Sodexho (and others): "We proudly bribe managers to promote women and minorities."

DiversityInc.com ^ | July 10, 2006 | By T.J. DeGroat

[flowerplough]

How to Ensure Diverse Promotion Rates

Q. What policies and procedures do you have to ensure promotion rates by race, ethnicity and gender match work-force-representation rates?

Rohini Anand, senior vice president and chief diversity officer, Sodexho(No. 14): "Sodexho has clearly defined policies on affirmative action, equal-employment opportunity and discrimination, harassment and retaliation. Our affirmative-action department closely monitors and reports quarterly progress relative to the affirmative-action plans. We provide training annually to all plan owners to ensure we are meeting goals. Additionally, we use an innovative scorecard that holds all incentive-eligible managers accountable for the hiring, promotion and retention of women and minorities. The objectives are mapped to internal or external availability as well as benchmarked against the most favored group in order to ensure that we are recruiting, retaining and developing individuals based on the available work force and the pipeline, as the case might be. Additionally, the scorecard includes qualitative metrics that ensure that managers are given credit for the underlying processes that drive the outcomes."

[flowerplough]

or, if one prefers: "We vigorously fine managers who fail to promote enough women and minorities."

[Skooz]

A quota by any other name will stench just as bad.

[wideawake]

That's standard at thousands of companies, not just Sodexho.

[Enterprise]

Diversity - heroically advanced via bribes and blackmail.

[2banana]

WMNNA - White Men Need Not Apply

[texas_mrs]

My company does work for the Texas Department of Transportation. Each year we must file a report that shows the number of minorities of each category we have on a particular project for July. When I told them I expected to report Hispanics under the regular category and Whites under the minority column since that is what our census now shows, they advised me that while Whites are the minority in Texas, they are not nationally, so keep the status quo.........

[GeorgefromGeorgia]

I am an attorney defending the USG against EEO claims. Only 5% of claims against DoD result in finding of discrimination. The system is incredibly bureaucratic and expensive. The vast majority of complaints are frivolous. The whole EEO system is designed to root out discrimination that in reality rarely exists.
I was at an EEO conference last year and in one group an EEO investigator (over 20 years experience) said that she had not seen a true case of discrimination in her entire career.
The statistical records game is to protect firms and the Government from claims based on disparate impact. Such claims try to show a pattern of discrimination based on a statistically high variation in for example promotions from the standard deviation.
The whole system does have some benefits, but the cost of the system in my opinion outweighs the benefits.

[AdvisorB]

Here is a small sample of the RATs that have given us this anti-Constitutional diversity mess. You don't rectify discrimination by practicing discrimination. Anyway, I wouldn't trust anything that these goofballs were promoting.

[Neoliberalnot]

Same practice, different name--similar practices occurred in the first half of the 20th century when whites were hired to the exclusion of blacks, et al. Nothing ever changes, just the approach and label.

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

Q. What policies and procedures do you have to ensure promotion rates by race, ethnicity and gender match work-force-representation rates?

Implicit in this absurd question is the premise that the abilities, education levels and work ethic, among other factors for promotion, are identical among all of their definable groups. Furthermore, since they begin with that premise, any discrepancies in promotion rates can only be attributed to illegal discrimination.

Our "friends" in the diversity world ought to acquaint themselves with the excellent body of work created by Thomas Sowell, a brilliant economist, writer, and researcher. Sowell happens to be Black, although the quantity of melanin in his skin is irrelevant to me. But, that's just me.

Sowell's thoroughly researched masterpeice, Race and Culture makes a compelling case that all men (and women) are not equal. He provides ample evidence that (primarily cultural) differences manifest themselves in ways that cause outcomes to be different among racial and ethnic groups.

My observations seem to confirm Sowell's. Pick any high school in the country with even a moderate racial and ethnic mix and then try to guess who will be the stars of the basketball team, who will be the Merit Scholars, and who will be the ones getting scholarships for playing the violin. Pick the name of a cornerback in the NFL out of a hat and try to guess what color he is. Hint--if you pick one color, you have a 100% chance of being correct. If you pick a different color, you have a 100% chance of being wrong. And, when the percentage is at or near 100, "chance" isn't the right word.

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

Complete illegal, unconstitutional, racist and unfair. This is what "diversity" is really about.

[kaylar]

When I interviewed at Marriot Inns back in '95, the interviewer proudly told me that they would promote less-qualified blacks over whites with greater experience and seniority to make sure their minority supervisor percentage goals were met.

I didn't even bother returning their calls for the setting up of a second interview.

I wasn't surprised when I read in 1997 that Marriot made Ebony's Best Companies for Black Employees list.

I Still won't stay at one.

[texas_mrs]

Agreed. I underwent an exhaustive EEO audit by TXDOT & was told I needed keep records that detailed our efforts to hire more blacks and women. It is rare that we get applicants from either of those groups, so I was advised that our recruitment, advertising, etc. needed to TARGET those groups. We don't even advertise to begin with, because most folks around here know us and we hire from our walk-in applications.

So, in effect, I am asked to turn down people who make the effort to come in, yet take the time and money to entice someone who hasn't.

[Moonman62]

Is there some way to translate that article into English?

[Atlas Sneezed]

Government agencies like the US Patent and Trademark Office do this, too.

[dfwgator]

Here's the translation for you: "White males need not apply."

[relictele]

Sodexho = French-owned

These clowns took over concessions (from a well-liked local company) at Mountaineer Field (WVU).

As expected, prices went way up and service decreased in proportion.

[only1percent]

This isn't nearly as bad as it seems.

The question is basically demanding promotion quotas.

The officer's answer is a long-winded of saying that they DON'T have promotion quotas, and instead have a system that makes sure managers TRY to find and promote minority and women managers, but doesn't assure that they'll succeed in doing so. Believe me, whatever their bonus system is, quantitative performance measures are going to be much more heavily weighted than the diversity-of-promotion measures. Any senior manager who promotes an incompentent minority into management is going to net lose bonus, not gain bonus, when that incompetent screws things up. The incentive is to find COMPETENT minority managers.

When well-adminsitered in the private sector, what these policies really do is to force managers to get outside their comfort zone -- to be aggressive in looking for talent outside of where you may usually expect to find it. That's pretty commendable.

The real problem is when these policies come into the public sector -- where there's little or no bottom-line component in performance reviews, and affirmative action can become an end in itself rather than a means to an end of making sure that qualified talent isn't overlooked or uncoscious biases aren't perpetuated.

[GeorgefromGeorgia]

In the Federal Government, a lot of agencies recruit from Historically Black Colleges, and actually get some pretty good interns that way.

[texas_mrs]

The only black employee we have is one of the best & friendliest of all our current employees. The county we live in probably has a black population in the single digits, though, so you can see why it is ridiculous to recruit a segment of the population which doesnt much exist & since these are blue-collar jobs with a high turnover it isnt worth the expense of moving to the area for these employees.