Racial and religious discriminatory practices in employment are widespread throughout the United States, it is asserted in a report by the National Community Relations Advisory Council, the coordinating body of national and local Jewish organizations engaged in combatting anti-Semitism and in fighting for civil rights.
“Every study that has been undertaken, whether under public or private auspices, whether of a locality or of an industry, whether of hiring or of upgrading, has established the existence of discrimination against racial, religious and national minorities,” the report says. It points out that the extent and areas of discrimination vary with local conditions.
Discrimination tends to vary directly with unemployment, the NCR AC report stresses, but the relative unemployment levels among minorities does not alone necessarily mirror the extent to which the minority is discriminated against. Complaints of discrimination do not represent a reliable index of the scope or seriousness of the problem. To project programs against employment discrimination on the basis of these criteria, therefore, is to approach the problem far too narrowly, the report suggests.
FEAR OFTEN KEEPS VICTIMS FROM COMPLAINING
The NCRAC points out that individual job seekers who encounter employment discrimination frequently fail to file complaints because of reluctance to become further involved in what has been a distasteful experience, because of fear of endangering future employment, because of the absence of a well-publicized channel through which complaints may be filed, because they feel that a follow-up will prove futile and, above all, because their primary concern is in getting a job – not in redressing a grievance.
“A firm that is generally suspected of maintaining a discriminatory employment policy may never have a complaint lodged against it, simply because minority group workers have learned on the basis of experience that they have greater likelihood of finding employment by applying elsewhere,” the NCRAC emphasizes. “A decline in the number of complaints alleging discrimination can mean a diminution in discriminatory practices. It can also mean merely expanded employment in companies with fair employment policies.”
The NCRAC draws attention to the fact that, during the past several years, various aspects of the problem have been subjected to detailed study by both governmental and private agencies. Taken together, those studies constitute an unimpeachable body of objective evidence, the report declares; that evidence is documented in thousands of pages of testimony before committees of both houses of the Congress. It is found in the reports of many agencies of the Federal Government, including the Department of Labor, the Bureau of Census and the President’s Committee on Civil Rights.
“Studies by agencies of states in Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and municipalities in Cincinnati, Detroit, Minneapolis provide convincing, if dismal, corroborative evidence, declares the NCRAC. Statistics of State employment service operations in California, Maryland, Michigan, and Ohio record the prevalence of discriminatory specifications on job orders in all sections of the country. Responsible private agencies have added to the burden of the evidence, the NCRAC holds.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
