Inside Affirmative Action: The Executive Order That Transformed America's Workforce by Karin Williamson Pedrick and Sandra Arnold Scham (review)

On September 24, 1965, President Johnson signed executive order 11246 mandating that federal contractors could not discriminate and must take affirmative action in the employment of minorities. The Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) in the Department of Labor (DOL) is the regulatory home of this mandate, which has endured multiple attacks from opponents both within government and without. This volume is a history of the efforts to extend, eliminate, and preserve affirmative action told through the lens of career staff and political actors in and around OFCCP, as framed in the larger political and ideological tides of presidential administrations.

The book begins with the personal histories of the two authors. Both entered their adult years with an orientation toward public service and a deep belief in the promise of equal opportunity and political leadership. The narrative reflects this standpoint. Both authors have long histories working first in staff and later leadership roles at the DOL, the OFCCP, and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). In short, they are insiders who believe in the mission. In crafting their book, the authors rely on their own experiences, interviews with many key actors in and around OFCCP, and a broad reading of the political history of equal rights and affirmative action in the United States. The book is a gold mine of anecdotes about the struggle to preserve the existence of OFCCP and the mandated affirmative action that federal contractors are required to take as part of their contractual relationship with the federal government. For example, I learned that the extension of the 1961 Equal Pay Act to cover exempt employees was a stealthily inserted phrase by career staffers into the 1972 amendments to the Civil Rights Act. The book is replete with small stories of career staffers and political appointees extending the reach of equal opportunity practices and policy in the early years and defending them later. An example of the latter are the series of fights between Reagan and George H. W. Bush, appointees within the DOL, and anti-affirmative action activists in the White House and Department of Justice over the future of affirmative action mandates. Those mandates endure partly because Republican political appointees in DOL under Nixon, Reagan, and Bush fought to preserve them.

Reagan and successive Republican administrations passed budget reductions that essentially weakened both the OFCCP and EEOC over time. Both agencies have smaller budgets and employment today than they did in 1980, even as the labor force is 50 percent larger and the set of protected employee categories has grown to include veterans, the disabled, older workers, and LGBTQ citizens. The book does not dwell on budget increments during the Clinton or Obama administrations, although others have shown that these were minimal during the Clinton years but did occur under Obama. This volume details tendencies toward aggressive systemic discrimination cases during Democratic presidencies and, in the case of the Obama administration, an increased reliance on performance metrics and data-driven investigations.

The authors say little about the role of employers in resisting affirmative action mandates. In fact, under both Bushes and more recently the Trump administration, the business community has come together to preserve the independence of the OFCCP after administration proposals to merge OFCCP and EEOC. Business solidarity with the OFCCP is attributed by the authors to the endorsement of affirmative action by major federal contractors. A more likely reason is that OFCCP was a known and controlled regulator. For example, the Chamber of Commerce strongly rebuked the Obama OFCCP and gave the Trump administration a laundry list of requests to reduce and reverse Obama-era regulatory shifts.

I found myself frustrated by this book in two ways. First, the authors assume that the OFCCP is effective in promoting its mission. Previous research, including my own, suggests that this was...