Diversity in the workplace has not helped the development of profitable minority business enterprises in the OEM American automotive industry.

Implications: Diversity in hiring, DIH, is now supposed to be  a measure of how "good" a company is being to minority groups in general. But it measures hiring only.

In fact the DIH rating actually measures only how well a company is complying with government laws, rules, and regulations proscribing discrimination in hiring.

The measure is worthless in determining how well minorities are doing in qualifying for management track positions.

The measure is less than worthless when trying to determine if a company is giving minority business enterprises a fair chance to compete for its business or is just trading dollars, or, worse, supporting pass-through fronts, to meet Federal and State targets for doing minority business.



Analysis: Diversity in the workplace is a poor measure of how well minority groups are doing in the quest for the American dream, a middle class income or self-employment as the head of a profitable business.

The same corporations that proudly display their numbers and percentages of employees, who are members of minority groups and women, broken down into details of race and gender show only the gross figures for what they pay in total as salaries and what they pay minority owned and operated suppliers for their goods. These gross figures are then reported as a percentage of the total cost of labor or of the total purchasing outlays of the reporting companies.

This last percentage information is meaningless as is the figure for the total dollars of minority spend.

Minority business enterprises are 99% private, so they do not need to report publicly their profit margins, their employment figures, or their financial statements, or balance sheets. 

The OEM American automotive industry claims that it collectively does 10% or more of its purchasing with minority owned and operated enterprises, but it does not report how much of that business is done profitably, because it would be too embarrassing to do so. It is also not required of minority suppliers to the OEM automotive industry that they report their total numbers of minority employees or the percentage of labor costs they pay that go to minority employees.

No one crowing about diversity in the work place ever mentions that the greatest losers among the half-million workers who have lost automobile industry related jobs just in Michigan in the last decade are minority group members who have fallen from middle class to lower class with little hope of ever regaining their former income level or life style.

Jesse Jackson came to Detroit in late 2006  to pressure the Ford Motor Company to exempt its African American dealerships from the general reduction of dealerships that the company has begun to cut its overhead. Mr. Jackson did not speak out to save the jobs of the many just the lucrative dealer development program checks of the few. Checks that are handed out whether or not the dealership makes a profit.

Diversity only matters when it contributes to wealth creation for those who have been excluded solely on the basis of race or gender. Otherwise as in the case of the OEM automotive industry it is a smokescreen to cover a failed agenda.