Affirmative Action Comes to Britain
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Who’d have thought South Africa would be trail blazing with it’s affirmative action laws? I certainly didn’t, but given the news today, it looks like the UK will be adopting a page from the South African book in the newly announced “Equalities Bill”.
Whilst most of the bill is designed to rule out discrimination and bring a whole lot of older laws under a single bill, it has a “positive” discrimination clause in it which will “allow firms to discriminate in favour of female and ethnic minority job candidates“.
Surely this is hypocritical, and leaves a nice gap in the law for abuse. You either condone discrimination, or you don’t. This isn’t something that should be conditional. I’m very much of opinion that fair’s fair. If you’re perfect for the job, you should get it, regardless of your race, sex, class or creed.
I have to concur with you in that Affirmative Action is severely flawed. I live in South Africa and even though I was too you to have been involved with anything that the members of The Struggle fought against I was old enough to enter the job market with Affirmative Action firmly in place. Sadly for me I was of the race and gender which Affirmative Action was discriminating against most. In SA if you are white and male you are at the very end of the queue and every other minority group should be chosen before you. The positive side of this is that white males have to outshine everyone else by far in order to survive and as such have become sought after commodities, especially abroad.
In the UK Affirmative Action should not have much impact because the groups being discriminated against are still a majority. In South Africa the opposite is true. The group being discriminated against most is by far a minority. To picture the effect of that, imagine the UK and an Affirmative Action bill where companies are required to discriminate against ethnic minority job candidates.
Still in a prefect world… “If you’re perfect for the job, you should get it, regardless of your race, sex, class or creed.” but the world isn’t perfect and we all just do the best with the cards we are dealt. And even though the odds may be stacked against you it doesn’t mean you can’t come out on top.