County gains in workforce diversity
Non-White personnel increases to 37.6%
Representation of non-White employees in Marin County’s workforce grew by 20% over the last five years and now stands at more than 37.6%, a personnel official said.
“The county’s workforce therefore has a greater representation of people of color than the geographic areas from where it hires its employees,” Roger Crawford, Marin County’s equal employment director, wrote in a report he presented to county supervisors.
Crawford’s presentation on Dec. 15 was followed by a program update from Anyania Muse, Marin County’s equity officer. Muse said among the projects she is working on is continuation of a speakers series that started last year following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor during police operations.
“These (speakers) will be thought leaders in race equity work,” Muse told supervisors, “around things like building an anti-racist society, the intersection between work and Black Lives Matter, and the intersection between White fragility and othering and belonging.”
The fact that the percentage of non-White employees working for Marin County is now larger than their “labor market availability” is significant. LMA is a technical term that refers to the number of people in a local workforce pool. Marin considers its LMA to consist of Marin, Sonoma, Contra Costa and Alameda counties.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the federal government endorses affirmative inclusion efforts, including numerical goals, for private companies if they are limited to efforts to remedy a gross imbalance between the percentage of protected group members in a particular job compared to their percentage in the relevant labor pool.
The ACLU says programs to rectify such imbalances must be temporary, and that “once the goal is attained, it cannot be used to maintain those numbers.”
Marin County Counsel Brian Washington wrote in an email that due to Proposition 209, “The county would not be able to implement any affirmative inclusion efforts that discriminate or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin.”
Crawford wrote in his report that the county’s equal employment opportunity plan “goes beyond LMA and job group assessments to help the county become a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace.”
According to his report, the representation of nonWhite employees from the county’s LMA is 26%. That means their representation among Marin’s 810 employees is over 11% higher than the LMA representation.
Marin County has been even more successful in increasing its representation of non-White employees in upper management positions. Currently, they hold 22 of 59 such positions, or about 37.3%, an increase of 43% since 2015. The county has increased its representation of African American employees in upper management from one to seven since 2015.
New hires include Washington in 2016; Benita McLarin, director of Marin’s Health and Human Services Department, in 2016; and Marlon Washington, Marin County’s chief probation officer, in July.
In his report, Crawford attributes the increased representation of non-White employees and women in the county workforce to the county’s goal of diversifying its hiring panels; its use of a new “diversity hiring tool kit” by managers; and “a better awareness among hiring managers of the county’s goal to diversify its workforce.”
According to the ACLU, people who benefit from inclusion programs must be qualified for the jobs in question.
At Tuesday’s meeting, however, Supervisor Damon Connolly asked if more could be done to eliminate minimum qualifications that prevent diversity hires.
“I was recently having this conversation with parks in particular,” Connolly said. “We don’t want a situation where that is an artificial barrier. Parks has actually affirmatively made some changes to the minimum qualifications to remedy that.”
Crawford said, “That is a countywide project. We’ve revised over 50% of our classifications.”
Crawford told supervisors that perhaps the biggest impediment to further increasing diversity in the county workforce is the fact that non-White workers are 1.5 times more likely than White workers to resign for non-retirement reasons.
“The high turnover rates for people of color make clear that the county must do more (to) engender a sense of belonging among its employees of color,” Crawford wrote in his report.
“Diversity efforts can’t be successful unless there is an equal if not greater focus on inclusion and equity,” Crawford told supervisors on Tuesday.
During the presentation on Marin’s equity initiative, Dominique Burton, who oversees the county’s learning and organizational development division, said 97% of the county workforce has completed a mandatory cultural intelligence training. The training, which initially required eight hours to complete, was shortened to a four-hour Zoom session after the pandemic hit.
“Next year we’re hoping to revamp it again to create a smaller version and also provide electives,” Burton said. Electives will include the topic of unconscious bias.
“Emotional intelligence fits into that,” Burton said. “How do you use resilience and your personal power to push you through when it is a difficult conversation?”
At the end of the presentation, Connolly asked Muse if her efforts were getting traction in county government and the larger Marin community.
Muse replied, “Some, not enough, but some. It means cultural change, and it also means changing the minds and hearts of people who traditionally benefit from the way this system currently is.”