Word: quota
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Once again, as has happened so often in this disappointing campaign, a complex issue was being oversimplified. "Quota" was being used as a code word implying vast sins against democratic ideals, an arbitrary advancement of the have-nots at the expense of those who have worked for their place in society. McGovern declared flatly that he too was against quotas: "I reject the quota system as detrimental to American society. It is both necessary and possible to open the doors that have long been shut to minority-group members without violating the basic principles of non-discrimination and without abandoning...
...present argument everyone is using the word quota in a pejorative sense: the assignment of a proportion of a group in the population to desirable jobs, offices or political-party positions on the sole basis of some common accident of birth. Used in this fashion, quotas become synonymous with socialization of achievement: awarding jobs, status or other roles without regard to talent or effort...
Thus defined, a rigid quota is a distorted result of the civil rights drive of the 1960s. Then the main motive was to equalize opportunities for blacks, and the movement used as one indicator of progress the proportion of blacks in the previously all-white schools of the South. The movement also led to President Lyndon Johnson's 1965 Executive Order 11246, requiring that no employer holding Government contracts may practice racial or ethnic discrimination in his hiring practices. Two years later, that order was amended to rule out sex discrimination as well...
...women in better positions raises fundamental questions about how groups that have been discriminated against can be helped without doing injustice to those who can hardly be blamed for past unfairness. The fact that a disproportionate number of scholars at major universities are Jews who had to overcome longstanding quotas restricting their opportunities shows the complexities of the problem. Setting new quotas today-for blacks or any group-suggests a return to past discrimination even as it promises new democracy. Understandably, the outcry from Jewish intellectuals has been loud, for some of them worry about a future in which jobs...
...attempt to achieve greater racial equality in the construction industry, the Government has come even closer to the kind of quotas that both Nixon and McGovern seem to deplore. The Labor Department has been insisting that six trade unions in Philadelphia each push the percentage of man-hours worked by blacks up from a previous level of about 4% to 26% by next year. Now, in view of Nixon's new anti-quota stance, department officials announced that the plan was under review. N.A.A.C.P. Labor Director Herbert Hill contends that "for all practical purposes, the day-to-day enforcement...