Creating Victims to Compensate Victims

Corporate America is creating victims among its employees. Certainly, there have been and continue to be gross injustices--worker exploitation, sexual harassment, racial discrimination. But it seems a new twist for corporations to systematically label an entire class of people as victims.

A prime example of this trend is Texaco’s move to provide an across-the-board 10% raise to all salaried African Americans in its employ, as a part of the settlement of a discrimination lawsuit. Perhaps the organization systematically surveyed salaries and indeed discovered that all blacks consistently receive less compensation than other groups. If so, fine. If not, I can only hope that other corporations with similar diversity problems think carefully before copying Texaco’s remedy.

Perhaps the plan that CEO Peter Bijur outlined seemed like the right thing for the moment. Perhaps, in the short run, it did accomplish the job of making black employees feel as if the wrongs many have no doubt suffered were being dealt with swiftly and surely. But what about the long run?

Did Texaco give any thought to the real consequences of such a patronizing move? Did anyone stop to think that there may be many recipients of that raise who never personally felt discrimination but now find themselves lumped together into an amorphous mass--all individuality lost--with those who were victimized?

Then there’s backlash: from Texaco managers and colleagues who are forced to participate in a collective guilt of discrimination in which they hold little if any responsibility, backlash from those who want to know why “they” get a raise and I don’t and, tragically, backlash from the inevitable few who will grasp any excuse to scapegoat others for their own misfortunes.

And what will this settlement do to the perception that has long plagued affirmative action programs that preferential treatment is given solely on the basis of race? Appearances are, after all, all-important. Affirmative action programs are losing support largely because of the impression--most often untrue--that they lower standards.

My heart goes out to black employees who now have to wonder if nonblacks in the organization are looking at them with resentment and, most important, no longer see them as valued and trusted individuals but merely members of a group that is receiving what appears to be preferential treatment.

And where does this indiscriminate compensation leave the real victims? Does this mass remedy not detract from the public respect for and recognition of the trauma that they experienced as individuals? Equal opportunity is about individual fairness, achievement, ability and the elimination of individual victimization. We in the diversity field preached for years that we need to treat each woman, each man, each Latino, each Asian-Pacific Islander, each Native American and each African American as an individual, not as a member of a group. Such collective labeling is, in fact, the very essence of discrimination.

Texaco and its chairman’s reaction was an honorable one. It was, however, tinged with fear and thus not entirely well-considered. Diversity and anti-discrimination measures need to be propelled not by fear, but by honest compassion, a passion for individual achievement and equality and a genuine desire to treat each individual employee with the respect he or she deserves.