SubscribeAfter reading this article, I'm really at a loss as to where the racism is.
Of course, we can't be expected to get any details at all from a 300-word wire service piece. But the law is pretty clear on such things. If the effect of such an evaluation system is that members of any one gender, race or age group (over 40) are disproportionately demoted or fired, then the company is de facto guilty of illegal discrimination. Whether or not the evaluation system was intentionally set up to produce such results or not is immaterial, though they might get smacked with more punitive damages if the workers can prove it was intentional.
They may have had long, productive careers, but it comes down to this: What have they done lately?
Well, let's get real here. People who have had "long, productive careers" do not just suddenly become megaslackers en masse (I'm being excessively Latin today; my apologies). These are relatively high-level employees we're talking about. If their performance had truly sucked, they would have been fired, or at least pushed aside somewhere irrelevant, long ago. If large numbers of 20-year-plus employees with good records (all of whom were at least "completing their projects" according to the article) are all of a sudden finding themselves being told their work isn't up to par, then something fishy, and probably illegal, is definitely going on.
Secondly, "What have they done lately?" is somewhat immoral, especially if it's not their work habits and abilities that have suddenly changed, but rather the system for determining how good they are. In other words, being told "You're great, don't change a thing," in every single evaluation for the last 25 years, and then suddenly being told in 2001 "We changed our minds. Under the new system, you suck," is just plain disgusting. In most other situations, one would call that "Being set up to take a fall."
Also, it's a proven fact that when skilled employee loses his job after the age of 50, his chances of obtaining another job of anywhere near an equivalent skill level, stature and salary are essentially nil, due entirely of course to nearly universal discrimination. He is completely fucked from that moment until the day he dies. Recovery is impossible. This is a big part of the reason age discrimination laws exist in the first place, so the firing of employees who have literally given their entire working lives (or at least majority chunks of it) to one company should not be allowed willy-nilly. If it were up to me, it would be completely illegal after a certain point unless intentional severe slacking on the employee's part could be proven in arbitration.
And now let's get to the most important piece of evidence against this whole thing: The evalution system is completely specious and has a built-in bias favoring the personal feelings of the supervisors over objective measurements. This system looks fair on its face - everyone gets a rating, lowest rated has to go - but what most people aren't noticing is that the managers aren't getting rated on actual performance. In a true meritocracy, it's each according to his abilities. If you're a college professor, and every one of the students in your class does truly excellent work, you can give every one of them As. If they turn out to be universally imbecilic, you can give every one of them Fs. But that's not what Ford is doing. They're handing you a set number of As, a set number of Bs, and a set number of Cs, and ordering you to attach one to each of your employee so that all of each letter are used up. You MUST give As to 10% of your workers and you MUST give Cs to 10% of your workers, regardless of how perfect or how horrible each individual member's performance actually is in your little group. If you have 50 guys under you, and you honestly believe in both your mind and heart that every single one of them gave truly equivalent 99.5% efforts, you still have to find some specious reason to say 5 of those guys are more equal than the others, and 5 of them are less equal.
Another reality against Ford is that the only truly honest way of ranking a group of employees is mathematically/scienfitically, and that's almost impossible to do for people in most management positions. If these guys were doing highly specific jobs, such as selling cars instead of designing them, it would be easy: Count who's making the most commissions for the dealership. If it turns out that one salesman has to be cut, and at the bottom of the list you have Bob, who sold $142,495 worth of cars last month, and Jay, who sold $142,494, well, sorry to see ya go, Jay, but it's right there in black and white, Bob just edged ya out. You can almost never plot it out that clearly in management jobs ... as long as the employees are doing their assigned duties on time, then separating the As and Cs from the middle always comes down to the hunches and personal biases of the supervisor. And in such cases, with a wide enough sample of employees to be rated, it's very easy to see if those supervisory biases are coming down harder against certain racial, gender or age groups of people harder than others. There's no merit in that.
(Would unions have much to do with this? Management employees usually aren't union members; is it different in the auto industry?)
posted by aaron at 4:28 PM on June 20, 2001
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Dictionary.com says:
1. The act of discriminating.
2. The ability or power to see or make fine distinctions; discernment.
3. Treatment or consideration based on class or category rather than individual merit; partiality or prejudice: racial discrimination; discrimination against foreigners.
I don't see a thing about white versus black in there. There is no such thing as reverse discrimination.
posted by jragon at 10:26 AM on June 20, 2001