Agencies 'happy to discriminate'


Professor Tariq Modood said he was surprised by the level of discrimination

Letting agents and employment agencies in the west of England are willing to discriminate against ethnic minority groups, a BBC investigation has found.
Of 30 temping agencies contacted by an Inside Out West researcher, 25 agreed to a request for a receptionist job to be offered only to white workers.
Seventeen out of 30 letting agencies also agreed to discriminate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7826077.stm

there's plenty of this in London too, mark my words.

Myself I don't need a reporter to tell me the above - if you're one of the people who can't get jobs because of your background, you find out very fast - I applied to 50 jobs on reed as Omar Pinar and 50 jobs on reed as James Jarvis - Pinar got no replies. Jarvis got several interested parties wanting to interview him and even a female agent flirting like mad - Omar And James were 100% the same except the name and email. They applied for the same types of jobs but at diff companies.

Not that I hate all white people because of this - hell, I would be doing exactly what I despise if I did THAT! But it is hard, and the people who have done this, and passively fostered it are all suffering now - so don't do it yourself. Why do such people suffer MORE in the crash? Simple. If you operate by filtering out races and sticking to an inbred little stock of workers, you have far less brain pooling, far less diverse approaches to action and when the trouble comes, you're far more "on your own" - by your own making!

thank god my tardis is working now! Today is day 2 of the "rest of my life" - and all it took was to keep adding tads of self-belief. But if every institution in society is full of people undermining that self belief because you're the "wrong" race... well, it takes a LOT to become like me. tariq and others can moan to the press... but me, i learned to eat the white man's food and become strong and now it's me that has the choice to discriminate - i gots the money and the jobs - but hey. If I do what they did to me, back to them, doesn't that make me a racist son of a £*£*£(£!!!! Good thing my mama taught me better, eh? there's a thought - no one ever mentions doctor who's mother - the original Mrs Who. Since his parents were obviously not doctorin the tardis, I suppose they were Mr and Mrs Who. Perhaps they were originally from China and it was spelled Mr and Mrs Hu - until employment and letting agencies convinced them to go for a whiter name!

That's messed up. We all want to think that this type of discrimination has gone away, but I doubt the results you got were an anomaly. What a difference a name makes. Then again, we just elected a guy named "Barak Obama" in my country, so I guess once you really get to know someone, a name doesn't mean much. Until then, people often fall back on prejudice.

I don't mind so much - the thing which scares me is my little brother having police aiming machine guns at him after pulling him over on his way home from dropping my mother to the airport. For no other reason than that he's asian. Or my big brother having police aim machine guns at him as he walks past westminster on the way to work events of various kinds.

But I think it's guys like you, and chris and many other people I know in my life who make me not care so much (like my apparent hero the doctor, i just live outside the mainstream, and by doing that evade the whole scene in which this rubbish goes on!) - besides, if it were someone jewish in an arab country, or someone arab in a russian country or someone russian in an indian country (etc etc) the sad truth is it'd always be the same.

I was thinking... gandhi stood up in the nonviolent way, and people say "if you die whilst standing nonviolently before your armed enemy - others will follow your aims and your death will be a victory" - but gandhi mainly opposed internal indian apartheid, aka the caste system, and the people who killed him had their leaders elected to government and now rule india (and are the CHIEF proponents of the internal apartheid/caste system) and india was challenged by the globe recently in durban (2001, august) about its hideous racism which still hasn't got any better since gandhi - and i just thought - what did gandhi live or die for? He didn't achieve anything. The british, moreover, would have left india with or without him, and that wasn't his real battle anyway. He LOST his real battle. Still, maybe things are still a lot better in the modern world than in the centuries of the past - but I'm not convinced - I mean we have no real direct comparison. I reckon humans have never ever become any less barbaric despite 1000s of years of so-called "civilization". But hey. What does it matter? None of us lives to 100, so there's only so much of the rubbish we have to live with!

Just saw this on the beeb this morning:

Female workers are being hit harder than ever before by the effects of the current downturn, a report suggests.
A study by the TUC showed the redundancy rate among women had risen by 2.3%, almost double the rate for men, since last year.

It's women (and foreigners) who suffer first in this "democractic" society. Poor women. And poor foreign women. The one I feel for most (being biased) is technically more screwed than most if she gives up her crusade. Her name is attached to far too much bleeding heart liberal activity - if one looks her up on Google, there is no end to the list of bleeding hearts associated with her - so she's female, arabmuslim and reputed for not being a capitalist shark cannibalistic evildoer like those who qualify for good jobs! In a way, it warms my heart that I'm so good at being a materialist. Maybe it's a big plus point, in terms of my own personal needs.

Anyway. This is the noble west, where women get no fair treatment and when the fan is hit with the bottom-effluent it's women this society throws out first. What a great great society we live in! Not. I'm definitely going to move to the carib by the end of it. There's no room for decent people in babylon.

im not sure if discrimination still exist, if it is, just ignore it..no matter what race you are..it's important in work how you do it effectively and efficiently

im not sure if discrimination still exist

I'm not sure if literacy still exists, myself. JV your english is improving in terms of writing, but reading? Do you parse the posts for content before responding or is it just a basic keyword-match system you use to trigger replies?

Not sure if discrimination exists!!!! Read the article I posted. You realise your spam would have a better result if your posts made it look like you were genuinely replying to the topic. Still, I think spam is not the right approach for you - you need much higher literacy to get away with it. Have you thought of a retail job?

Discrimination exists but many companies have mandatory quotas where they must hire and interview certain amounts of different ethnic groups.

Discrimination will forever exsist as long as the world does. It is human nature to be discriminant to a certain extent. The racial discrimination I can't understand though. We are all here within this world with different palces and people. That will never change.

Discrimination will forever exsist as long as the world does. It is human nature to be discriminant to a certain extent. The racial discrimination I can't understand though. We are all here within this world with different palces and people. That will never change.

I hope that it will stop one day. Hope for the best.

That's true. Hope for the best, give it your best. Things should work out if you go that way. I saw a man who was so mentally hurt by the racism in England that he just knuckled down, separated himself from "the white man" and now has MANY millions of pounds. Sure I'll inherit it, but what I would rather have received, when he's dead, than millions of pounds, is that the society I live in should show respect for people of my father's background!

Instead he has become another israel! I love him, but he has caught the racism addiction. Those who hurt me could have made ME a racist too, but they didn't. I was attacked by a BNP skinhead, in a train station, in front of 100s of people, when i was a child. 15 years old, on a friday night, seeing a friend in richmond, on my way home at about 8 o'clock, and this skinhead picked me up by my collar and started screaming GOOO HOME! GOOO HOME! interestingly I was at the time trying to locate a wimbledon train, to take me home.

The skinhead pursued me after I manage to escape thanks to the intervention of a big black man who worked for British rail. Naturally there was, at the time, no reason for anyone to imagine calling the cops would help. So after i'd escaped, the black man had to let the skinhead go. He hunted me down on my train and chased me for a while. I still escaped, but i lived in fear of the tube for months - and I still remember dozens of "middle class" people sitting on that train as the skinhead chased me. they buried their faces in their novels and their newspapers.

that day, something was born on planet earth which will shaft every ******n racist goon from here to cairo, from washington to "mumbai".

People told me - over the years - if i am not careful, i will become the skinhead, chasing every white person i see into the darkness, making them scared, hurting them, brutalizing them. But anyone who knows all the women i've loved, all the friends i've had, even the ones i still make, knows that i never became the skinhead.

In La Haine, I am the black man who pulls the trigger in the last scene. Anyone intelligent can work out which man dies in that scene.

Thanks for moving this post. I should have put it in here in the first place.

if discrimination still exist, if it is, just ignore it

I was just re-reading this and it struck me that this sums up why the problem doesn't go away. Most people are like JV17 - they just ignore it.

If you ignore a disease, it kills you.

Well, for my say, i just think that discrimination won't and will never go away. I agree, that the discrimination will always be here as long as the world does.

Originally Posted by Jmarshall

Discrimination exists but many companies have mandatory quotas where they must hire and interview certain amounts of different ethnic groups.

Quotas are discrimination, plain and simple. With quotas, you are making hiring decisions based on ones ethnicity or the color of their skin rather their qualifications. Discrimination in its truest form.

Quotas are a deliberate attempt to undo the tendency to discriminate, so I'm not sure I'd call it a form of discrimination. Saying quotas are discrimination relies on the assumption that minority groups are less qualified than the majority.

While I'm not a huge fan of reverse discrimination, and think affirmative action should eventually be phased out, it did and does play an important role in correcting the balance in our culture.

In a perfect world, if 30% of the graduates are from minority groups, and a degree is required for a position, 30% of the interviews should be with those groups.

There's discrimination in just about everything imaginable. Why, I suppose it reverts back to human nature and perhaps a lack of education.

Try going into any store with a suit and tie, see what kind of service you receive. Now a few days later and go back to that same store wearing work clothes and see what kind of service you receive. Even right now, depending how I look and dress will make a difference as to how I am treated.

Many years ago I read Mickey Rooney's autobiography, one issue he brought out which really bothered him, the male star always got top billing, even though the female was the main star. I still see this happening....

Originally Posted by Giselle

the male star always got top billing, even though the female was the main star. I still see this happening....

Absolutely. Women have it particularly tough because if they are tough they are considered a b*tch, but also supposedly makes them more employable as management (re:Hilary). If they are feminine or worse yet sexy, they are idiots who get by on their looks(re:Palin).

Originally Posted by wayfarer07

Saying quotas are discrimination relies on the assumption that minority groups are less qualified than the majority.

That is simply not true. The minute you use quotas, how qualified a candidate is for the job is a secondary criteria, used only after color of skin. Whether the "minorities" are less or more qualified is irrelevant because it wasn't the primary determining factor.

I put the word minorities in quotes because what we used to consider the majority(White Anglo Saxon Protestant) is disappearing. They may already be less than 50% of the U.S. population, making them just another percentage of the folks applying or hiring.

Originally Posted by wayfarer07

In a perfect world, if 30% of the graduates are from minority groups, and a degree is required for a position, 30% of the interviews should be with those groups.

Maybe. You'd have to consider the make up of a given geography, and a variety of other things, but it still strikes me as a bit of a crock. What if Affirmative Action were applied to Hollywood? Would there be less Jews in tinsel town? Should they be forced not use nepotism in their hiring practices? How about the NBA and NFL? Affirmative action an ok thing there, or will we discriminate on where "discrimination" is ok? Why does it not offend anyone that the black athletes going for these positions are just better, and that their employees are allowed to have clearly lobsided hiring practices because they hire on who is best for the job and nothing else? Shouldnt we be social engineering white folk to play better ball so we can have proper representation in the NBA?

There is something kind of stinky(Communism?) about the whole thing. Let people do what they do best. Let people hire the people who are best at what they do, regardless of color of skin.

Maybe I can give institutes of education a pass because they are a starting point rather than an ending point, but I'd have to think about it.