Posted on 01/27/2004 1:23:35 PM PST by Diddle E. Squat
A panel of the Metropolitan Transit Authority board wants to know why the agency employs so few Hispanics, but its search for answers has been slowed by the difficulty of wading through reams of employment records.
Board member Janie Reyes, who chairs the committee looking into hiring practices, said Monday the agency did not computerize these records until October.
Despite incomplete records, the committee will hold its first meeting today to begin its review of Metro's hiring practices.
"I'm asking for the last year of applicants," she said. "The problem is the time it takes manually to pull them out."
According to the 2000 Census, Harris County is 42 percent Anglo, 33 percent Hispanic, 18 percent black, and 6.5 percent Asian and others. In contrast, Metro's 4,000-member workforce is 17 percent Anglo, 61 percent black, 14.5 percent Hispanic and 8 percent Asian.
Reyes said some personal data, including an applicant's ethnicity, are noted on a detachable part of the employment application to ensure hiring decisions will not be influenced by racial considerations. Metro staff are trying to meet the committee's request by laboriously matching the two segments of each application by hand, she said.
Reyes said the problem does not involve any loss or discarding of data. "They're being very responsive," she said of Metro staff. "I'm sorry we didn't have this (computerized) system a year ago."
However, Reyes expressed concern that the information may not be assembled before she steps down April 30. Reyes and another member of the committee, Dr. Carol Lewis, are among the five Metro board members appointed by Mayor Lee Brown in May 2002 whom newly elected Mayor Bill White has replaced.
The committee, created by outgoing board Chairman Arthur Schechter in December, also includes Harris County appointee Art Morales.
Reyes said the transit agency's staff will likely brief the panel about the inquiry, but Metro spokeswoman Maggi Stewart said the meeting will be closed to the public because personnel issues are involved and no quorum will be present.
Lewis and Morales referred questions to Reyes, but all three said they believe Metro is making a good-faith effort to comply with their panel's request.
"It's a massive job," Lewis said.
"Essentially we're just waiting on the staff," Morales said.
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Way back when the Union Pacific was "brand new" it had a lot of wooden trestle bridges designed and built by the Chinese contract work crews and their engineers. White men would not take a train across the bridge, and the Chinese sure wouldn't either. They knew. But then, too, black men wouldn't take those trains across figuring that if the whites and the Chinese thought the deal too risky, it must certainly be too risky.
Ended up all the train drivers who would take a locomotive across a Chinese designed and built wooden trestle bridge were Japanese. You can find their descendants throughout the intermountain West in small cities everywhere.
Qualifying for that job depended on how desperate you were and how much faith you had in the Buddhist promise of reincarnation. The Japanese were very desperate and very devout.
The same thing goes on today in hospitals in that little laboratory where the young woman or young man from India assays a tissue or other sample for disease. THey are as desperate and as devout as were those Japanese train drivers.
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