White Men May Still Apply : Affirmative action: Get the facts straight about quotas, mandates and set-asides in hiring: There are virtually none.

President Clinton is the latest to sing the angry white male blues. His review of federal affirmative-action measures is a blatant and cynical political sop to conservatives.

Affirmative action has fast moved up to the No. 1 spot on the nation’s politicalhit list. Many white males fervently believe that if a minority person is not comatose, the government will force a private firm to hire that person instead of a white male.

This is a myth. Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 in 1965. This is still the only federally mandated program that legally refers to “affirmative action.” The goal is to promote racial equity in employment. Contractors and subcontractors who have 50 or more employees and do more than $50,000 in business with the federal government are required to ensure that their employees reflect diversity in the work force. The procedures are straightforward. The company must submit a utilization study of its employees and, if women and minorities are underrepresented, develop a plan and submit it to the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The plan must include goals and timetables for hiring employees from an available pool of qualified applicants. Hiring must be based on a meritocratic system.

There is no army of federal monitors riding roughshod over contractors to make sure they comply with their own plan. No contractors are forced to replace qualified (or even unqualified) white males with unqualified women or minority candidates. Contractors are not forced to have a fixed quota of minorities or women in their company.

An estimated 250,000 contractors did business with the federal government in 1991. The small force of compliance officers made 5,379 compliance reviews of companies. At that rate, it would take more than 46 years to review all the contractors.

During the Carter Administration, 12 companies were barred from doing business with the government for compliance reasons. Four were barred from doing business during the Reagan years and three during the Bush Administration.

White contractors continue to gripe incessantly about government set-aside programs. This is much ado about little. Congress mandated that 18 government agencies are obligated to award just 5% of their contract funds to socially and economically disadvantaged individuals. This does not mean just blacks. It also includes Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Pacific Americans and whites.

The biggest source of white-male rage, however, has been court-imposed quotas. These are rare and have been imposed almost exclusively on a handful of police and fire departments nationally. The 1987 Supreme Court decision that explicitly upheld court-imposed quotas was widely attacked by conservatives. It required that quotas be tailored to specific jobs in specific agencies. The quotas must be flexible and temporary. There was not one word in the decision that said whites couldn’t be hired. The court made it clear that hiring had to be fair to white applicants and that they could and should be hired if there were no qualified women or minorities. White women, not blacks or Latinos, have been the main beneficiaries of these quotas.

Angry white males rail that the quotas and compliance reviews amount to reverse discrimination. But there is no conclusive evidence that the gains that women and minorities have made in the workplace can be attributed to affirmative action. Their numbers would have increased anyway because of better education, expansion of professional, managerial and technical jobs and the increase in job opportunities in the public sector.

What Clinton’s study of affirmative action should ask is: “Is the racism that continues to pervade the American workplace fair?” The answer is one he may not want to hear.