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Just last week the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charged with enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, announced that it would move away from bringing suits aimed at helping entire classes of minorities and instead seek to remedy only individual discrimination, which is more difficult and costly to prove. Said EEOC Commissioner Fred Alvarez: "When somebody tells me they ought to get something because they're Irish and saw signs in Boston that said IRISH NEED NOT APPLY . . . or because their ancestors were in slavery, I say, 'So what?' "
The lower federal courts, however, have kept right on ordering and approving goals and timetables. By and large, they have applied Stotts only to cases in which no discrimination has been proved, and the hiring of a minority leads to the displacement of a white male. Says Judy Goldsmith, president of the National Organization for Women: "The Memphis decision has had very little effect because it did not attack the philosophy of affirmative action." A few weeks after Stotts, for instance, a federal judge ordered the city of Detroit to rehire 1,000 (mostly black) police officers, many of whom had been hired originally under an affirmative action program but were then laid off during an austerity move. Even in Memphis, the fire department continues to abide by goals stipulating that half of those hired and 20% of those promoted should be black.
Despite the go-slow signals emanating from Washington, many employers in the private sector continue to practice affirmative action. Says Thomas Hunt, an employment-discrimination lawyer in Los Angeles: "I don't get the type of resistance to affirmative action I did ten or 15 years ago. In the midst of this success, Reynolds is just a speck on the ceiling shooting his mouth off." Hunt estimates that at least 60% of the nation's companies now use goals and timetables. He knows of none that have abandoned them since Reagan came to office.
There is, of course, a fierce dispute over whether affirmative action works. Says NAACP Legal Defense Fund Counsel Barry Goldstein: "There's no doubt in my mind that affirmative action has been effective. In 1970 there were about 23,000 black police officers in the country; in 1979 there were 43,000. In 1970 there were appproximately 15,000 black electricians; in 1979 there were 37,000. We're not just talking about jobs for the black elite, we're talking about solid jobs in the economy." Agrees Jonathan Leonard, a Business School professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who recently completed a study of affirmative action for the Department of Labor: "On the whole, these programs seem to have helped reduce discrimination, while there is no statistically significant evidence of reverse discrimination."
Critics of affirmative action claim that the statistics mislead. "I think it's debatable whether affirmative action has resulted in any changes that wouldn't have occurred naturally," says EEOC Chairman Clarence Thomas. "In the long run, I don't think the results are going to be so positive." There will be no marked improvement in minority hiring, he says, until primary and secondary education is improved for lower-class blacks.