a person's physical skills are an important part of the job, such as heavy machinery, hiring a less qualified person could cause safety issues as well. Would you want someone working a crane around you if they barely passed the test for operations? From an administrative standpoint the management may also feel a negative attitude toward being forced to hire someone who they know doesn't fit the job, but some sort of government program is telling them too. This could cause internal conflict at even the management level toward the workers. Contract work between the government and contractors is another area that was targeted by the Affirmative Action programs. The same type of safety issues are the first concerns that come to mind when you think of the government hiring potentially less qualified contractors to do work for them. The upside to this part of the plan is it helps to break away from some of the political ties that some contractors have had in the past. It gives some of the smaller companies a chance to prove themselves. Education is another area of Affirmative Action that has had its criticisms. The admittance of a student for educational purposes without having to meet the same requirements as the whole seems to me to be a bit discriminative in nature. A popular case that has occurred in our history was that of the University of California vs. Bakke (1978). In this case the University had reserved 16 of its 100 openings for minorities. The other 64 slots had already been filled, because Bakke was not a minority, his admittance was denied, even though he was more qualified than his minority competitors. The admittance of a student to a University or any other college program without having to score as high as the general population on the entrance exams is another form of Affirmative Action discrimination. At Ivy League colleges the median GPA of applicants is close to a 4.0 and SAT scores are close to 1300. The minorities th...
