AFFIRMATIVE_ACTION.pdfVIP

AHMAD MAHDZAN AYOB 1 AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS NOT REVERSE DISCRIMINATION Background Affirmative action (AA) is one of the most profound public policies ever introduced by the American legislature in the twentieth century (Soni, 1999). In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925, ruling that federal contractors should “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin” (Shaw and Barry, 2004). The policy was originally conceived as a way of ‘going the extra mile’ to attract and retain minority employees (Noe, Hollenbeck, Gerhart and Wright, 2003), who hitherto had been underrepresented in the workplace, relative to their proportion in the population. In the American experience, minorities (mainly people of African and Hispanic origin) and women were discriminated against by white employers. Most African Americans are descended from slaves who had worked in the plantations of the South. Following their emancipation after the American Civil War, they were discriminated in the workplace, in schools and colleges. After affirmative action became law, many white males felt that they were being discriminated against, in favor of minorities and women. To them, affirmative action is ‘reverse discrimination,’ i.e. a discrimination against a majority race in favor of minority races and women. Australia has its own version of affirmative action in the form of Equal Employment Opportunity for Women Act 1986, and the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Bush, 1998; Nankerrvis et al., 2002). Malaysia had her ‘affirmative action’ (Klitgaard and Katz, 1983), the New Economic Policy (Ayob, 2004), following the racial clashes of 1969, to give preferential treatment in corporate equity, and places in higher education to the indigenous peoples (‘Bumiputra’), who form the majority (Rasiah and Shari, 2001; Chitose, 2003; Cohen, 2004). The purpose of this