[immibis]

> So you start with 500 slots to fill, 1000 qualified white applicants and 10 qualified black applicants

What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.

[thaumasiotes]

There are only so many black people in the country. Every skilled job has this problem; poaching can make you look slightly better but it does nothing overall and will make wherever you poached your qualified black applicants from look worse.

[amluto]

> There are only so many black people in the country.

The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a good outcome.

If 1/8 of the population is black and someone is trying to get 1/4 of air traffic controllers to be black, that seems like a mistake.

[thaumasiotes]

> Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black.

It doesn't mean that at all.

Well, depending on what you mean. It could just be that your premise is known to be false.

[amluto]

Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality. This doesn’t mean that the FAA should mess with its hiring process in an ill-conceived and very likely illegal attempt to make it look like the problem doesn’t exist.

But, to me, it would be absurd to suggest that the air traffic controllers should be “diverse” in the sense that a “minority” group should be represented in excess of its representation in the overall population, that there aren’t enough black people the US for a fair hiring process to achieve this, and that therefore an unfair process should be used to increase this sort of “diversity”. That’s all kinds of wrong!

[thaumasiotes]

> Of course my premise doesn’t hold, and the glaringly obvious cause is historical inequality.

No, this is false. You don't appear to know what you're trying to postulate.

[lazide]

Only if black candidates meet the criteria equally, are as interested to work as air traffic controllers as anyone else, have equivalent lifestyles and family support to allow them to do the job as effectively as anyone else, etc.

There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes?

As to if they are fair or not? Probably not. are you going to fix it, and if so, how?

We can argue about theoretical from birth path differences all we want, but no one on the hiring side has the time to deal with those or to control them - and if looking at things from a coarse population level - it just doesn’t reflect actual reality right now, yes?

[immibis]

Then keep chasing the symptom backwards until you find the root cause. It's standard troubleshooting, not rocket science.

[lazide]

If your problem is who to hire this week, root causing back to someone’s childhood conditions 20 years ago does absolutely fuck all for you.

[immibis]

You're telling me they had this diversity mandate 10 years ago and in the last 10 years all they could think to do was to disqualify white people from hiring and there were absolutely no opportunities to go and encourage people to be air traffic controllers?

Now that's proof that white hiring managers are incompetent! (that's a joke)

[harvey9]

The article specifically talks about how the college courses were in community colleges, not bastions of privilege of any kind.

[AnthonyMouse]

Ah yes, but that isn't guaranteed to work, and if someone is going to get in trouble if they don't make their numbers then they start making contingencies.

[sneedle]

Or you stop trying to force blacks into the job and hire whoever applies and is the most qualified. This way people don't die just so leftists can feel satisfied.

[immibis]

Which part of setting up a stall in a job fair in a more diverse part of town is "forcing blacks into the job"?

[lazide]

From what I saw, people did that years and years ago. What happens when that isn’t sufficient?

[XCabbage]

The problem, of course, is that due to "disparate impact" doctrine, this (and colourblind hiring in general) is de facto illegal, and DEI scale-tipping is de facto mandatory (even though it's almost always de jure illegal).

Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.

There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.

[caminante]

Curious to see if "disparate impact" criteria gets softened, i.e., impose requirement to find "intentional bias" (c.f. status quo)

What I think is weird is how many firms have this reason, but do it for other stated reasons and don't simply state this compliance nuance. I figure more people would accept your "paragraph three strategy" as an acceptable means to a required end. Maybe this threat is more of a "what if" that has lower probability of enforcement so in practice, getting hunted for this is not that likely.

[lukas099]

What grandparent said wouldn’t lead to people dying though.

[WillPostForFood]

Depends if you are able fill the slots, and how quickly.

[intended]

It looks like the thing that stopped the slot filling was funding, not a dearth of candidates.

We had 500 open positions. We filled 100, and argued over 10.

That’s still a gap of 400 positions. We have only 110 qualified applicants.

The Math is missing a third variable.

[lazide]

Having been on the (explicit) receiving side of this - you just don’t fill the other positions until you find the right candidates (where right is whatever criteria you can’t say out loud - though has been said out load often in the last few years).

Alternatively, this is a way for your boss to meet budget targets while not explicitly laying people off, and giving hope to people that help is coming.

[immibis]

Advertising your jobs to more people (including black ones) might help you find more candidates. If you're not finding enough candidates AND you're only finding white candidates, something is wrong, innit? There are all those people who aren't white who might be candidates who for some reason you're ignoring.