The iron fist in the velvet glove of "diversity:"

Many people assume that affirmative action only exists in college admissions, but that aspect of racial quotas is dwarfed by corporations imposing quotas upon themselves to prevent lawsuits like the Sodexho case. The Washington Post reports:

Sodexho Inc., the Gaithersburg-based food and facilities-management company, agreed Wednesday to pay $80 million to settle a lawsuit that claimed it systematically denied promotions to 3,400 black mid-level managers.

The company also agreed to widespread training and a more structured hiring process for its 106,000 employees throughout the country, in an effort to promote more minorities into higher corporate jobs. A panel appointed by the plaintiffs and the company will monitor Sodexho's compliance.

Sodexho officials said they have already implemented many of the remedies included in the settlement, such as tying bonuses for top executives to the company's progress toward workforce diversity goals...

In the years since the Sodexho lawsuit was filed, the proportion of blacks in management positions at the company has remained around 12 percent, Aun said. Currently, 1,921 of Sodexho's 15,532 managers are black.

In contrast, the plaintiffs maintained, only 2 percent of the company's upper management is black. About one-fourth of the company's total workforce is black.

The take home message to corporate executives is that it makes more sense to impose quotas on yourself now, than pay out 80 million and be forced to impose them later anyway. Most sizable companies long ago got the message and quietly put together these kind of programs to racially discriminate against their white employees.

The U.S. initiated racial quotas three dozen years ago when there were about seven whites for every black. The U.S. is a rich country and that ratio of payees to payers under affirmative action has proven affordable as the white to black ratio has been fairly stable over the decades.

But, in 1973, with almost no forethought, the federal bureaucracy added most immigrants to the ranks of quota beneficiaries, and the ratio of whites, who are expected to give up opportunities, to immigrants, who are aided by quotas, has been worsening ever since. As with the Social Security system, the affirmative action system's decline in the "racial ratio" of payer to payee foretells long term trouble, as I detailed here.

A reader writes:

Well, I think I know of the next company lead attorney [and white man] Kerry Alan Scanlon can target: his own law firm, Kaye Scholer, whose numbers are similar to Sodexho's! I just clicked on all their attorneys, about half of whom had pictures on their law fim web pages and half of whom did not. Of the 102 Kaye Scholer attorneys who have photos, guess how many are black? Answer: same as the number of 188 top jobs held at Sodexho, whom Kaye Scholer just successfully sued for their lack of African-Americans in top jobs. Zero.

Same numbers, yet one company is able to extract $80 million from the other. Hmmm.

I suppose the black plaintiffs hardly wanted to risk losing their big payouts by hiring minority attorneys who might only have their jobs due to affirmative action. With that much money at stake, who can afford diversity?

Maybe the Rev. Jesse Jackson could go shake down Kaye Scholer next?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer