A group of U.S. state attorneys general on Thursday warned Apple and the rest of the top 100 largest American companies that certain workforce “diversity” policies could be illegal in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision effectively striking down affirmative action in higher education.
The 13 officials in letters sent to the 100 largest U.S. companies said the court last month made clear that any policy that treats people differently because of their race is illegal, even when it is adopted with good intentions.
The attorneys general urged the companies to abandon race-based quotas or preferences in hiring, promotion and contracting and threatened legal action “sooner rather than later” if they do not.
“Companies that engage in racial discrimination should and will face serious legal consequences,” the attorneys general wrote.
The officials singled out about a dozen companies that they said have used racial quotas and other explicitly race-based practices, including Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Microsoft Corp, and Uber Technologies Corp.
The Supreme Court ruling last month said Harvard University’s and the University of North Carolina’s race-conscious admissions policies violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
The decision does not directly affect employers, but in a concurring opinion Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that the federal law banning race bias in federally-funded programs, including higher education, is “essentially identical” to the law prohibiting workplace discrimination.
The decision is widely expected to spur legal challenges to admissions policies at universities and high schools and to corporate diversity initiatives that take race into account.
Federal and state laws already bar companies from explicitly considering race in making employment decisions, but there is little recent precedent on the legality of diversity programs.
MacDailyNews Take: Making hiring decisions based on skin color is, by definition, racist.
Getting the absolute best people should remain Apple’s ultimate goal. Forced diversity carries its own set of problems. Would the group be comprised of the best-qualifed people possible or would it be designed to hit pre-defined quotas? Would some employees, consciously or unconsciously, consider certain employees, or even themselves, to be tokens meant to fill a quota? That would be a suboptimal result for Apple and everyone involved.
The best and desired outcome is for the quest for diversity to work in Apple’s favor. Truly looking at qualified people from a larger pool would likely result in delivering different viewpoints and new ways of looking at things and tackling problems than a more homogenized workforce would likely be capable of delivering.
Regardless and of course, someday it sure would be nice for everyone to just be able to evaluate a person’s potential, not measuring and tabulating superficial, meaningless things like skin color and gender.
How do we ever get to the point where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” when we insist on judging people by the color of their skin? — MacDailyNews, December 31, 2015
Read the full letter form the U.S. states attorneys general to Fortune 100 CEOs here.
See also: Apple on the losing side as Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions – June 29, 2023
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