The Virginian-Pilot
                            THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995                   TAG: 9506020651
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL 
SERIES: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
        A four-part series
        PART ONE
        OVERVIEW
SOURCE: BY MARGARET EDDS, STAFF WRITER 
                                             LENGTH: Long  :  248 lines

ENFORCING EQUALITY HOW FAIR IS IT...WHEN WOMEN AND MOST MINORITY GROUPS LAG BEHIND WHITE MEN IN PAY AND ADVANCEMENT? ...WHEN RACE AND SEX ARE PUT AHEAD OF MERIT IN TRYING TO LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD?

Neither Jim Croson nor Melvin Brown set out to carve a niche in the legal history of the United States.

In the fall of 1983, Brown was the owner of a fledgling metal-hose fabricating company in Richmond. With all-American grit, he'd founded his own business - rising from the Baltimore slums where his first enterprise, at age 8, was washing marble steps for a quarter per row house.

The risks, in 1983, were enormous for Brown, his wife and four children, but the determination was also great. ``It was a dream simply because no one in my family ever had,'' he said.

Jim Croson also knew something about dreams. With a $500 loan from his mom, he'd launched a mechanical contracting business in Ohio in 1959. He struggled for 11 years before the company was large enough to seek major jobs.

By 1983, J.A. Croson Co. had expanded to Virginia. That October, the firm bid to install stainless steel plumbing fixtures in the Richmond jail. It also requested a waiver from a new city policy earmarking 30 percent of such business for minority-owned firms.

When the Croson Co. looked for a minority firm to supply the fixtures, it turned up only one offer. The price, said company officials as they rejected it, was $6,000 over the usual markup. The bid came from Continental Metal Hose Inc., whose owner was Melvin Brown.

This spring, as affirmative action is the hot-button topic of political agendas and backyard conversation, the landmark court case that followed - ``Richmond v. Croson'' - is a reminder of a difficult truth: that behind the passion and rhetoric lie individuals with honestly held and acutely different perceptions of how best to give blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, men and women a fair and equal shot at prosperity.

The nation entered this debate 30 years ago, and it has resurfaced with escalating ferocity every few years - a sign of how deep the divisions are and how much is at stake.

At root are two questions:

How fair can an economic system be when, by every statistical measure, women and most minority groups lag - sometimes dramatically - behind white men in pay and advancement?

On the other hand, is it fair to put race and sex ahead of merit when attempting to level the field?

Asked another way, is it fair to discriminate in the name of fighting discrimination?

Advocates of affirmative action say special consideration is still due women and minorities because centuries of second-class citizenship continue to drive workplace decisions. Without government prodding, gains would be erased, they fear.

Opponents counter that affirmative action is dangerously polarizing, rife with abuse, and fundamentally unfair to individual white males. They point to snafus such as the U.S. Forestry Service's recent appeal for ``unqualified applicants'' to fill several jobs earmarked for women.

A demographic revolution that will turn racial minorities into the majority by early in the next century will eventually eclipse social engineering to produce equity, the opponents say.

Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court, in one of its most significant affirmative action rulings, tossed out the Richmond set-aside plan, Melvin Brown and Jim Croson reflect the opposing poles of thought.

Now living near Orlando, Fla., Croson said he has given up doing city contracting work because affirmative action makes it ``too big a hassle and too much of a fraud.'' The court decision in ``Richmond v. Croson'' may have clamped down on set-asides, in which minority firms are guaranteed a percentage of a city or state's business, but Croson says Orlando's ``goal'' of giving 18 percent of the city's work to minority firms acts much the same way.

The result, he said, is too often a scam in which minority firms are brought in as subcontractors on projects and paid a standard 3 percent fee simply to pass paperwork through their books. The cruel paradox is that firms are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars without getting authentic work experience, he said.

A slower, but far better solution is the private mentoring he has done with several African-American plumbers, he believes.

Brown, whose company folded a couple of years after the Richmond set-aside program was abandoned, is unconvinced. He acknowledges the existence of the sort of ``broker'' arrangements described by Croson, but says such abuse is a small price for the benefits when affirmative action works as intended.

For him, the Richmond set-aside program made the difference between modest success and failure.

``When the 30 percent shut down, those same guys who were calling - `Mel, can you do a job?' - stopped calling. It was like sometimes, `Is my phone working?' '' he said.

His business folded in 1992, throwing seven people out of work. Brown, who recently reopened a small contracting company, is still trying to get back on his feet financially.

The problem, he added, is that without a nudge, white contractors are unlikely to subcontract with small, black-owned firms like his. ``We don't golf, don't drink beer together, don't go to the same church together. The biggest barrier is that there's no commonality there.''

Statistics leave little doubt that to be white and male in America is to hold an economic ace.

According to Census Bureau data, a white woman earns, on average, 71 cents for every dollar earned by a white male. Black men earn 74 cents on the white male's dollar, and black women earn 64 cents. For Asian males, the figure is 99 cents on the dollar, and for Asian females, it's 78 cents. Hispanic males earn 65 cents on the dollar, and Hispanic females earn 54 cents.

Among midsize to large private companies in Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth and Suffolk, 30 percent of the employees are members of a minority group. But according to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, just 11 percent of the managers are black men or women. Fifty-six percent of the managers are white men, and 31 percent are white women. Women comprise more than half of the employees, but just over one-third of the top echelon.

In local governments in South Hampton Roads, an even larger percentage of the managerial jobs - 66 percent - are held by white males, according to the EEOC.

Similar gaps are apparent in academe and in government contracting. For instance, in Virginia, whose population is about 19 percent African-American, 25 percent of state government workers are black. Just 6 percent of those state government workers earning $50,000 or more per year are African American, according to a Virginian-Pilot computer analysis of 1994 personnel data.

According to the analysis, less than a quarter of the state government worker earning $50,000 or more a year are women, yet women make up 51 percent of the state work force.

Minority-owned firms received only 5 percent of the $1.5 billion spent by the state on supplies and services in 1993, the most recent year for which state data is available. That was up from 3 percent in 1990.

How those figures are interpreted depends on whether one views the glass as half empty or half full.

Affirmative-action critics point out that the numbers, however unequal, indicate that the playing field is becoming more level. For instance, women have closed the earning gap with men by 15 cents since 1973. Black men have gained six cents. Critics argue that such momentum will continue to improve conditions for minorities and women.

Supporters of affirmative action counter that government activism helps account for the closure, and that there is no guarantee of continued progress without it.

Academic researchers are divided on the question of whether progress is due to affirmative action or other factors, such as the dramatic shift of women into the work force.

Jonathan S. Leonard, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, is among those who attribute only a modest share of minority and female gains directly to affirmative action.

According to Leonard's research, employment gains among women who work for government contractors - companies required to pursue affirmative action goals - are no greater than among women working elsewhere.

A U.S. Labor Department study found that affirmative action has helped 6 million women and 5 million minorities move up in the workplace.

Francine Blau, a professor of labor economics at Cornell University, and her associate Laurence Kahn have developed a statistical model that seeks to explain why the male-female wage gap narrowed between 1975 and 1987. They primarily credit such forces as deunionization and the increased movement of women into the labor force.

But they also concluded that 22 percent of the gap could not be attributed to such trends, leaving room for affirmative action perhaps to have had an important role.

Her view, Blau said in an interview, is that the combination of anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies have had ``major effects directly in the labor market and indirectly in encouraging women and minorities to raise expectations.''

On the government contracting side, affirmative action goals clearly have diversified the pool of individuals feeding at the public trough. But at the state and local level, and particularly since the Croson decision, such goals are sporadically applied.

No South Hampton Roads city, for instance, has a numerical goal for channeling contract dollars to minority-owned firms. Portsmouth alone has an informal goal of steering at least 4 percent to 5 percent of work to such firms, according to a purchasing official.

In 1983, just before the Richmond City Council adopted its 30 percent set-aside plan, a study found that less than 1 percent of the city's contract dollars were going to minority firms. In the 3 1/2 years the policy was in place, the average leaped to almost 40 percent.

A soon-to-be-published book by Virginia Commonwealth University professors W. Avon Drake and Robert D. Holsworth reports that, while 47 companies benefited, two got more than half the contract dollars.

Those types of results provide ammunition to critics such as William Julius Wilson, a University of Chicago professor and adviser to President Clinton. Wilson argues that affirmative action policies mostly help middle class individuals, not the ``truly disadvantaged.''

But Deborah Barnes, who has monitored minority contracting for Richmond since the council adopted a new policy - a 16 percent ``goal'' - in April 1993, argues that the Richmond experience proves the need for affirmative action.

After Richmond dropped its set-aside plan, the percentage of city work going to minority firms plummeted to 13 percent, one-third of the earlier average, she said.

All sides in the affirmative action debate agree that the past three decades prove that government alone cannot create economic parity. Private employers, most of whom fall outside affirmative action mandates, are the most critical force.

With the issue promising to electrify the 1996 presidential election, some Democrats are urging Clinton to accept government's relative impotence as a rationale to join Republicans in backing away from numerical preferences.

Will Marshall, director of the Progressive Policy Institute and one such Democrat, argues that ``the real impediment to racial progress in the '90s is less outright discrimination than lack of education and skills.''

He proposes abandoning set-asides and numerical goals in government, strengthening anti-discrimination laws, and focusing on policies that help the disadvantaged develop personal financial assets.

But liberal Democrats, who see little historical precedent for the view that economic power will be voluntarily shared, say that even the limited imperative created by affirmative action outweighs its failings.

``There's no simple fix,'' said state Sen. Henry Marsh, D-Richmond, who helped prepare the city's defense in the Croson case and was mayor when the 30 percent set-aside was adopted. ``We're changing generations of history.'' ILLUSTRATION: LAWRENCE JACKSON/Staff photo illustration

Photos

TRACY MACK/

The Daily Commercial

JIM CROSON: Owner of a mechanical contracting firm. Five years after

Richmond v. Croson - in which the U.S. Supreme Court tossed out the

city's plan to earmark 30 percent of city contracting work for

minority firms - Croson has given up seeking city work, calling it

``too big a hassle.''

LAWRENCE JACKSON/Staff

MELVIN BROWN: Former owner of a fledgling metal-hose fabricating

company in Richmond. His business folded in 1992, after Richmond

abandoned its set-aside program. ``Those same guys who were calling

. . . stopped calling. It was like sometimes, `Is my phone working?'

'' he said.

Graphics

JOHN EARLE/Staff

DIVERSITY IN TOP MANAGEMENT

Among officials and administrators in South Hampton Roads

SOURCE: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

JOHN EARLE/Staff

A BRIEF HISTORY OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

National policy on affirmative action has evolved over the past

three decades through a series of presidential decrees, legislative

actions and court decisions. Among hthe most important:

[For complete graphics, please see microfilm]

KEYWORDS: AFFIRMATIVE ACTION OPINIONS by CNB