Majority Support Steps to Diversity in the Workplace, Times Poll Finds : Employment: Despite reports of friction, most back efforts toward equal opportunity. More than 80% say race relations at the office are good.

You are black, Latino, female. These are grand days of opportunity in the American work force.

Well, maybe not so grand.

And white males trying to climb the career ladder? Your timing is rotten. But you still hold all the best jobs, don’t you?

“The only sin which we never forgive in each other,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “is difference of opinion.”

For a generation, Americans worked under a loose-knit addendum to our social contract called “affirmative action.” Now affirmative action has evolved into “diversity.”

Not only are we claiming that we want to pry open the doors of opportunity, but we are all being asked to appreciate our racial, gender and cultural differences.

The ensuing social friction showers us with hot sparks: Million-dollar legal judgments for workplace harassment. Demands and boycotts; counter-demands and backlash. Income disparities by color and gender. Anger met by rage.

Sometimes it’s enough to make us ask: Is diversity a great American flop?

Actually, no.

In a national survey of 987 American workers conducted last summer, the Los Angeles Times Poll found more agreement over workplace diversity than news headlines might suggest. And the poll found that a large majority either supports current efforts or is willing to do more to push toward equality of opportunity.

When asked, 83% of respondents said race relations were good to excellent at their place of employment, and this included 52% of African Americans surveyed.

Among blacks, 46% said they had suffered discrimination on the job in the last five years. An equal number said they had not.

As for workplace relations between men and women, 88% of the respondents said things were good to excellent, including 91% of the women.

Only 18% of the women surveyed said they had been subjected to gender discrimination in the workplace during the last five years, versus 10% of the men.

Have we gone too far in the quest for diversity?

In the poll, 30% of respondents said the nation has gone overboard with attempts to guarantee minorities a fair shake in the workplace, but 26% said more effort is needed. And 39% put themselves in the middle, agreeing that enough is being done.

Blacks and whites, however, view America differently: 66% of blacks want more aggressive efforts, while only 19% of whites want to go faster.

How about efforts to equalize opportunities for women?

Answer: Only 16% of respondents were in the backlash category of saying America is going overboard. Another 31% said they want more effort. And 48% were in the middle, saying enough is being done now.

The poll found that female and black respondents were more eager to speed up the process, while whites and men were more likely to say they are content with the pace of diversity efforts.

In this regard, polls are tricky. Reword the questions slightly and the numbers can shift. And people respond differently to the same questions, depending on their race and culture.

In a recent lecture on racism, Houston attorney Xavier Lemond explained: “White people look at discrimination from an individual point of view. White people come up to me and say: ‘My parents taught me never to be prejudiced--look at our maid, Suzie, she’s like one of the family.’ . . . Blacks look at discrimination from a societal point of view--whoever does it to the least of my brethren does it to me.”

Still, at the very time when America depicts itself--and is depicted abroad--as a country divided, a large majority of Americans seem to support workplace diversity.

And even in the polarized politics of the 1990s, 57% of respondents who describe themselves as politically conservative say they favor current efforts to guarantee fairness in the workplace--or want even more done.

In interviews conducted across the nation, a common theme emerged: Americans regard diversity differently than other social movements.

Yes, it touches our lives and ambitions as directly as any matter of public policy. The goal itself reflects a remarkable turn of human events, a society striving to make good on the high-minded promise of justice sounded in its Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

But diversity lacks the exultation that has sustained America through other struggles.

Few workers among us rejoice at being part of a noble cause. No leader stands up to inspire us, no martyr lays down sacrifices we can follow, no call to action is lofty enough to be recorded in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

Instead, the process of diversity is bureaucratic, its vernacular legalistic, its victims and beneficiaries often dehumanized as mere fine print in this new social contract. Our politicians and business managers cling to a stubborn contradiction: Diversity is not a matter of quotas, oh no. But how else can progress be measured except to count the numbers?

For the worse, and for the better, diversity has altered our concepts of merit. And it comes at a time when the nature of employment itself is undergoing broad change.

So we confront diversity as a personal matter. We are not crusading. We are coping.

We drink society’s medicine, and we decide ourselves if it comes from a glass half full or half empty.

Dale Robinson sells cars in Denver. He strides confidently on the lot. He is the only African American at the dealership.

Shoppers, he says, “expect to see a guy in a tie who is white. And if they see a black guy, it can create more anxiety. Even black customers have a tendency not to want to deal with black salesmen.”

Angry? Sometimes. Hurt? Yes. Resigned? Hardly.

He said he learned the trade from an African American who humiliated him and made his life miserable. “He taught me the guy who takes the most makes the most.” He taught the young man to cope.

So Robinson teams up with a white salesman sometimes. The partner softens the buyer and then Robinson is introduced into the deal as the supposed “floor manager.” It’s the old good-guy, bad-guy routine. But because Robinson is introduced as someone with power over the deal, he is given respect. “As soon as they perceive me as someone who can give them what they want, color isn’t an issue anymore.”

Sometimes prejudice explodes in his face, and a manager or customer utters a racist jape. That only hardens his resolve. “If a guy comes in and treats me like ---- and calls me a lowlife . . . that’s the guy I’m going to make all my money on. I go to the bank and say: ‘I’ve got $3,000 of that guy’s money in my pocket.’ ”

Robinson’s circumstance falls short of the American ideal. But he measures progress. It’s a job, not a life, he said. “I took a lot of abuse to get where I am in car sales. I look at it victoriously at the end of the month when I get my paycheck.”

Onetime Los Angeles area gang member Anna Gill now works in Houston. A Latina, she perhaps typifies the incomplete but incremental progress America has made.

In moving from one job to another, she has gone from hopelessness to hope. That itself is a great distance. But Gill feels it is further still from hope to reality.

She remembers her job as a fund-raiser at New Orleans Children’s Hospital.

“It was very chauvinistic and racist. When they hired a young white male, younger than me, I had to train him. I said, that was it. I knew what his salary was. It was more than mine. I knew where his job was going, which was higher than mine. They didn’t really believe in me. They saw my race, they didn’t see me.”

Now she is an alumni fund-raiser at the University of Houston. And she says she has hope because of a supervisor who is committed to having a diverse work force, to promoting minorities.

“We’re moving ahead,” Gill said. “But not fast enough. . . . Racism is here forever, in one form or another, I’m sorry to say.”

Because workplace diversity is so personal, our feelings are often ambivalent, sometimes contradictory.

If asked, we’re apt to say anything, including the truth.

Around the nation, any number of companies congratulate one another for progress in diversifying work forces, and their efforts are held up as examples in their communities. But a good number of these companies would rather leave it there. Big firms like the Bank of America in Los Angeles and Corning Glass in New York, and smaller ones like Quark Inc. in Denver, all refused requests by The Times to explore their diversity programs firsthand.

An exception is the Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel. Come over and you’ll see all kinds of diversity, a manager offered.

No tally sheet was necessary. Not only could you see diversity at the hotel, you could feel it.

David Hill lost both of his legs to a land mine in Vietnam. He started his career at the Marriott as a furniture repair specialist. From his wheelchair, he could easily refinish wood. But to advance, he needed a way to operate a sewing machine so he could repair upholstery too.

Hill and his supervisor put their heads together. For less than 50 cents, they devised what Hill calls his “foot”--a simple rod and wooden block that enables him to operate the sewing machine.

“I’m very happy,” he says, rolling through the lobby to his job.

Steven Griffieth has the skeletal disease scoliosis. He had been a custodian when he joined the hotel staff as a trainee two years ago through a program sponsored by Goodwill Industries. His small, frail body was not up to that job.

Today he is guest services coordinator. “I really didn’t have any idea I would get that far,” he said.

Diversity is personal, but its actualization is not.

Griffieth nods to the computer at his desk. “I didn’t have a lot of experience dealing with technical equipment. But I enjoyed people. I look at some of the associates I work with who have college degrees and see myself here without a degree. And they’re anxious to help me and educate me.”

Maybe it helps that the hotel’s human resources director did not come from a university business school but up from the ranks of waitresses.

And if it matters--and it probably does in a story about diversity--Hill and Griffieth are African Americans.

The Times Poll asked Americans their views of diversity training at the workplace--a phenomenon that has swept across businesses nationwide. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they believe that these sessions are worthwhile in raising sensitivities to race and gender differences.

One company that offers such consultation and training is Gamma Vision of Seattle. For a round-table discussion, it gathered workers and managers from two of its public-works clients, Puget Power and Pierce County Transit. The purpose: to explore views on diversity.

On some points, these front-line employees shared a consensus. As practiced at the workplace today, diversity can shape conduct but not always attitudes.

“Some people’s minds will never change. But you can at least let them know certain kinds of behavior are not acceptable at the workplace,” said Stephanie Ostmann, a human-resources trainer for the transit system.

They also agreed that progress was being made, but not secured.

“We’re downsizing. . . . And we’re going to end up losing a lot of the people we worked really hard to move into the crafts,” said Barbara Revo, manager of labor relations for the power company.

In her frustration, she joined in a conversation about technology and diversity. Maybe that’s the answer to all our prejudice. Put everybody behind a computer screen at home. Filter our contact with each other until everyone assumes the digitalized shape of their software program.

“You couldn’t tell a person’s color, you wouldn’t know whether they were tall or short or fat or thin,” she remarked.

That offered little consolation to bus driver Ronda Barfield. “I don’t think any time soon we’re going to find a computer to drive the buses.”

So like millions of other Americans, Barfield copes.

She is a beneficiary of this epic struggle for justice. Only within her lifetime have women gained the peacetime opportunity to operate buses in Pierce County.

But she is still its victim.

Each day as the shifts change, drivers gather to gossip and gripe at the dispatch center. “The lobby experience,” they call it. And the male-dominated culture of the past clings to its traditions: The banter is raw and salacious.

Barfield avoids the dispatch lobby and sits alone in her car each day until one minute before her shift begins.

“For some reason, I personally happen to be the topic of conversation. The less they see me, the less they talk about me.”

Times researchers Doug Conner in Seattle, Lianne Hart in Houston, Ann Rovin in Denver and Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.

How Americans View Diversity Efforts

A national survey of 987 working Americans found that many believe efforts to promote fairness for minorities are adequate. But there are many discrepancies between how various groups view such efforts.

MAJOR GAPS IN WHAT THEY SEE

Believe more effort is needed to guarantee racial minorities fairness in the workplace: Whites: 19% Blacks: 66% *

Have been discriminated against in the workplace because of race or ethnic background in last five years: Whites: 11% Blacks: 46% *

Believe race relations at their workplace are good or excellent: Whites: 87% Blacks: 52% *

Believe more effort is needed these days to guarantee that women get fair treatment in the workplace: Men: 26% Women: 38% Numbers do not add up to 100% because all responses are not shown.

Source: Los Angeles Times Poll taken July 23-26, 1994. Margin of error is 4 percentage points.