To Whom It May Concern:

From 1988 to 1996, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service[1] (NRCS) supervisors gave me “Fully Successful” ratings, but their honest verbal communications with me in private supervisor-employee meetings and periodic facial expressions of disappointment communicated their true assessment of my performance.  In reality, I “Did Not Meet Fully Successful” on critical tasks.  As Federal Government supervisors, they were pressured to rate me higher than my merits due to racial and gender preferential treatment policies, precedence, and disastrous case histories that hinder supervisors from serving as supervisors when evaluating “protected” minority or women employees.

Federal Government hiring and preferential treatment policies and related collateral duties contributed greatly to my unsatisfactory civil engineering performance.  In some ways, I was a victim of failed government preferential treatment policies and social engineering.  My USDA employers were unable to interview me, whether in person or via the telephone, to better speculate my potential competence and personality for open positions.  Federal Civil Rights rules prevented them from conducting interviews for positions that do not involve national security, military intelligence, or presidential appointed political positions.  Instead, they rely solely on paper applications using Federal employment forms and candidate detailed supplemental sheets presenting knowledge, skills, abilities, training inventory, and recognition.  Candidates are welcome to contact the selecting official, typically by telephone, to gather information.  Selecting officials, on the other hand, cannot contact any candidate during the selection process.  This process is supposedly executed to safeguard against discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, disability, familial status, national origin, gender, and so on.  As is commonly known, however, how someone communicates their competence in person and on paper can be two separate things.  Evidently, I presented myself well on paper but the selecting officials probably would have had a different prediction of my potential competence during face-to-face interviews.  Had my NRCS supervisors in Nebraska and Arizona interviewed me face-to-face prior to selecting someone for successive open positions, I am certain they would not have selected me.  Had this happened, we would have all been better off.

Preferential treatment, as related to Federal law governing Federal human resources employment, has the idea that when all things are equal, women and minorities will be hired and promoted over White men.  This policy was developed with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to correct past employment discriminations on the basis of race, color, disability, national origin, gender, and so on.  In practice, however, this policy is fatally flawed as there is no such thing as ‘all things being equal’ between prospective candidates or staff employees.  That is, each individual has different personalities, skills, knowledge, abilities, and competencies that they use and offer to employers and clients.

Preferential treatment arbitrary numerical ‘goals’ for specific sub-discipline positions based on broad, multi-discipline category labor pool average distributions that do not consider statistical variance, multiple occupations or sub-specialties within general disciplines, qualifications, education, geographic service area, demographics, and wide-ranging differences in group cultural characteristics, values, and choices have the effect of being quotas.  Regarding statistical variance, averages are only meaningful if variance exists.  That is, to say that something happens a certain way on the average is not to say that it happens that way every time.  Yet preferential treatment deals with averages as if there were no variance.  In many cases, U.S. courts have nearly made statistical variance a federal offense.

Regarding multiple occupations or sub-specialties within general disciplines, in reality groups of people are distributed differently within sub-specialties or sub-disciplines categories than they are among general discipline or multi-discipline categories.  For example, available labor pool data typically include women and minority engineering distributions or percentages for a given state.  Finer aggregation data of women and minority engineering labor pool for local service area, engineering disciplines, and qualifications are typically incomplete or not available.  For illustration, a Dallas, Texas wastewater treatment facility may compare its sanitary engineering staff with labor pool averages to develop a preferential treatment plan as required by law.  Facility sanitary engineering employees may be required to have waste treatment design and operation knowledge and experience, Texas professional engineer license registrations, and related waste treatment certifications and collegiate education.  In developing a plan, it would be erroneous to include a computer central processing electrical engineer having manufacturing experience while employed in Corpus Christi who does not have a professional engineer’s license as being part of the comparative labor pool as the two disciplines involve different and incompatible experience and knowledge.  Likewise, it would be erroneous to include other civil engineering sub-specialties or sub-disciplines of highway transportation engineering, irrigation engineering, shipbuilding engineering, geotechnical engineering, or space shuttle structural tile engineering as being part of the waste treatment labor pool as these sub-disciplines have different requirements and qualifications.  A minority group may have, say, twenty percent engineering labor pool in Texas.  Out of the twenty percent, however, perhaps only three percent are sanitary engineers, a figure that probably would not be available.  Yet preferential treatment demands that the waste treatment plan use the erroneous minority group twenty percent sanitary engineering employment goal.  Being that the facility may never realistically hope to reach twenty percent minority group employment because there is only a three percent average minority group sanitary engineering labor pool, plaintiffs can still claim that the plant is guilty of illegal discrimination even when such discrimination does not exist.  Plaintiffs can also arrange the plant’s statistics in any number of possible ways and then go shopping for illegal discrimination among the possibilities for the one that will present the employment pattern in the worst way.  This leads to the larger problem that the burden of proof is on the accused to prove their innocence, once ‘suspicious’ numbers have been found.

To address broadly extrapolated numerical ‘goals’ that do not realistically represent service geographic area human resources, many organizations within respective agencies often venture outside of their service areas and compete for the same woman and minority prospects.  For example, officials in several NRCS state and national organizations throughout the country yearly seek out African American prospects in African American land grant colleges in the southeast United States by traveling to these colleges and competing with each other to recruit these prospects.  These overlapping efforts certainly involve considerable expenditures of taxpayer funds compared to other recruitment activities.  Furthermore, these efforts directed to relatively few educated and privileged prospects suggest that advantaged women and minorities benefit from preferential treatment while the disadvantaged fall behind.  From such overlapping efforts, an agency organization with ‘successful’ recruitment tends to end up with a ‘zoo’ of token woman and minority employees that the organization tends to brag about and display.  It is as if token woman and minority employees were ‘exotic animals’ that were gathered from far away places and displayed among local modern tools and staff, which trivialize employee competence and liberties.  Furthermore, “protected” women and minority employees who have been hired or promoted beyond their competence tend to stigmatize competent women and minority employees and prospects.  In reality, this policy pressures selecting officials to meet arbitrary numerical ‘goals’ or quotas under the threat of receiving disciplinary or court mandated actions instead of encouraging all individuals to serve at their competence levels and consider healthy aspirations.  Federal preferential treatment laws hurt the very people they intend to help.

According to Thomas Sowell in his book entitled Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, the term “affirmative action” was first used in a racial discrimination context in President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order No. 10,925 in 1961.  As initially presented, affirmative action referred to various activities, such as monitoring subordinate decision makers to ensure the fairness of their hiring and promotion decisions, and spreading information about employment or other opportunities so as to encourage previously excluded groups to apply.  Given these activities, the actual selection could be made without regard to group membership.  Thus, it was both meaningful and consistent for President Kennedy’s Executive Order to say that federal contractors should “take affirmative action to ensure that the applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”  By the time the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was debated, however, the meaning of “affirmative action” was somehow changed from equality of prospective opportunity toward numerical parity of retrospective results.  In other words, the original concept of equal individual opportunity changed toward the concept of equal group results.

Being that I was a “protected” minority who served in positions of relative responsibilities, regional and state directors assigned me to serve as a Civil Rights Committee member and Employees with Disability Program Manager.  In doing so, directors acted unilaterally over my supervisors to assign me these collateral duties on top of my primary duties that my supervisors selected me for.  While I was able to satisfactorily serve the Arizona director in these capacities, my employment relationship with my Water Resources Team supervisor was strained as my time competed with serving two supervisors instead of just one.  In other words, the dilemma of whether I was to serve external customers and my Water Resources Team supervisor as a Planning Engineer or serve internal executive director customers as a Civil Rights Committee member and Employee with Disability Program Manager often caused supervisory conflicts.  These conflicts frustrated my Water Resources Team supervisor.
Part of my duties as the Employees with Disability Program Manager was to encourage individuals with disability to consider NRCS employment and internships.  While I was able to send NRCS Arizona open position and internship typed public releases to Arizona colleges, universities, and associations where qualified individuals may be, I dreaded any prospect of encouraging anyone face-to-audience or face-to-face given my declining motivation and confidence as a NRCS employee.

Thank you for considering my Federal government civil engineering experience concerns.  Developing this letter is my effort to follow the engineering principle of ‘working the problem.’
Respectfully,

Gregory Perez

[1] The USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (http://www.nrcs.usda.gov) is a federal agency that works in partnership with citizens to conserve and sustain natural resources and was formerly the USDA Soil Conservation Service.

Note: Although this letter describes the failures of the use of race preferences in government, it deals with a federal program, one that would not be effected if Amendment 46 passes, but still reflects the need for a colorblind system.