unrealistic. An analogy would be a company that enjoys good profits each year and recruits from one particular university or seeks management trainees who are at least six feet tall. It would be difficult to explain why this organization would automatically lose money if it broadened its recruiting criteria. Personnel psychologists have devised excellent indicators of a person's motivation and potential, which I am sure are more relevant than homeownership and many of the other criteria used. The successes of many minority persons in the face of severe limitations should indicate the untapped potential in this group. Changing selection and screening methods should not jeopardize the franchisor's business. The advantages of a franchised enterprise previously cited give the franchisor the edge as opposed to other types of independent, small businesses. A major reason for so few mortalities in franchises is the very support given by the franchising company to insure the security of its source of income. The definition of franchise includes "... assistance in organizing, training, merchandising, and management." Another relevant aspect of selection is the means employed by the franchisor in recruiting for franchisees. Active recruiting of minorites must involve advertising in those areas and among those organizations which will reach blacks and other minorities. Franchisors should inform such sources as the Urban League, the Interracial Council for Business Opportunity, the Office of Minority Business Enterprise, and the black and ethnic news media. The franchisor with a good product will continue to enjoy his share of the market and even increase his profits by expanding recruitment efforts with the goal of granting new franchises in several new locations. Therefore, parent companies will not only reap intangible rewards by giving their time and personal resources to the cause for equal opportunity, but also tangible benefits-profits. Companies are willing to trade off one desirable personal characteristic for another when hiring employees, whether it be experience for demonstrated potential or vice versa. Why then shouldn't special consideration be given to the disadvantaged who have potential as established by objective measuring techniques? This also applies to the financial requirements for the otherwise "qualified" franchisee. A special fund should be set up by franchising companies with the aim to bring minority people on board (and not in token numbers). As to the acceptability of differential treatment, the Federal Government, along with many States and cities, is providing resources for the purpose of extending help to those who most need it. The President and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have implemented programs which use the taxpayers' dollars for Model Cities. Further, Congress approves tax incentives, such as rapid write-offs, for defense industries. Consequently, we have ample precedence for franchisors to follow. According to the Service Bulletin, National Better Business Bureau, Inc., May 1968, "In some franchise fields, contracts with franchisees are not uniform within an area; one operator may pay more than another for the same services". On this basis it is acceptable to negotiate different financial arrangements, depending on the relationship. It also might be worth mentioning that the franchisor is not the only one taking a chance or risk, no matter how large or small. The franchisee, particularly a minority person, has everything at stake. If he is able to put up capital, he more than likely risks losing all tangible assets, and in any case, he is risking his chance at a life-long dream for a good and financially secure life, in all probability his last chance. The franchisee is the one who works the long hard hours and then when profits are realized, the franchisor must get his share, sometimes half. This is not to say that this arrangement is unfair, both parties obviously benefit, but I do submit that the franchisor is in a better position to take chances. He has the finances to move forward and assist minorities in achieving a better future. The University of Minnesota study on the popularity of franchises also revealed that there appears to be a strong drive in most men to accomplish something of significance during their lifetime. Both franchisor and franchisee would be satisfying this desire by "having a business of his own". There is no doubt that the black person and other minorities want a share in this American ideal of being self-employed, self-sustaining. It would definitely be an accomplishment to own and operate an establishment of one's own when previously there was, for some, little hope of a decent job, little hope for self-respect, and the respect of one's peers. For the sake of the future of the economy of this country and all of its peoples, it is time for the affluent to share the wealth. PHILIP HARRIS Mr. Harris is Associate Professor of Management at The Bernard M. Baruch College of The City University of New York. GENUINE EQUALITY of opportunity in Federal employment is a recent development and still requires vigorous implementation to make it a reality. The employment practices of the Federal Government have evolved gradually from positive discrimination to active commitment to equal opportunity. Samuel Krislov (The Negro in Federal Employment: The Quest for Equal Opportunity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967) points out that when the Federal Government was established it was simply taken for granted that employment was limited to whites, and in the 1820's Congress made this principle explicit by specifically prohibiting the employment of Negroes in the Post Office. Even after the Civil War, rigid discrimination was the order of the day in all significant positions. Only rarely, on a token basis, were Negroes appointed; and even then, their assignments were largely limited to the District of Columbia or to diplomatic assignments in Haiti, Liberia, and Santo Domingo. As Krislov says, Frederick Douglass, the most prominent Negro of the day, for example, "was made marshall of the District of Columbia by President Hayes and appointed to other honorific posts by later Republican presidents." The establishment of the classified Civil Service in 1883 opened the doors a little wider, but it was not until the passage of the Ramspeck Act and the accompanying Executive order of November 7, 1940, that racial discrimination became officially illegal in Federal employment and promotion policies. Even with the pressure of wartime manpower needs, however, progress remained slow. It was not until the middle 1950's, for example, that enforcement efforts were institutionalized through the creation of deputy equal employment officers who were assigned to "receive, interpret, and adjudge compliance" with the equal employment pro gram. The pace of progress has accelerated in the 1960's, and the Federal Government has departed from a policy of responding to specific complaints of discrimination to one of a positive attempt to identify and correct problems before they reach the formal complaint status. Equal Opportunity and the If minority group members were equal in all respects except employment, and if all those competing under the merit system really started from an equal beginning, there would be no problem. But everyone does not start equally; some, especially blacks from inner-city ghettos, start under a series of handicaps. Many begin with the handicaps of limited education, limited experience, low motivation, and poor work habits which have placed them in the unemployable category. Others may have completed their formal education at least through high school and perhaps even college; and yet, because of the inadequacy of their schools may find themselves at a distinct disadvantage in competing with their suburban counterparts. Krislov notes that the current civil rights movement affects the merit system in two ways. In the first place, the emphasis on the elimination of artificial barriers and the insistence on reexamination of job requirements strengthens the merit system. The second aspect, the call for "compensatory employment" or "reverse discrimination," is more troublesome. Krislov rejects the ideas as unworkable because "the claim is insufficiently self-contained and self-defining to be satisfied without continuous social strife. The remedy is worse than the disease." Charles Silberman (Crisis in Black and White, New York: Vintage Books, 1969) however, contends that preferential treatment and even "reverse quotas" are essential, and a mere formal policy of nondiscrimination is inadequate. The object is not compensation... it is to overcome the tendencies to exclude the Negro which are built into the very marrow of American society. . . . A formal policy of non-discrimination, of employing people "regardless of race, color, creed," however estimable, usually works out in practice to be a policy of employing whites only. Hence Negroes' demand for quotas represents a necessary tactic, an attempt to fix the responsibility for increasing employment of Negroes on those who do the hiring. Not to use numbers as a yardstick for measuring performance is, in effect, to revert to "tokenism." The point is not whether there is some "right" number of Negroes to be employed-obviously there is not -but simply that there is no meaningful measure of change other than numbers. Initial efforts to open up job opportunities for minority group members concentrated on attempts to hire well-qualified blacks, especially in a few conspicuous positions. But recently the Civil Service Commission has recognized that in order to make a significant break-through, it must develop programs to reach those who have previously been regarded as unemployable because of limited education and lack of experience. It has also recognized that it can no longer simply announce that jobs are available on an equal opportunity basis and expect blacks to respond. In fact, because of competion from private industry, even strong recruiting programs and improvement of personnel policies to eliminate overt discrimination are not providing an adequate supply of qualified black applicants. It has become necessary, therefore, to develop methods for recruiting minority and other disadvantaged persons who are not presently qualified and provide the necessary training to make them employable. On the basis of this realization, a two-pronged approach to the problems of employing the disadvantaged has emerged. One prong has been the development of various job training programs related to the war on poverty. Among the most important of the pre-employment programs are the Job Corps, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, and the New Careers Program. The other side of the picture, and by far the more difficult one, is the necessity to provide jobs for those who have received training. One means of expanding job opportunities has been the emphasis on redesigning jobs to eliminate routine, lower-level duties from middle- and high-level jobs and collecting these duties in new groupings to open new job opportunities for the disadvantaged. This effort to obtain maximum utilization of the skills and training (MUST) of employees is applied by redesigning entry-level positions to permit hiring people of lower skill levels who have a potential for learning. But even when new employment opportunities for the disadvantaged are developed it is still necessary to devise methods by which they can be placed on the job. In normal open competitive examination, the disadvantaged are likely to be too far down the Civil Service Register to be available for employment. The MUST program, however, creates entry-level jobs that can be successfully filled by a person with limited education or experience. These jobs may involve work that is hard, dirty, and unpleasant such as working in a laundry, loading and unloading heavy loads, shoveling snow, etc.; and, therefore, these jobs are not very appealing to a person who is qualified for some higher position. In order to prevent the register from being cluttered with overqualified applicants and open opportunities for unskilled persons who need a job and are willing to work at almost anything, the Civil Service Commission has developed a new method of rating applicants for Maintenance and Service Worker positions and for certain clerical positions. The plan screens out those who are overqualified and creates a special Worker-Trainee register for those who are unskilled but who rate high on willingness to work, reliability, ability to follow instructions, and ability to perform hard labor. Even those blacks who have obtained college degrees often find themselves screened out of the Federal service. In 1967, for example, a survey of 191 colleges and universities showed that 71.7 percent of those taking the Federal Service Entrance Examination passed it. But only 29.6 percent of the students at predominantly black colleges passed the exam. Some efforts are being made to eliminate these barriers which block out so many black college graduates. The Ford Foundation has funded a study of possible cultural bias in the FSEE which will probably result in some improvement of this particular entranceway into the Federal service. And a new experimental program permits recent college graduates with a grade point average of 3.5 in all undergraduate courses or who rank in the top 10 percent of their class to qualify for grade GS-5 without taking the FSEE. But the impact has been slight and appointments constitute fewer than 1 percent of FSEE placement. The elimination of cultural bias and the development of greater flexibility in the FSEE in order to reach truly qualified people can be reconciled with the merit principle without difficulty. But the problem of reaching those previously considered unemployable is more difficult because it forces managers to try to reconcile the goal of equal opportunity with the goal of efficient and effective implementa tion of their substantive programs. Even so, this program is not as much of a departure from merit principles as it may seem at first. The development of the MUST concept provides job opportunities which are not only available to unskilled, inexperienced workers, but which are too simple and therefore unattractive to those with greater qualifications. Therefore, the use of the "Worker-Trainee" designation to limit these jobs to persons with limited education and experience represents a genuine effort to match the right person with the right job and is in keeping with experience in private industry which has indicated that employee dissatisfaction and high turnover rates occur when only qualified applicants are placed in routine, low-skill positions. In fact, the most significant feature of this effort is that, instead of treating merit as a static concept which judges an individual by rigid standards of education and experience, there is now an opportunity to develop a dynamic concept of merit in which motivation and dependability and the intangible quality of potential create a more flexible and more humane standard of judgment. Implementation and The successful implementation of the program of equal employment opportunity and the development of a program to provide points of entry for the previously unemployable require the spinning of an intricate web of communication both inside and outside the Federal Government. An effective communication requires more than just transmission of ideas-a real effort must be made to insure that the recipients of these ideas will be receptive. Merely sending out announcements on job opportunities or posting notices of the requirements for eliminating discrimination for recruiting and promotion will largely be meaningless unless those who read them believe them. Writing in the somewhat different context of communication between labor and management, William H. Whyte, Jr. (Is Anybody Listening?, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952) noted that: Only with trust can there be any real communication, and until that trust is achieved the techniques and gadgetry of communications are so much wasted effort. Study after study has pointed out the same moral: before employees will accept management "facts" they must first have overall confidence in the motives and sincerity of management. The first major block to effective communication between Federal agencies and the disadvantaged, therefore, is the mistrust and suspicion felt by blacks and members of other minority groups toward all elements of the white establishment. This suspicion may seem almost incomprehensible to many Federal managers who are intimately aware of the efforts now being made within the Federal Government to increase equal opportunity. But the suspicion is there; and as Silberman notes, it is based on experience. Clearly the conditions of life have changed, the opportunities have broadened enormously. Yet just as clearly, the white world is still mined against the Negro. Or is it? One is really never sure, part of the price of being a Negro in |