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- Title
Retroactive Seniority and Agency Retrenchment.
- Authors
Schachter, Hindy Lauer
- Abstract
This article examines the use of retroactive seniority in the decision to lay-off government employees. In the 1980s cutback management will dominate governmental agendas. State civil service laws and union contracts often mandate reverse seniority as the sole criterion for determining layoffs. One way to offset this erosion is to hedge the use of seniority with some variant on quota system where the percentage of minorities or females fired is not allowed to exceed the percentage of minorities in a given position. If 5% of budget analysts are black, then blacks should comprise--at most--5% of those fired. The agency substitutes whites with greater seniority for blacks after the 5 percent level is reached. A very different approach is to use retroactive seniority as a way to relieve individual victims of past discrimination. The reason that straight-statute seniority plays havoc with minorities and women is that until recently they were barred from many agency positions either explicitly or through the use of de facto discriminatory selection procedures.
- Subjects
CIVIL service; MANAGEMENT; CONTRACTS; MINORITIES; FEMALES; BUDGET analysts; DISCRIMINATION (Sociology); WOMEN
- Publication
Public Administration Review, 1983, Vol 43, Issue 1, p77
- ISSN
0033-3352
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/975303