US retail chains should defend their hiring diversity schemes

livemint.com:

Just a week after the Supreme Court ruling to ban affirmative action in college admissions, Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas urged Target Corp to end efforts to racially diversify its workforce and vendor network. He called the US-based company’s programmes “discriminatory" and threatened “significant and likely costly litigation" should Target fail to change its ways. The step from college admissions to corporate employment is not a big one.

As Noah Feldman wrote, the high court’s conservative justices have made it clear that using race as a factor in hiring decisions isn’t a practice they’ll condone. Whatever side you fall on with this issue, you can’t dispute that retail relies on workers of colour, and attempts by lawmakers to end practices to attract those workers would leave stores even more desperate than they are to find employees while further limiting one of the few career paths available to people of colour. Non-Caucasians make up a disproportionate number of retail workers compared with their size of the US population.

African-Americans alone accounted for more than 12% of the industry’s workforce in 2018, compared with 11% of the total population, while Latinos are almost 19% of retail workers but some 18% of the population, according to a Census report. Occupational segregation in the US begins well before anyone applies for a job. But much of the racial slice-up between professional and service industries stems from lower rates of advanced degrees across communities of colour, which limits job prospects.