Reducing Identity Politics in the Workplace A Modest Proposal

Ever since passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, employers have complained that nondiscrimination laws constitute an additional regulatory burden on business, while civil rights advocates have argued that compliance requires nothing more than the sorts of sound personnel practices that successful businesses have long found to be effective management tools. While most Americans clearly agree that people ought not be subjected to invidious employment discrimination based on race, religion, or other criteria unrelated to job performance, current laws do not necessarily represent the best approach to that problem. We argue that the “group identity” approach to workplace equity embedded in traditional civil rights statutes has retarded, rather than promoted, the adoption of sound and valid personnel assessment tools, and that attempts by U.S. business to reconcile the mandates of current civil rights law with fair and effective corporate human resource practices represent a heroic but fundamentally flawed effort. In this paper, we outline an alternative model based upon worker productivity which we believe to be legally defensible and practically superior to current regulatory approaches to evaluating and attaining fairness in the workplace.