BC fire fighters again..One step closer to discrimination

Oh I love this. Remember a day or two ago when I mentioned the fire fighters that were thinking of hiring only women and visible minorities but 'white men can still apply'? yeah, looks like they just got the thumbs up from the superiors and now just have to go through the BC human rights commission to get approval for this discrimination to take place. I wonder if this is just a sort of smoke screen rouse put on by the firefighters of BC. Here is how the story plays out. They get yelled at and have a bad reputation for being male chauvanist pigs due to having roughly 95% of their hired help as men. So, to show that they are nice nice they say "yep, gonna hire women and visible minorities because we see the error of our ways and will try to be nice". Then it goes to the BC human rights and they say "are you nuts? that is discrimination, we wont let it pass". So the firefighters then sit back, hire men again as business as usual and say "hey, we tried. The BC human rights commission said no, they are the bad guy, we arent".

I hope that this is the case, because the only other option is that the BC fire fighters want to do discriminational hiring, and the BC human rights will go along with it because it helps out the minorities and women. However, they don't look at the other side that says 'if we help out this group of people by making a policy to help them get hired, then we are hurting this other side of the group". This is new policy is no better than if any organization paid for the training and only hired caucasian men but said "minorities and women can still apply".

I just hope that the BC human rights commission has the common sense to see this dark side of this plan and do the right thing.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070316/firefighters_070316/20070316?hub=Canada

B.C. politicians want more female firefighters

Updated Fri. Mar. 16 2007 11:10 PM ET
Canadian Press

VANCOUVER -- A beleaguered B.C. fire department has been given the thumbs up by politicians to favour women and visible minorities when hiring.

Richmond, B.C., city council has approved a proposal for its fire rescue department to adopt an assisted hiring practice for its next recruitment campaign.

Rather than recruiting new firefighters directly out of training schools, the force wants to pay for women and minorities to attend the programs, said city spokesman Ted Townsend.

Townsend said traditionally the training schools don't produce the ethnicly diverse group of graduates the department wants so it hopes to entice them to attend the program if it pays.

"We know this is going to take time," Townsend said. "But we've seen this kind of integration on other police forces and we know it can work."

Townsend said the city is still accepting applications from everyone and knows it can't fill all the vacancies with women or minorities.

"We are not going to compromise our standards," he said. "There are very rigorous standards that all firefighters have to meet and women and visible minorities will have to meet them as well."

Attracting women and minorities to a force that had its reputation blackened after allegations of sexual harassment two years ago will be a challenge, Townsend acknowledged, but he said the internal review prompted by those allegations led to massive changes within the department designed to make it more accommodating.

Townsend called the assisted hiring practice only one of many steps needed to move the department forward to representing Richmond's increasingly diverse population.

There are only two women and fewer than 10 visible minorities among the 206 firefighters in the Vancouver suburban community.

"That's completely out of whack with our city," Townsend said.

Visible minorities make up 60 per cent of Richmond's population and there's almost an even split between men and women overall.

The department now must gain the approval of the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal to move forward with the plan.

If approved, the new recruitment campaign will begin in the spring.

soap box rant - discrimination

*pulls out my soap box and stands up tall on it*

Yep, gotta bring out that soap box again. I mean, I just don't get it. Really, I don't get it at all. I mean, how can you do one thing, reward one person and then turn around and have a gov't agency do the complete opposite and make it legal? I do have a tendancy to sort of do a non-sequitor (doesn't follow, like 'all dogs have 4 legs, my cat has 4 legs, therefore my cat is a dog') and usually think that one thing is like another when it has only one thing in common but is a completely new situation. So, here is how I see it and let's see what the people (and by 'people' I mean Blue and maybe the one person named 'anonymous' that has left comments) think.

Just read this article (http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20070314/tribunal_damages_070314/20070314?hub=Canada) in the news were two black men were refused service in a bar in the Montreal area back in 2003 because they were 'bad for business' and the human rights commission just now found their rights to have been violated and bar, co-owner, busboy and waitress were ordered to pay $5000 in moral and $3000 in punitive damages plus legal fees the two men. Ok, good for the law. I agree with this one hundred percent. No one should be denied service or any sort of human dignity based on race, colour, creed, gender, sexual preference, height, weight, eye colour or any other physical, mental, fashion factor that they have. We are all human, we all have rights and we all have equal right to those rights. Reason why these men were denied service? It seems that there was a recent outbreak in 'black gang' related activities and the bar had a policy not to serve black individuals to try to keep the 'unwanted element' away from the bar. Little harsh and presumptious way of handling this situation and completely stupid. I mean, just because there is an increase in gang activity, and just because the increase means that more blacks might be arrested and charged, all of a sudden all black people must be barred from certain places cause they are a safety hazard? That is just plain stupid, immoral, unethical and just plain out moronic.

Now, we come to part #2 of this little soap box rant. An article from the past that I read a few months ago and followed for a bit and then it just sort of faded away when Anna Nicole Smith died, cause as you all know, her death is waaaay more important and newsworthy than a discrimination case. Four women in Richmond, B.C were hired by the fire fighters, they then quit and pressed charges against co-workers and the organization claiming that there was sexual harrassment, discrimination and general hostility towards them because they were female and "the City of Richmond failed to stop the harassment and even fostered a culture of discrimination against its female firefighters." (http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2006/12/15/bc-firefighter.html). Unfortuneatly, this case was thrown out of court and would not be heard because the Supreme Court of Canada decreed that this was directly related to their job and should be handled by the union arbitrator and not a court of law. Now, that strikes me as odd and down right useless considering that the unions these days have mutated from their past noble ideals of "workers banding together to stop the explotation of workers" and are more in the lines of "lets see how much we can pinch the companies and dig into their pockets to give to the workers who have become lazy and whiney".

Now, the thing that gets me to connect these two cases is the reaction of the Richmond Fire and rescue service does to this whole ordeal. They announce that they will now try to improve their image by hiring more 'women and visible minorities' into the force. (http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/03/02/fire-service.html?ref=rss) I guess their reasoning is that the force was run by caucasian male thugs and they let a couple, females into the crowd and were harrassed. So by diluting the male thug population there will be equality. Since thugs only pick on the lesser of the population, increase the population, you increase the safety (safety in numbers and all that jazz).

Here is the problem. This, to my knowledge, has been happening for years and years already. I mean, when I was growing up I was hearing how caucasian male brothers of my friends were applying to the RCMP, fire fighters and EMT positions and were being told "sorry, we have all the spots filled, we need minorities or women now". Even where I work we have a quota of aboriginal to caucasian/ male to female ratio that has to be filled at all times. If we are under quota for more than a month, then those same union reps that were previous mentioned (the latter, not the former unions) start kicking up dust and screaming. There was even a time that people were saying that these organizations even had different hiring minimums for the different genders. So, hypothetically it would be argued that the RCMP said that men had to be over 5'10" tall (cause, lets face it, you are a 6'0", 220 lbs brute resisting arrest, a 5'0", 100lbs officer screaming 'freeze you are under arrest' better be packing a load of heat and aimed at the guy cause I dont think he is gonna stop) and be over 190lbs and be able to complete a certain fitness test. Whereas women might have to be over only 5'6" tall and be over 140lbs and do a fitness test but slightly lower than the men. They have them for the Olympics, they have them for boxing and other sports, so it wasn't that difficult for that belief to spread to the people that were being denied because they were caucasian whereas a shorter woman than the minimum was being let in. Hell, growing up I became accustomed to hearing the term "Affirmative Action" meaning "Discrimination" or "we hire natives first, caucasians second". Growing up my friends and my parents friends always joked that "if you were a female native with a speech disability and were pregnant, you could be CEO of this company within a week", though the scary part was you couldnt be CEO but you could be elevated to manager in a few days.

So, now what do we have. We have a bar that saw an increase in criminal activity (caused by black gang members) and to decrease that activity (stop the crime) and make their establishment a safer place they stop allowing the people of the criminal activity (blacks) into the bar. We also have a place hiring people (Richmond fire and rescue) that saw an increase in criminal activity (sexual harrassment) and now to stop that activity (stop the crime/harrassment) from happening they are stopping, or lessening, the population of that criminal influence (caucasian men). Now the two black men got $16,000 in damages for the discimintation. Wonder how much the hundreds of applicants that were denied jobs because the organization had to hire minorities over them will get if they go and sue for discrimination. I mean, the Richmond Fire and Rescue organization said that ""White men are still welcome to apply" because 'it is doubtful that we will be able to fill all the positions with women and visible minorities'. Now, in my mind that is like the bar saying "oh, black men can apply (come to the door and ask to be let in) but if the seats are all full of caucasians, I am sorry they won't be allowed in" And just because it just so happened that the seats in the bar were being held for caucasians that hadn't yet arrived yet, means that the two men were denied service in the bar, doesn't mean that the bar discriminated against the black men. No no, no discrimination there, just that they were allowing (hiring) only caucasian men at the time.

So, you can see my problem with this. On one hand, the law is telling us that we can not discriminate service or anything due to race, colour, creed, gender or religious beliefs. But then on the other hand the Fire Rescue organziation (a fully gov't run organization like the RCMP that isnt privitized) is telling us that they are allowed to disciminate in their hiring process.

To me, discrimination is pure and simple, black and white (I dont know, is that a pun?). I apply for a job, a woman applies for the same job. We both have the same educational qualifications but she has two years more experience than me, making her the ideal candidate but I get the job, THAT is discrimination. We both go for the job, same qualifications but I have two years more experience than she, she gets the job under 'female affirmative action' THAT is discrimination. Anytime anyone is hired into a job not because of experience or qualifications but simply because of a race, colour, religious belief or gender, THAT is discrimination. Anytime anyone is denied service at an establishment based on beliefs of a group of people and not the individuals own personal attributes or misdeeds, THAT is discrimination. No affirmative action, no minority enforcement/encouragement, no safety issues, it is down right discrimination. Just as it is wrong to deny entrance to a person into a bar because of the colour of their skin, so it is wrong to hire, or not to hire, someone based on the colour of their skin or because of what is between (or not between) their legs.

*climbs down quietly from the soap box, dusts it off and puts it away for another day*