MANAGING DIVERSITY: Grappling With Change in the Work Force. A SPECIAL REPORT : Firms Struggle With Workers’ Ethnic Mix
Cultural diversity, still a matter for corporate speculation and planning in many parts of the United States, is the reality today in California’s work force.
In 1985, the state’s labor pool already was twice as heavily Latino (20.5%) and Asian (8%) as the national work force is projected to be by the year 2000, according to Labor Department estimates.
By the early years of the next century, demographers say nonwhites will constitute a majority of California’s work force--the result of the comparative youth of California’s ethnic population and the flood of working-age immigrants who have entered the state in the last decade.
A gathering one afternoon last month to roast the outgoing general manager at Northern Telecom’s San Diego plant underscored the startling variety of the state’s workers. When employees stood one by one to wish the executive farewell in their native languages, the result was a Babel of Chinese, Indian, Quebecois French, Dutch, Persian, Russian, Spanish and Tagalog.
Yet, as elsewhere in the country, many employers in California remain deaf to the ramifications of the mix of languages and cultures in the labor market.
“There are very few people who recognize the whole future of their work force--that white males are going to be the vanishing element in the work force,” said Lewis H. Butler, president of California Tomorrow, a statewide nonprofit group that does research and runs programs focusing on multicultural issues.
“Most of us in California think we’re already more OK on these issues, more liberal, because we’re more tolerant,” said San Francisco film maker Lewis Griggs, who recently produced a series of training films on workplace diversity. “But there’s almost more resistance to this in San Francisco than in Des Moines.”
Future Customers
A handful of California employers have demonstrated their alertness to the changes sweeping the work force, though, by moving to the forefront of the burgeoning national campaign to manage and value diversity. UCLA and UC Berkeley have sponsored seminars on the issue, and both the Merchants & Manufacturers Assn. and the California office of the National Assn. of Business are offering training to employers in managing a diverse work force.
“These are the people who will be our future customers and future employees,” said Chuck Smith, executive director for recruitment, placement and training at Pacific Bell in San Francisco.
Top minority managers at Pacific Bell are immersed in a training program that challenges them to dump the “cultural baggage” created by years of discrimination and develop aggressive professional habits and high career goals.
“To the Asian who is very polite and doesn’t want to offend, (the training) says working in a management environment and asking people to set goals and objectives is not being rude,” Smith said, offering one example of the changes in attitude that are the program’s aim. “It’s being a better manager.”
Even some smaller California employers have awakened to the multiculturalism of the workplace.
Germaine Schwider, administrator of the Westside Neighborhood Clinic in Long Beach, noticed last year that the outpatient medical center for the poor was registering a marked increase in patient complaints.
Scheduled Seminars
Schwider tried all the fixes she had read about in management books, assuming that the complaints stemmed from poor service. She reviewed job descriptions, met with her 12-member staff, conducted performance evaluations and set individual objectives.
“I did it all,” she recalled. “And it didn’t work.”
Still searching for a solution, she chatted with Maria Escude-Reifler, a former teacher and marriage counselor from Claremont who now does intercultural consulting. Escude-Reifler recommended a series of seminars on cultural diversity for the clinic’s staff.
The medical workers talked about the cultural characteristics of the center’s patients. They spoke more openly than ever before about their own diverse backgrounds, presenting three-minute oral biographies to the group.
One young Latina complained that an older black woman was lazy, making clear in the process she considered laziness characteristic of blacks. The black woman explained that the agency that placed her at the clinic set strict limits on her duties.
Suddenly, facts replaced stereotype. “Everybody assumed that everybody knew,” Escude-Reifler said.
The clinic’s staff is still working on improved understanding. But Schwider says the candor of the initial sessions has left its mark.
“I have seen a change of attitude in the staff,” she said. “And staff have approached me individually and said, ‘I think things are better.’ ”
On a percentage basis, more women and minorities have achieved managerial or professional rank in California than in the nation as a whole, reflecting the state’s historically high minority population and the crowding of native- and foreign-born Asians into technical fields.
Some ethnic groups seem, on average, to be overachievers. According to 1980 Census figures, workers of Chinese heritage made up 1.9% of the state’s managers and professionals, for example, but just 1.5% of the work force as a whole. Workers of Indian heritage constituted 0.4% of the managers and professionals, but only 0.2% of all workers.
Major Disadvantages
The more common phenomenon, though, is for minority groups to face intense disadvantages in the California economy, whether because of language barriers stemming from their recent immigration, their illegal entry into the state or historic prejudices, including the anti-Asian sentiments that swept California in the late 1800s and again during World War II.
Regardless of their level of education, native-born black, Asian and Latino women, along with foreign-born Asians and Latinos, crowd the low-wage ranks of the state’s economy, according to studies by ethnologists Amado Cabezas and Gary Kawaguchi of UC Berkeley. Census data indicate that the state’s Koreans and Filipinos are especially underemployed, given their educational qualifications, Kawaguchi said.
Expecting demographics to prompt corporations to break with past patterns and open their doors wide to California’s ethnics “sounds logical,” Kawaguchi said. “Whether or not it is logical, it just doesn’t hold up in practice.”
