COLUMN ONE : How Well Does It Work? : A visit to America’s factories and offices, based on a Times analysis, shows affirmative action has produced striking, if uneven results that have helped fuel debate over who benefits--and at what cost.

Three decades after the government launched its most ambitious and controversial foray into social engineering, affirmative action has left an unmistakable and complex mark that has altered the face of the nation’s workplaces.

In the textile belt of the Carolinas, whites who once held an iron-grip monopoly on mill jobs toil side by side with blacks.

At Denver’s phone company, another bastion of white men, women have wrested the largest share of the jobs and almost one-third of management positions.

In the sleek skyscrapers of Boston’s financial district, black women have surged past black men in professional positions, mirroring a stunning 2-to-1 edge nationwide.

And in the hulking Westwood Federal Building, blacks have become heavily overrepresented in government offices, while Latinos, 38% of Los Angeles County’s population, are strikingly absent.

Shifting patterns of employment form the backdrop for the national struggle over affirmative action. But in the emotion-laden clash over jobs and fairness, fundamental questions remain unanswered: What effect have these programs had since the 1960s, when the federal government beheld America’s charred cities and launched its crusade to eradicate “widespread . . . crushing” job discrimination? Who has benefited most--and at what cost?

A wide-ranging Times examination of government data--along with hundreds of interviews--found that affirmative action has produced uneven results by race, gender and occupation across the nation. Among the most striking changes:

* It has helped lift the fortunes of many women, whose share of full-time professional and administrative jobs nearly tripled to 40% between 1960 and 1990.

* Latinos have lagged most in capturing America’s better jobs, even though they increased their share of managerial jobs sevenfold.

* White men have lost much of their dominance in upper-end white- and blue-collar jobs. Their grip on administrative jobs loosened, from 88% to 54%.

* For America’s fastest-growing group, Asians, the leap up the career ladder appears to have come largely apart from affirmative action. Like whites, they are now overrepresented in professional and technical jobs, and have attained full representation in management jobs that minorities have found hardest to land.

* Blacks--mostly women--tripled their share of management, technical and clerical jobs. The salaries of black male managers and administrators, who were paid 25 cents to every dollar that their white male counterparts earned in 1960, have climbed to 69 cents on the dollar. The wage gap is much less among younger blacks and whites.

Still, the racial and gender stratification of jobs decried by the U.S. government in the 1960s remains nearly as pronounced today.

For example, 7 of 10 blacks and Latinos remain in low-level jobs--as clerks, service workers, laborers, farmhands and machine operators--just a notch below the 8 in 10 before affirmative action. In the best-paying jobs, they remain at roughly half of their representation in the work force.

Although women had captured a majority of professional jobs by last year, most remain in female-dominated occupations such as teaching and health care. And they are scarce in entire swaths of the economy, including construction, mining and manufacturing. Less than 1 in 5 engineers and architects, and 1 in 4 lawyers, are women.

“Some [companies],” said prominent diversity consultant Freada Klein, “have [only] done affirmative action with a gun to their head.”

There also are fierce debates over how much of the sometimes-dramatic diversification of America’s work forces can be attributed to affirmative action.

The most basic question--how many workers are subject to formal and informal affirmative action programs?--is murky because the government does not collect the information. The programs are required of many government agencies and government contractors, but only of a minority of private companies.

Times interviews with more than 130 employers nationwide found that about 1 in 4 had any affirmative action initiative, such as advertising for minority or women applicants.

Employment patterns studied by The Times provide strong evidence that affirmative action has driven some of the changes. Blacks, for example, have made disproportionate gains in public- and private-sector jobs subject to affirmative action monitoring by the federal government. But white men have fared far worse in such companies than in the rest of the economy.

Still, many experts believe that affirmative action has exerted less influence on workplace demographics than other social forces--disparities in education, the influx of women workers, an overhaul of immigration laws in 1965, and the growth and decline of whole industries.

“These factors overwhelm anything that happened in terms of affirmative action,” said James P. Smith, a RAND researcher who has studied the effects of the program.

A journey through America’s factories and offices--in areas where major trends identified by The Times were most pronounced--shows that affirmative action has accelerated the advance of some groups. But it has failed to lift others, causing conflicts not only between whites and minorities, but among many of the groups the program was designed to help.

On these pages, a look at those major trends and groups.

WHITE MEN

At the Sara Lee textile mill outside Greenwood, S.C., an imposing mission statement hanging in the employee conference room declares diversity is a competitive advantage. New employees are greeted with half-day sessions on what it means to be a minority.

At cloth-spewing machines, dyeing vats and computer control rooms, whites and blacks, men and women work together, producing cotton for Hanes T-shirts. Almost two-thirds of the more than 400 workers are minorities, roughly twice their proportion of the county’s population. Almost a third of the mill’s management team are minorities, mostly blacks.

The Carolina textiles industry looked nothing like this before the federal government began a bold affirmative action and anti-discrimination campaign in the 1960s.

Jim Crow laws and Southern social norms reserved the cleanest, highest-paying blue-collar jobs in mill towns for white men. Blacks were relegated to cleaning up or busting open cotton bales in dust-choked outer rooms. At some plants, whites clung to segregated lunchrooms until the late 1960s.

“There weren’t many industries that were so blatantly discriminatory,” said University of Chicago researcher James J. Heckman.

In 1964, the lock of white males on mill jobs gave way, a breakthrough Heckman and others link in part to federal government pressures, including temporary suspension of some U.S. fabric contracts. Three-fifths of new hires at North Carolina textile mills between 1964 and 1965 were black, according to a federal analysis.

Today, minorities and women have garnered a majority of the Carolina textile jobs. White men retain only about one-third of such work, far below the steady 60% in previous decades.

The new opportunities for blacks have stoked simmering resentment among whites in the Carolina textile belt, a bellwether of the current backlash against affirmative action. Five years ago, North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms won a tight race against a black opponent, armed with a TV ad that showed white hands crumpling a rejection slip as a voice intoned, “You needed that job . . . you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota.”

The anti-affirmative action anger resonates in small towns such as Greenwood, a sleepy manufacturing hub in the forested hills west of Columbia, S.C.

Veteran mill mechanic Ken Riddle, like many blue-collar workers, thinks affirmative action has gone too far, often helping the less qualified. He is now heavily outnumbered by minorities at the nylon plant where he has spent 31 years. “They say there’s not a quota,” he said, but “everybody but white males” seems to be getting ahead.

Rick Smith, who runs diversity workshops for new hires at the Sara Lee plant, says: “It comes up all the time. White people say: ‘They use this affirmative action to give jobs to other people.’ ”

But minorities, like Greenwood resident Angel Fox, note the complexion of management ranks at most mills remains overwhelmingly white, while the production workers are black.

Affirmative action is one of the few agents spurring change, she said, because minorities fear that speaking up will cost them their jobs. “People are just not going to say too much,” said Fox, who is black. “If you make a big issue, you’ll be out the door.”

Economic forces have helped pull the textile mills toward change as well. Unemployment is down. Other manufacturers have flocked to the area in search of low-cost skilled labor, opening opportunities for minorities. Also, high-tech machinery has simplified production tasks, reducing the value of older, more experienced textile operators. “Automation has allowed us to hire anyone,” said Sara Lee production leader Dexter Kennedy.

Some white workers in Greenwood believe affirmative action is not what is blocking their advancement. Gary McDaniel blames foreign competition for the loss of his job and home. The mill where he used to work shut down, saying it could no longer compete with low-cost imported fabric. He now has a lower-paying job overseeing the irrigation of a golf course. White co-workers at the old plant, McDaniel said, saw their real economic enemy as cheap foreign labor, a factor in the loss of about 100,000 Carolina textile jobs in the last 20 years.

“They’re angry at the government [for] all this cloth from overseas,” he said.

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The Change

White men have lost the most in better-paying white-and blue-collar occupations:

TECHNICAL JOBS

1960: 81%

1990: 51%

ADMINISTRATIVE JOBS

1960: 88%

1990: 54%

Sources: U.S. Census Public Use Microdate Sample, 1980 and 1990 (full-time workers)

LATINOS

From his perch on the sixth floor of Westwood’s mammoth Federal Building, home of more than a dozen government agencies, Ramon Silva gets a clear snapshot of who has benefited from affirmative action--and who has not. Beyond his desk at the Department of Veterans Affairs, hundreds of workers process claims under rows of fluorescent lights.

It is a sea of black faces.

Most top managerial jobs--including four of five executive VA jobs here, Silva said--are held by whites.

The Latinos? In a county where they are approaching a majority of workers, Silva can count the brown faces on his hands.

Latinos, nationwide data shows, remain the most underrepresented minority in the workplace, save for their unenviable lock on America’s most menial jobs.

In part because of a tidal wave of poorly educated immigrants, Latinos have made the fewest gains in the best and highest-paying jobs since 1960, The Times found. They are nearly 8% of U.S. workers, but make up less than half that percentage of professional jobs.

Rather, Latinos’ biggest gains in three decades have been in semi-skilled, service, or laborer jobs.

Even in government, where affirmative action has been promoted most vigorously, Latinos are represented at only three-fourths their strength in the overall work force, while blacks are nearly twice as concentrated in public jobs as in the overall work force.

California is one of the states where Latino underrepresentation in Civil Service is most acute.

To Silva, a Mexican American from East Los Angeles, affirmative action has been mostly aimed at helping blacks. “They are seen as the real minorities,” said the ex-Marine, who was hired by the VA after his face was sprayed by shrapnel in Vietnam.

Although Mexican Americans have faced long histories of discrimination and segregation, they were once excluded from federal government recruitment drives that focused only on historically black colleges.

Blacks in the building say they broke into federal jobs long before Latinos because many agencies, responding to pressure from black groups and black politicians, opened offices in Watts after the 1965 riots. Keith McQuaid, a black VA employee, recalled that he was promoted by one black manager who said, “We have to take care of our own.” White and Latino managers, McQuaid says, discriminate similarly, but Latinos have the fewest managers in a position to favor their own.

Anthony Rios, a postal worker, said he has gone before a dozen promotion panels during his career, almost all made up exclusively of blacks. “We knew, hey, they are going to pick a black for the job. And that’s how it went,” said Rios, who believes the Postal Service has made recent efforts to improve. Last year, the two Latinos on the U.S. Postal Service’s board complained bitterly that in Los Angeles County, where Latinos outnumber blacks 4 to 1 in the work force, the Postal Service was 62% black and 15% Latino.

Federal officials deny favoritism. They say blacks have learned the government’s hiring policies are among the most fair, so they applied in disproportionate numbers. Federal hiring had slowed to a trickle by the time the Latino population exploded and Latinos began to apply for government jobs in the 1980s, said Jeanette Perkins, a black union representative for Social Security Administration employees in Los Angeles.

Rios and other Latinos acknowledge other stumbling blocks. Latinos, particularly those in California where half are foreign-born, have relatively little political clout. “If we had more politicians campaigning for us, we would get more of the jobs,” said Rose Marie Alfaro, who works with Silva.

Latinos are plagued by low education levels, particularly among the mostly poor immigrants who accounted for much of the 53% spurt in Latinos in the 1980s. In 1993, 61% of U.S. Latinos had finished high school, compared to 83% of blacks.

“You have to look at the readiness of Latinos to take advantage of affirmative action opportunities,” said Theresa Fay-Bustillos, vice president of legal programs at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Some Latino advocacy groups--citing the principles of affirmative action--are pushing federal agencies to cap their hiring of blacks and step up hiring of Latinos.

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The Change

Even in government jobs, Latinos in California have fared poorly while other minority groups, particularly blacks, have done much better.

LATINOS

24% of Calif. work force

Govts.

Local: 16%

State: 14%

Federal: 12%

WHITES

61% of Calif. work force

Govts.

Local: 64%

State: 69%

Federal: 63%

BLACKS

6% of Calif. work force

Govts.

Local: 12%

State: 9%

Federal: 15%

ASIANS

9% of Calif. work force

Govts.

Local: 8%

State: 7%

Federal: 9%

Sources: U.S. Census Public Use Microdate Sample, 1990 (California work force percentage includes full-time, part-time and unemployed workers)

WHITE WOMEN

In a cinder-block phone company service garage outside Denver--the sort of good-paying, blue-collar stronghold that was once wall-to-wall white men--Nancy Davis is a proud, unapologetic product of affirmative action.

Seventeen years ago, the company was scrambling to comply with a court-ordered agreement to open up traditionally male jobs to women. Searching for a new career, Davis landed a position as a phone installation trainee. Just 18 months later, jumping over male colleagues with more experience, she became one of Denver’s first women to manage a phone crew.

“Because of affirmative action, that opportunity was there,” Davis said, juggling phone calls and hurried conferences with members of her team of technicians--17 men and one woman. “If [affirmative action] hadn’t been there, I don’t know how long those doors would have been closed.”

White women like Davis have made some of the greatest strides in the era of affirmative action. Although they remain far from parity with white males in pay and top management positions, The Times analysis shows, they still have risen more rapidly--and spread more evenly--in the American work force than any racial minority group. Their rise was aided by some clear advantages: They were better educated; they tend to be more accepted by white men who dominate decision-making ranks; they have fewer children than minority women.

White women’s strides seem most apparent in boom towns like Denver, which has lured young, two-earner families and college-educated females. Women own more businesses in Denver than any large metropolitan area. And Aurora, the fast-growing suburb where Davis’ crew works, has the nation’s highest ratio of women in the work force--about 7 in 10 are employed.

The successes of white women have led to sometimes bitter competition with minorities. Three years ago minorities revolted against a state plan that would have made it easier for female-owned businesses to be classified as “disadvantaged” firms.

At the phone company--US West--groups recognized by the company lobby for women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Native Americans. Recruitment programs have helped ensure that despite a 1990s downsizing, minority employees still exceed their proportion of the labor force in areas the firm serves. Company officials say they have brought more women and minorities into high-level management than many large companies.

But white women hold the largest share of US West jobs, and numerically are the most overrepresented of any group. They hold about 17% of the 43 high-level executive posts, compared with four minority men--and no minority women.

“There’s women up there, but they are all white,” said Brenda Snyder, a marketing employee who is active in a group called US West Women. System integration manager Marta Crespin, a Latina and 22-year US West employee, adds that affirmative action has not worked as it should for minority women. “White women are tied into the power base [but] we don’t relate very well, or look like anybody” at the top, she said.

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The Change

White women’s greatest gains were in highest-paying job categories:

ADMINISTRATIVE

1960: 9%

1990: 33%

PROFESSIONAL

1960: 22%

1990: 34%

TECHNICAL

1960: 14%

1990: 30%

Sources: U.S. Census Public Use Microdate Sample, 1980 and 1990 (full-time workers)

BLACKS

It is at cocktail parties for Boston bankers that Tom Schumpert notices it. As an African American, he is pleasantly reminded that, unlike before, there are a significant number of blacks in the room.

Then he is stunned that almost all of them are women. Nationwide, there are nearly three times as many black female bank employees as there are male ones.

It is, Schumpert and others say, one indicator from inside the gleaming skyscrapers of Boston’s financial district that affirmative action may have had wildly disparate effects--even among blacks.

“You could see it happening,” said former Shawmut Bank Senior Vice President Bill Fuller, a tall black man with a graying mustache, staring out his office window onto a commanding view of Boston Harbor. At rival BayBank Boston, three of five black managers and professionals are women.

“Black women are doing better than black men. They aren’t excluded to the same extent as black men,” said a diversity consultant who works with Boston banks, adding that the loss of higher-paying blue-collar jobs for black men and plummeting marriage rates have been powerful motivators pushing black women into the work force.

In 1960, most blacks who had risen to become managers or professional workers were men. Today, black professional women outpace black professional men nearly 2 to 1, records show, and have made among the greatest strides of any nonwhite minority group. In Boston, nearly 7 of 10 black professionals are women.

Affirmative action has helped blacks--regardless of their gender--in corporate America. Ann Taylor was raised by her father in Harlem, went to Cornell University on minority education loans, and was recruited to several banks, often as the only black person in her department. “I’m a bright person,” said the U.S. Trust Co. Boston research analyst. “But affirmative action opened doors.”

But black bankers emphasize that affirmative action opened those doors a crack wider for black women. “Some companies think that with women they get a black and a female. They can count twice,” Fuller said. Bank of Boston Urban Banking President Gail Snowden, who is black, said: “There are some black men who feel they are passed over for black women.” Some resentful black male colleagues during her career have told her she should give up the race to the executive suite and let a black man rise instead.

Bankers caution that other, more fundamental issues have also tipped the scales. According to the U.S. Justice Department, 1 in 4 black men in their 20s is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. Many others opt for military careers typically less available to black women. “It’s open season on black men,” said BayBank Boston Regional President Grady Hedgespeth, who is black, adding that the disproportionate absence of fathers in black homes hits their sons hardest. Half his black male childhood friends, he said, are either dead or in jail.

The cumulative toll registers on college campuses, where 61% of blacks are women. “Black men are getting derailed early on. It’s that simple,” said Ella L. J. Edmondson Bell, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and a contributor to this year’s federal Glass Ceiling Commission report.

White men in charge of hiring and promotion prefer to work with black women, diversity consultants say, posing another hurdle to black men. “Black females come across as less threatening,” said Fuller.

At diversity training seminars, Fuller has had fellow managers confess that they think of black men as threatening, violent, unmotivated and ignorant. Fuller acknowledges that a barrage of daily slights--from people locking their car doors when he walks by to shopkeepers assuming he may be a shoplifter--make him and other black men guarded, which can be interpreted as hostile.

But many black bankers believe the biggest drive to diversify--past and future--will be spurred by something with a lot more teeth than affirmative action: the Community Reinvestment Act, a federal law that requires banks to lend and invest “adequately” in low-income areas. Beefed-up enforcement of the act since 1989, which threatened to put many money-making bank mergers on hold, has spurred firms to expand services in the inner city. In 1989, BayBank Boston had automated tellers liberally scattered throughout Boston’s suburbs but no branches in black neighborhoods. Today, its seven branches and 33 ATMs in those areas are staffed mostly by blacks.

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The Change

In general, blacks gained most in administrative, semi-skilled, technical and clerical work between 1960 and 1990, and have seen their overrepresentation in laborer and service jobs diminish. But black women have done much better, particularly in higher-paying jobs.

PROFESSIONAL JOBS

1960

Black men: 1.4%

Black women: 1.2%

1990

Black men: 2.8%

Black women: 4.2%

ADMINISTRATIVE JOBS

1960

Black men: 1.5%

Black women: less than 1%

1990

Black men: 2.9%

Black women: 3.1%

Sources: U.S. Census Public Use Microdate Sample, 1980 and 1990 (full-time workers)

ASIANS

Taking a break from his computer screen at Intel Corp.’s Silicon Valley headquarters, Hong Ang described his pathway to his profession, one typical of the many Asians who have excelled in the fields of science and engineering in the past three decades.

Journeying to the United States from Singapore in 1981 to study computer engineering, he graduated from USC with a master’s degree. Hong was snatched up by a high-tech firm, which sponsored him to live permanently in the United States under a Cold War-era program designed to combat shortages in technology expertise.

Today, he is part of the vaunted team of Intel engineers that has helped the firm dominate the personal computer microprocessor market. Through it all, Hong doesn’t believe affirmative action has helped his career. “I cannot relate to [it] too much. It doesn’t mean anything to me personally. The culture here is very meritocracy-based.”

If anything, in the Silicon Valley, where Asians hold nearly 1 of 3 computer industry jobs, 50% more than their share of the San Jose-area work force, firms feel compelled to reach out beyond Asians and hire other minorities. The result: some Asians see affirmative action more as a hindrance than a help.

Unlike women and other minorities, Asian engineers like Hong are not considered “underrepresented” at Intel. In the long warrens of cubicles where technical wizards devise ever-faster computer chips, in every few workstations is a Chou, a Liou or a Patel--many immigrants from China, Taiwan or India.

Intel has dozens of programs aimed at expanding the pool of minority applicants--from funding minority engineering conferences and scholarships, to recruiting black, Latino and female engineering interns. Among new college graduates, the firm hires more black, Latino and other underrepresented minorities than the share of those groups receiving engineering degrees. Therein lies the problem, said Intel: too few of these groups are graduating people with the needed expertise.

Asians--two-thirds of whom are immigrants--often link their success in the professions to relatively high levels of education and a strong work ethic. Among male professionals, records show, average earnings for Asians in 1990 were 10% more than for whites.

Although Asians remain underrepresented in top management, their advancement has given critics ammunition to argue that minorities do not need special consideration.

Indeed many Asians say their opportunities came more as a result of another 1960s legislative landmark--immigration reforms which dropped a long bias against Asians and Latinos and gave preference to those with science and technology skills. Asians, less than 10% of the U.S. immigrants in the 1950s, leaped to 37% in the 1980s, many of them foreign science and engineering students who stayed in the United States.

For some, the growth of Asians in high-tech fields underscores the need for affirmative steps to break old patterns of recruitment and networking by groups already in the door. Jahi Awakoaiye, a black Intel engineer, said other minorities have an equal shot “if you go to the right school.” But firms like his recruit heavily at top engineering schools that “traditionally don’t have significant numbers of African Americans” and overlook qualified minority candidates at less prestigious schools, he said.

Even gains by Asian Americans in the high-tech industry have been decidedly uneven. Workers of Filipino and Vietnamese ancestry are concentrated in lower-paying jobs; those of Japanese and Chinese ancestry in engineering and computer design. And despite their large numbers in professional ranks, few Asians have reached upper management at large high-tech firms. “It’s sort of like black football players,” said researcher Lenny Siegel, who studies Silicon Valley. “[Asians] are perceived to be good players, but you don’t put them in charge of the team.”

In the high-tech industry and beyond, some argue that affirmative action is needed to help Asians, especially recent immigrants, gain access to firms and occupations where they are inadequately represented.

“Some Asians buy into this misconception that affirmative action is only for unqualified persons,” said Henry Der of Chinese for Affirmative Action, a Bay Area activist group that helps place Asians with employers. “What they miss is that there is a need for some race-consciousness. . . . Employers would not make these larger, aggressive recruitment efforts if it were not for affirmative action.”

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The Change

Asians, who make up 3% of the national work force, have fared better than other nonwhites, and in some job categories have surpassed white males:

OCCUPATIONAL SHARE

2.8% of nat’l work force

Administrative: 3%

Professional: 4%

Technical: 4%

ASIAN MALE INCOME

as % of white male income

Administrative: 91%

Professional: 110%

Technical: 102%

Sources: U.S. Census Public Use Microdate Sample, 1990

Times librarian Janet Lundblad and editorial researcher Tracy Thomas contributed to this report.

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About this Series

* In this series: The Times examines affirmative action, a policy that has left its imprint on the workplace and college campuses over the last 30 years. With some now questioning whether giving preferences to minorities has been fair to all, this series, which will appear periodically throughout 1995, will measure its impact on American institutions, ideas and attitudes.

* Previously: Why affirmative action became an issue in 1995, its legal underpinnings, its impact on presidential politics, the difficulties of defining a minority, the views of its beneficiaries, a Times poll showing ambivalent attitudes on the issue, how informal preferences have molded American life, the mind at work in racial stereotyping, the evolution of diversity programs in the workplace, affirmative action in sports and recruiting minorities.

TODAY: Affirmative action has cut an uneven swath across America’s workplaces, benefitting some groups much more than others.

MONDAY: Attacked from all sides, affirmative action contracting programs in California fail to deliver on promises of giving women and minorities significant shares of public business.

TUESDAY: Forces more powerful than affirmative action have helped relegate many minorities to lower paying jobs in small and large businesses throughout California.

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Retrospective

Key dates in the history of affirmative action:

1960s

1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs Civil Rights Act, barring discrimination in the workplace.

1965: Johnson issues executive order setting up enforcement of minority hiring guidelines.

1970s

1970: President Richard M. Nixon imposes the most explicit quota plan to date, requiring contractors receiving federal money to set timetables and goals for minority employment.

1972: Congress passes Equal Employment Opportunity Act, allowing civil lawsuits against companies with discriminatory practices.

1978: In Allan Bakke case, Supreme Court rules that colleges may consider race as one factor in admissions policies but cannot set aside fixed number of places for minorities.

1980s

1980: High court upholds practice of setting aside 10% of federal public works contracts for minority-owned businesses.

1985: Ronald Reagan Administration begins campaign to weaken Johnson’ affirmative action order.

1986: Supreme Court finds unconstitutional an affirmative action program requiring layoffs of senior white teachers to protect jobs of newly hired blacks.

1989: Supreme Court strikes down set-aside program in Richmond, Va., citing lack of specific evidence of past bias.

1990s

1990: Supreme Court upholds racial preferences for minority broadcasters.

1995: President Clinton orders review of federal affirmative action policies; Supreme Court limits affirmative-action efforts to a stricter standard of constitutionality; UC system affirmative action policies disbanded.

Compiled by CHRIS ERSKINE / Los Angeles Times

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Job Gains and Losses Across America

From the textile belt of the Carolinas, to banks in Boston’s financial district, to federal government offices in Los Angeles, affirmative action has affected its intended beneficiaries unevenly. White women have done best, Latinos have lagged most, and black women have surged past black men in capturing administrative and professional jobs. These trends, while evident nationwide, come into sharpest relief in certain parts of the country. These places and people represent the changes:

Silicon Valley, Calif.

Asians have done the best among non-white minority groups; proportionally, they are now overrepresented in professional and technical jobs, and have attained full representation in management jobs that minorities have found hardest to land. In the Silicon Valley, Asians comprise more than 30% of high-tech industry workers, 50% more than their numbers in the San Jose-area work force.

****

Westwood

Even in government, where affirmative action has been promoted most vigorously, Latinos are represented at only three-fourths their strength in the overall work force, but blacks have become heavily concentrated, seizing nearly twice their proportion of public jobs. Among the states where Latino underrepresentation in civil service is most acute is California--and inside the federal building in Westwood.

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Denver

White women have made some of the greatest strides in the era of affirmative action. Those gains are most apparent in boom towns such as Denver, which has lured young, two-earner families and college-educated females. Here, women own more businesses than in any large metropolitan area, and in the city’s phone company, white women now hold the largest share of jobs.

****

Boston

Black women have surged past black men in capturing administrative and professional jobs. That overrepresentation of women relative to men in higher-paying occupations is most evident in the Southeast and Northeast. In Boston, nearly 7 of 10 black professionals are women.

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Greenwood, S.C.

In Carolina textile mills, among the most discriminatory industries in the 1960s, most workers are now minorities or women; white men retain just one-third of all jobs. Swift racial and gender changes in the textile work force helped make this area a bellweather of the current backlash against affirmative action by white men.

Source: Los Angeles Times

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Affirmative Action at Work

One strong indicator that affirmative action has had an impact: Whites have lost job share in private companies whose work forces are monitored by the federal government and in public jobs where affirmative action has been most vigorously promoted. In contrast, blacks have increased their percentage in such jobs. The proportion of Latinos and Asians in monitored jobs roughly matches their representation in the overall work force. Here is how they stand:

Whites

Overall work force: 79.6%

Private industry*: 76.7%

Government: 71.4%

Blacks

Overall work force: 9.7%

Private industry*: 12.6%

Government: 18.9%

Latinos

Overall work force: 7.2%

Private industry*: 7.2%

Government: 6.8%

Asians

Overall work force: 2.8%

Private industry*: 3.1%

Government: 2.3%

* Includes only private companies that must report their work force composition to the federal government.

Source: U.S. Census 1993 Current Population Survey; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Compiled by Richard O’Reilly, director of computer analysis, Los Angeles Times.

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Three Decades of Changes

WHITE MEN

* 47.7% of the work force

White men have lost the most ground since affirmative action began in the 1960s, particularly in technical, administrative, and semi-skilled work--and in government jobs. Still, white men remained overrepresented in these areas, particularly in skilled jobs, where they retained 77% of all positions. White men have held their lock on certain jobs: carpenters (84%), airplane pilots (93%), mechanical engineers (85%) and dentists (82%).

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WHITE WOMEN

* 31.9% of the work force

White women have gained most in the best-paying occupations: professional, administrative and technical jobs. But they lag in male-dominated skilled jobs and as laborers. Their proportion of jobs has surged in traditionally female-dominated fields. At least four of five occupational therapists and secretaries are white women, as are about three of four kindergarten teachers and nurses. Nine of 10 dental hygienists are white women.

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LATINO MEN

* 4.6% of the work force

While there are great differences between more well-to-do Cubans and poorer Mexican-Americans or Puerto Ricans, the biggest gains among Latino men overall have been in lower-paying menial jobs. They held 11% of laborer’s jobs in 1990--up from 2% three decades earlier. Latino men remain most underrepresented in professional jobs. Few are lawyers and teachers, but more than one in five of the nation’s waiters, farm workers and gardeners are Latino men.

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LATINO WOMEN

* 2.6% of the work force

Latino women have fared the worst in gaining proportional representation in the nation’s top occupations and are most underrepresented among professionals. Their greatest gains have come in service, clerical and semi-skilled work, where they grew from 1% of the work force in 1960 to 5% by 1993. Latinas are most overrepresented among service workers. They hold 32% of household cleaning jobs. About one in 10 jobs as sewing machine operators and packaging machine operators are held by Latinas.

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BLACK MEN

* 4.8% of the work force

Black men made their greatest progress in technical, sales and skilled jobs. Among the more high-paying occupations, black men are equally represented only in technical jobs. They are least represented in sales and professional work. But they are overrepresented among laborers, holding about 12% of the jobs. Black men make up 32% of garbage collectors, 22% of bus drivers, 17% of private security guards and 23% of parking lot attendants.

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BLACK WOMEN

* 4.9% of the work force

Black women made their strongest gains in capturing clerical jobs, going from 2% of these jobs in 1960 to 9% in 1990. But black women went from holding 1% of professional and technical jobs in 1960 to 5% in 1993. Black women now hold more than two times their share of clerical and service jobs. Only one out 100 physicians is a black woman. But one of six social workers and teachers aides is a black women, and at least one in four household cleaners, nursing aides and hospital orderlies is a black woman.

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ASIAN MEN

* 1.6% of the work force

Asian men have become heavily overrepresented in technical and professional work, where they hold nearly twice their share of jobs and are more overrepresented than white men. They are 7% of aerospace and civil engineers. Such gains, however, vary widely from one Asian group to the next: Japanese-Americans have done best, while many Vietnamese and Thai workers.

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ASIAN WOMEN

* 1.2% of the work force

Asian women are most overrepresented in technical and clerical fields, making up 4.5% of clinical laboratory technicians. Among all women, Asians fared best in their proportion of professional and technical jobs, making up 2.7% of physicians. Many remain locked in low-end jobs. About 6.5% of garment industry machine operators are Asian women.

Source: U.S. Census Public Use Microdata Sample, 1960 and 1990; U.S. Census Current Population Survey, 1993 (full-time workers)

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

How This Series Was Prepared

In three decades of affirmative action, a multitude of voluntary and mandatory programs have arisen in America’s private and public workplaces. But there is no uniform system to keep track of these programs or to measure their effect on the hiring, training and promotion of women and minorities. Although large employers are required to report the composition of their work forces to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency does not even ask whether these workplaces have formal or informal affirmative action programs.

To assess the impact of affirmative action for this series, The Times:

* Measured changes in the employment, occupations and salaries of women and minorities in the United States since 1960, using computerized data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the National Archives and the EEOC.

* Studied additional EEOC reports from UCLA’s Maps and Government Information Library, scholarly studies from other major universities and congressional reports from the Library of Congress.

* Using detailed questionnaires, interviewed officials of more than 130 small and large businesses throughout the country to determine whether they have affirmative action programs and why they do or do not.

* Visited selected workplaces throughout California and the nation to interview workers, employers and others whose lives have been affected directly or indirectly by programs designed to diversify work forces.

* Analyzed state and local government reports, tapes of hearings and computerized data regarding programs for encouraging participation of minorities and women in billions of dollars of public contracts in California.

COMPUTER ANALYSIS:

* Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, and data analyst Sandra Poindexter wrote more than 200 programs to generate more than 3,000 pages of information on job and earning trends.

* The computerized census data included individual records of more than 5.1 million people in samples drawn from the 1960, 1980 and 1990 censuses and from the annual current population surveys taken in 1993 and 1994.

* Other important data came from annual reports filed with the EEOC by more than 483,000 private employers and 62,000 state and local governments in 1983, 1984, 1987, 1988 and 1993.