over the U.S. (and in many ways the world) for people with the
right talent and inclination. Thus, the U.S. population, would be a better
norm. This is more than sloppy reporting, the EEOC plays the same game in
attempts to find employers guilty. In a now 10-year old, but famous, case
the Daniel Lamp company was found guilty of not hiring enough blacks and
having too many Latinos. It was near a railroad track which divided the
two communities, and was in the Latino community. Thus, blacks didn't want
to work there. Nonetheless, the EEOC drew a nice round circle that crossed
to the other side of the tracks and concluded the work force should be 30%
black.
With the quota-esque evidence in place, the article moved on its conclusion
within the first column:
> ``It's pretty clear that there's an ethnic and occupational
> segregation going on in the Silicon Valley,'' said Manuel Pastor,
> a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz who has
> studied racial issues in Silicon Valley.
> [ numerous anecodtal stories charging racism instead of hinting at
> it ]
There are racial disparities. But in the usual sense of the word (implying
something prejudicial), the statement is utterly false. I've been involved
in recruiting for Oracle since the day I joined. Each department does its
own recruiting with some help from the corporation. I have interviewed
about 100 people, and been involved in many brainstorming sessions on how
to find people. We are desperate to hire anybody. Race absolutely does
not matter (I'm the worst offender, for asking if a given candidate can
speak English, and that comment always produces scowls). We advertise
everywhere we can think of. From the inside looking out, it's absolutely
ludicrous to suggeest there is racism in hiring at Oracle (lest you think
Oracle is special somehow, the article targetted Oracle as one of the worst
offenders). After reading the article, I walked around my floor and
counted. Of the 78 people working on my floor, only 19 are Caucasian
Americans (some few of the others are Caucasian immigrants). Of those 19,
2 are openly gay men. Most of the rest are Indians and Pacific Rim Asians
(I was recently told I cannot use "Oriental" any more). Oracle has support
groups for blacks, gays, women, and disabled persons. It celebrates Black
History Month and Gay Pride Week (the latter is perhaps more telling
because there are no legal requirements regarding sexual orientation).
This is racism? Really?
It's true, of that balance, there are no blacks. But it is not because
any have been rejected. It is because none have applied (so far as I
know). Our web employment page (for example) is open to all.
Additionally, the employment decisions are made by a group of people which
reflects the overall makeup. To suggest there is racism is to suggest that
(Asian) Indians have some greater animus against African-Americans than
they do Caucasians.
The article confesses later that Asians are over represented in the Silicon
Valley work force. Asians are probably not discriminated against as
heavily as blacks, but still the fact that they are over-represented,
instead of being less dramatically under-represented, proves that racism is
not the full explanation (not that it disproves it entirely either). But,
it definitely shows that mere numerical disparity is not the consequence
only of racism.
The article tries to advocate quotas while skirting the quota charge (as
does the federal law which prohibits quotas, but de facto requires them):
> Companies that win government contracts of $50,000 or more are not
> required to hire a certain number of minorities, but they must prove
> that they've made a ``good faith effort'' to implement an affirmative
> action program. [...]
> The Department of Labor cannot fine firms unless it finds a worker who >
was denied a job for which he or she was qualified. In that case, the
> worker can get back pay for the period of unemployment.
The EEOC is going to decide who is qualified? They are not able. My
department, PL/SQL, does its own interviews and makes its own hiring
decisions precisely because no one else, not even the other technical
people we work with every day, are competent to judge whether a candidate
would make a good compiler writer. You must have some special knowledge
to make those kind of judgments. Some lawyer in D.C. is supposed to be
able to tell? Even if the EEOC hired compiler experts (for instance) to
decide if a compiler-positition candidate had been discriminated against,
it would be worthless. Internally, we debate candidates strengths and
weaknesses, trying to make the best determination we can. Rarely are we
unanimous on a candidate.
In the absence of being able to tell if someone is qualified, they fall
back to numerical disparity as proof, i.e. quotas. "good faith effort"
comes to about the same. Here is an example of a supposedly "good faith
effort" (implied by the article's author, not the EEOC):
>-- Recruiting: Many Silicon Valley firms fail to seek out blacks and
> Latinos at minority job fairs and college campuses with large black and
> Latino populations.
The answer comes several columns later:
> While Silicon Valley firms make some effort to recruit blacks and
> Latinos, critics say it's not enough. Intel Corp., for example,
> recruits almost exclusively from Ivy League schools and the top public
> universities.
Guess what: none of the top schools are principally minority schools (nor
are they principally majority schools). The implication is clear:
compromise standards to meet the quota.
--------
Next, is the labor union point of view. This is ironic because
historically unions have been one of the more racist institutions (e.g.
advocating Davis-Bacon). That is not surprising because most labor unions
raise their wages by restricting trade, in the sense of making it illegal
or impossible for people to accept jobs at terms they find aggreeable.
Once money is no longer the arbiter of who gets the job, and there is an
excess supply of labor, some other way must be used, racism and nepotism
are two common ones. The other aspect of restricted entry is that unions
try to adhere to the fiction that all workers are equal, and that
productivity is fixed. Thus, the purpose of labor is merely to ransom as
much as possible without really producing anything:
> ``Prosperity isn't being shared,'' said Amy Dean, executive officer of
> the South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council. ``Silicon Valley is very much a
> tale of two cities -- and the community of color is being left
> behind.''
Of course not, prosperity is being created, an unthinkable thing from a
union mentality, to produce something new rather than to just take what
someone else has already done. It's no surprise that the computer biz is
one of the least unionized because flexibility of who you work for, how you
work, and most importantly the opportunity to use individual talent are
important. All of those are just the opposite of what unions stand for.
Regardless, that prosperity is producing benefits for everyone because the
wages paid to computer geeks come out of savings or quality improvements in
all of the other industries that use the technology. Compromising that
productivity by giving unqualified people jobs or by making the incentive
system inefficienct ('sharing prosperity') will leave us all worse off.
The liberal answer:
> But critics say Silicon Valley firms are overlooking a possible long-
> term solution to the worker shortage: training blacks and Latinos, many
> of whom are in their own back yards, for high-tech careers.
> ``If you can always find people from overseas, then the economic
> necessity does not exist to seek out and train young people from
> minority groups,'' said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the
> Center for Immigration Studies, a nonpartisan Washington D.C. think
> tank that often opposes immigration increases.
I always wonder why immigrants to the U.S. (who are typically 'minorities')
that spend their lives here, becoming permanent residents or citizens, and
whose children usually stay here, are not people too? It always struck me
as racism on the union's part to want hurt such people. Most immigrants
join non-union professions and that's really the end of the story, their
concerns about racism are so many crocodile tears.
Actually, immigrants are fairly expensive because companies need to keep
legal staffs to overcome the obstacles that the feds erect. Sometimes,
they have to leave the country for a period of a few months, and companies
often try to keep them on the payroll when they are overseas (how's that
for an unintended outcome of immigration law?). Finally, many immigrants
quit their first job as soon as they get their green card, which means
companies lose their training investment.
Back to the main point, just how are companies supposed to do this deep
training? What if a company promised to teach some unqualified person all
of the math and computer science they needed (welders writing C++? run for
cover), they would have to pay them substandard wages to recover that cost.
Imagine the howls of protest if companies made trainees sign contracts
promising not to quit for 10 years so they could pay them sub-par wages and
recover educational costs. There is one kind of company which can do that:
banks, in the form of educational loans. And, they do. The training cost
is transferred, computer companies pay high salaries with which employees
can repay their student loans. So, we are back to square one. Minorities
either cannot learn (pick your favorite reason) or do not want to learn
high-tech skills. Companies are already, indirectly, training as many of
them as is possible.
===============================================================
Ervan Darnell |"Term limits are not enough.
ervan@iname.com | We need jail."
http://www.appsmiths.com/~ervan | -- P.J. O' Rourke
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