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84 In 1966 workplaces were extremely segregated by race and gender. We suspect that there had already been some minor declines in race segregation as a reaction to the civil rights movement, the passage of fair employment practice laws in many northern and western states, and President Kennedy’s 1961 executive order admonishing federal contractors take affirmative action in the hiring of African Americans. We now examine changes in the political landscape as well as in corporate employment practices between 1964 and 1972. How did private-sector employers respond to the changing contours of the political and legal landscape following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was created to monitor progress toward an equal employment opportunity economy. The EEO-1 forms that private-sector firms have been submitting to the EEOC since 1966 are ideal for this purpose: they provide population-level coverage of workplace employment distributions by race and gender.1 In this regard, they are akin to a census of federal contractors with more than twenty-five employees and other workplaces that are not federal contractors and have more than fifty employees. Although this amounts to only about half of all private-sector employment, it is the half of the economy populated by all of the large and medium-size corporations that were the primary targets of the expanding regulatory enforcement efforts. The 1966 to 1972 period is one of maximum uncertainty around racial integration. On the one hand, employers were certain that the law had changed and that there was substantial political pressure on them to incorporate black workers into their firms. On the other hand, they had no clear idea as to what behaviors would be acceptable to regulators and the courts. They also faced internal resistance from their current workforces, as well as the inertia of past practice, and no doubt they were asking themselves : How many black workers would be enough? How many black Chapter 3 The Era of Uncertainty, 1966 to 1972 The Era of Uncertainty    85 employees would satisfy the EEOC, the OFCCP, and the courts when they began to examine corporate employment practices? Because of the deepseated cultural reality of race relations in the United States, employers were also deeply concerned that hiring too many blacks might produce a backlash among their current workforces and disrupt production. Because the law was vague as to how desegregation should be accomplished and no regulatory guidance or court rulings had emerged yet to clarify what was expected under the law, firms were aware that they should do something, but not what. They certainly did not know what was sufficient to inoculate themselves against regulatory or social movement intrusions on their business practices. Resistance, on the other hand, was predictable and local. The resulting uncertainty made this period from the late 1960s to the early 1970s the worst time to look like a racist firm even as it remained a time when most employees knew, and many white employees expected, that racial segregation was the normal course of affairs. Moreover, no one was quite sure what a nonracist firm looked like. If uncertainty is an important motivator of innovation in equal employment opportunity (EEO) practice, we should expect to see widespread , but contained, desegregation during this early period, despite the lack of regulatory guidelines or enforcement. For gender discrimination, this was not a period of uncertainty, at least not at so high a level. As we saw in the previous chapter, all social movement activities and the resulting changes in law were targeted at race. As we will see shortly, the leaders of the newly established regulatory agencies (EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance [OFCC]) made clear that they saw their jobs as promoting racial progress, but not progress for women. Although the Civil Rights Act made employment discrimination on the basis of “sex” illegal, it was not until later that corporations and the courts began to take EEO progress for women seriously. Hence, this period is one in which the law was the same for race and gender , but uncertainty as to the proper corporate response was high only for race. In fact, although gender discrimination in employment was now illegal , newspapers continued posting separate “help wanted” columns for women and men (Pedriana and Abraham 2006). The Supreme Court did not rule this practice illegal until 1973. As we have already seen, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extended equal nondiscriminatory...

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