Actually, most of what's described here, and what happened to me and thousands of others at my company, is Reverse Discrimination through Affirmative Action. My company, in order to avoid lengthy legal troubles, signed off on a Consent Decree which obligated them to hire and promote women and minorities in preference to us white fellers, to balance out the discrimination they had practiced before (which was true, in part anyway). This left many better-qualified and able people behind while putting a lot of poor candidates in jobs they couldn't handle, because the primary qualifications became race and/or sex, not ability. It's impossible to calculate the cost to the company of having to hire extra people to do the work the AA folks couldn't handle, but clearly they thought it was less than the expense of a bunch of lawsuits and bad publicity. What it cost me and others was being stuck in lower-paying jobs until the quotas were filled and the workforce balanced to the government's satisfaction.
Some of the AA people went on to become valuable, capable employees while others were drags on the whole shebang for their entire careers and often attitude cases to boot because they knew they were pretty much bullet-proof., but the company got by, and those of us that were held back eventually caught up to where we belonged. My second-level manager promoted a bunch of us in one fell swoop to make up for what we'd been denied, and I imagine others did as well. I never resented the AA people myself (unless I had trouble because they couldn't do their job, even after years of experience), but I was pissed at the company for putting us in this situation in the first place by discriminating and then rolling over rather than seeking a fair settlement for what they'd done, costing good employees thousands each in missed higher wages and opportunities.
Still, I came out smelling like a rose in the end. One of Life's little lessons.
How many times were you told "two wrongs don't make a right" when you were a child?
