This short volume fills a gap between the weighty and often abstruse tomes JL analysing discrimination in employment and the simplified lists of do's and don'ts offered by training providers and professional development centres. Any credible tertiary program in employment relations, human resource management or industrial relations must address the issues of employment discrimination and affirmative action or Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) programs. As someone who is regularly asked, by undergraduate students doing their first assignment on this topic, to explain all that they need to know about employment discrimination and EEO or affirmative action in half an hour or less, I can testify to the very great need for a short, clear, readable and academically sound text that introduces the basics of the legal and social issues regarding identifying and addressing employment discrimination.The book is the product of a research project that 'sought to take the commonplace assumptions of... affirmative action and ferret out myth from reality'. It is divided into six chapters that examine the legislative environment of race and sex discrimination in the United States of America; the nature, extent and causes of job segregation by race and sex; the effectiveness of affirmative action programs in reducing employment discrimination (including the effects of different levels of political commitment as expressed by statutory regulations and legislation); and some of the policy implications of these findings for both legislators and society in general.Reskin, and most of the extensive research she cites, focuses exclusively on the United States. The first chapter is thus the least relevant to Australian readers, although many would find it useful to discover the labyrinthine nature of the legislation addressing employment discrimination in the United States. Affirmative action legislation in that country actually only applies to a tiny proportion of the total workforce (approximately 3 per cent) and the oftquoted bogey of quotas is a myth rather than a reality. It seems to stem from the fact that courts can actually order organisations found to be blatantly discriminatory to set targets based on potential recruitment or applicant pools, and those targets can be monitored more effectively than is the case in Australia.The remaining chapters, and the enormous quantity of research reviewed and cited in them, consider the generic issues of race and sex discrimination, and are relevant to any industrialised, multicultural society, as the causes, evidence and solutions relate to common structural conditions. For example, chapter 2 analyses the evidence for job segregation by race and gender, deat UNIV OF NORTH DAKOTA on May 16, 2015 jir.sagepub.com Downloaded from
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