ABSTRACT
The office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) is housed in the US Department of Labor under Employment Standards Administration and is charged with enforcing Executive Orders 11236 and 11375. The term “affirmative action” was first used by the outgoing President’s Committee on Government Contracts in 1960, when the Chairman of that Committee, Vice President Nixon, proposed to the next administration that contract compliance would be much more viable if contractors were taking more affirmative action. In addition to defining affirmative action as a process of removing discriminative hiring and promotional practices, the OFCC began in the late 1960’s to define the need for applying good management practices to the problem of affirmative action. In summary, there has been a major shift in what is meant by affirmative action. Initially, what was meant was simply “to stop discriminating” in hiring, promotion, layoffs, salary scales and the like.
