Diversity As A Jobs Program

Government becomes an industry when its regulations or legal demands cause job categories to be created out of thin air. If government requires you to file Form #666-69 in order to build a house, there will be several jobs created: the bureaucrats who process the forms, the lawyers who guide you through the process around the invisible obstacles, and the people who fill out the forms for large firms.

Voters rarely understand laws as imposing costs. To them, government makes a rule and then people follow it or are punished. They forget that in addition to the police who have to arrest the violators, many other costs are imposed, as well as delays. People always complain about red tape, but somehow forget that whenever they get scared before an election and vote for the nice person who promises a strong response.

Those strong responses make government a major employer. In America, almost 22 million people are directly employed by the government, and many more are in jobs created by regulations, laws, or the need to manage government agencies or oversight.

Politicians are aware of this and use government as a jobs program. When they roll out a new policy, like the TSA, there will be new hires; when they unleash a federal agency like the FDA, many will be hired in management and legal compliance to adapt to the new rules. When government declares a new policy that requires a workaround to be halfway functional, new millionaires are minted, just like when it moves a facility, someone wins big at real estate.

Perhaps the largest area of job creation however may be ideology itself. Any law which is ideological, or connected to our postwar mission of equality, requires private companies to hire people to administer it. With diversity, large armies of well-paid bureaucrats have been created:

1. The University of Michigan currently employs a diversity staff of nearly 100 (91) full-time diversity administrators, officers, directors, vice-provosts, deans, consultants, specialists, investigators, managers, executive assistants, administrative assistants, analysts, and coordinators.

2. More than one-quarter (26) of these “diversicrats” earn annual salaries of more than $100,000, and the total payroll for this small army is $8.4 million. When you add to cash salaries an estimated 32.45% for UM’s very generous fringe benefit package for the average employee in this group (retirement, health care, dental insurance, life insurance, long-term disability, paid leave, paid vacation, social security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, etc.) the total employee compensation for this group tops $11 million per year. And of course that doesn’t count the cost of office space, telephones, computers and printers, printing, postage, programs, training, or travel expenses.

...4. Michigan’s Student Housing Office has a diversity team of at least six full-time employees, and according to an email from a former UM employee:

UM Housing has its own additional diversity army and trains students in paid positions to be “Diversity Peer Educators” in every dorm and apartment area. These students mandate compliance with the ever-changing progressive views on gender and diversity in all campus housing facilities.

6. The average salary for a typical UM “diversicrat” is roughly $92,000. Not bad. It’s $10,000 more than the average annual salary of $82,000 for an assistant professor with a Ph.D. in the College of Literature, Science and Arts (LSA) and only $10,000 less than the average salary for an associate LSA professor of $102,000.

7. The Michigan School of Nursing recently hired its own Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at a salary of $123,600. Nationally, women earn 84.4% of bachelor’s degrees in health sciences, 82% of master’s degrees in health sciences and 59% of doctor’s degrees. You might think that the top priority of a chief diversity and inclusion officer in a School of Nursing would be greater gender diversity and inclusion, i.e., correcting the huge gender imbalance favoring women in nursing and health sciences with programs, funding, and scholarships to recruit more men. After all, greater gender diversity and inclusion in other non-nursing STEM fields is the stated goal of UM diversity efforts when females are under-represented.

This is from one institution. Multiply that times the number of colleges in the nation, then consider all of the corporate diversity officers, and then all of the people in every branch of government, including the military, tasked with making diversity happen. This is a sizeable workforce.

All of these people vote, and many agitate, especially since they have plenty of money and their jobs are easy, so they have plenty of time. All of their friends and family members vote, too. We have created a Soviet-style class of people who depend wholly on government for employment, and they are not doing so badly, so they are fighting tooth and nail to keep the illusion.

At the same time, much as legal cases changed our situation to be where it is today, they are one legal decision away from being unnecessary. If affirmative action or other civil rights law go away, so will diversity, which is why these people are so politically active. They are grifters with their hooks in the prey and they know their condition is tenuous.