I've never been involved with hiring and have only ever worked at companies small enough to fly under the radar when it comes to regulating things like that, so I have zero experience in seeing how it would have actually worked. But there are two narratives I often heard about it:
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Companies were forced to meet "quotas". For example black people have to make up some percent of their workforce, meaning they would have to prioritize black candidates if they were actively hiring but under the quota
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Even if a company met the quota, if they were considering two candidates that were equal in qualifications and one was white and the other not, the non-white candidate would get the job because being non-white give them... like extra "points" or something? I guess to give them a "buffer" so if next time they're hiring, they can hire a white person?
I have a strong feeling both are myths, and the reality of it was more vague and loosely enforced, especially since I never heard anything about what the punishment would be for not following these rules. A fine? Prison time for leadership? Complete shutdown of the business? Who knows. I am interested in hearing how it actually worked from anyone who has firsthand experience with affirmative action.
Been doing more reading on it, and found that quotas used to be a thing, but were struck down by the supreme court in 1978. I can't find anything that says the quota system UC Davis used was forced on them by the government.
Typically if a company had affirmative action requirements for staff hiring it was because it was tied to a government contract or grant’s terms. So worse case scenario, they’d lose the contract/grant. What reactionaries are probably conflating here is rules about discrimination in hiring processes. Those could carry civil penalties, but that was in outright statements or policies of not hiring minorities/women, not anything to do with the percentage of minorities/women working there. As the Wikipedia page notes, the UC Davis policy was an internal one.
After ‘78 the outright quota system ended (conservatives acted like it was still in place), but colleges kept a kinda sorta system of having minority status count as points on an application. Mind you, this would be worth a couple points on an application with potentially hundreds of points; being an athlete is worth a few points, as is alumni status, or coming from a poor rural area (effectively affirmative action for poor rural whites). The 2023 decision struck down the points for minority status policies, but that can be easily glided around with a “poor urban area” equivalent.
One similar program that’s still around is government agencies that have MWBE requirements for contractors. A certain percentage of their contractors needs to be owned by women and/or minorities. However, this is typically not enforced that much and easy to game (wife is the owner on paper, but it’s really the husband’s business). Is the reason that SHI has a ton of government IT contracts though.
