Positive Discrimination

A number of social injustices can in theory be redressed or avoided by means of positive discrimination, particularly in the context of recruiting workers.  Whether positive discrimination is either proper or effective is a matter of considerable contemporary controversy and complexity.  As usual, Jewish business ethics have a particular insight to offer.

Positive discrimination means more than just advertising or recruiting in such a way as to encourage applications from disadvantaged classes.  That may be positive action, but it is not discrimination.  Jewish law and thought strongly encourage positive action of this kind.  The Torah identifies widows, orphans and strangers as particularly vulnerable groups, and encourages us to show particular love and concern for them.  We can do this particularly in the context of the mitzvah of tzedakah, and the highest form of tzedakah is to help a person to be self-supporting.

But actual discrimination is more difficult, and depends in particular on the status within the employing organisation of the person making the decision.  In a one-person business, for example, if the proprietor decides to go out of his or her way to give a job to someone who is disadvantaged, that is entirely within the proprietor's right, and could fall within the general mitzvah of "and you shall love the stranger".  (Subject, of course, to the practical qualification that it is no favour to put someone in a position in which they are unlikely to succeed.)

At the other end of the scale, someone employed within a large organisation to recruit workers owes a duty to his or her employers to perform the recruitment function in whatever way maximises the likely benefits for the business.  To favour one candidate over another because he or she deserves sympathy is to introduce an irrelevant consideration into the recruitment officer's decision-making: put simply, it is not for me to do tzedakah with someone else's business interests!  In such a case, therefore, the recruitment officer can discriminate in favour of a disadvantaged candidate only in pursuance of a policy of positive discrimination formally adopted by the organisation.

One other consideration may be relevant.  It is not easy to know who needs or deserves a job more; someone who is superficially from an advantaged class may in fact deserve support more than someone who is superficially from a disadvantaged class.  Recruiting in circumstances where jobs are scarce a person may decide that the fairest approach is to set aside all possible distorting factors and to concentrate on fitness for the job; that approach derives some support from the idea that in a judicial context a person must resist the temptation to side with one party or another on grounds of sympathy (Exodus 23: 3-6) and must decide between competing claims by reference only to relevant factors.