Every state agency in Illinois is supposed to file a "work-force report" with the secretary of state's office by Jan. 1. The reports detail the past year's hirings and promotions and catego- rizes employees by race, gender and salary level. I had written about the issue a year earlier, but this year, I had the benefit of FoxPro. There are almost 100 state agencies, com- missions and boards, and 65 of them had filed their reports.
The records were not available electronically, SO I typed in the information I wanted into about 20 different fields. I wanted to look at percentages of minorities in every agency, and at how salaries for minorities compared from agency to agency and track hiring and promotion trends. It took about three days to enter this using my own Mac laptop for the project. Affirmative action is a hot issue, and state employment is always a lively topic around Spring- field, where one-third of the city's population works for the government.
There's a law on the books saying each state agency's work force should reflect the state's population as a whole (which is 25 percent nonwhite), but the groups who represent minority employees believe the state has been lax in enforcing this. My data analysis revealed that, in some ways, the state has done pretty well hiring minorities and women: 23 percent of the work force is minority, and Illinois Gov.
Jim Edgar has ap- pointed some women and minorities as cabinet directors. Despite that, the number of minorities work- ing for the government has actually declined since his administration started five years ago. And right away, the analysis showed just how few minorities can get a job outside the urban social service agencies that have traditionally provided them with patronage work in welfare offices and mental hospitals.
Outside a few well-paid directors, few mi- norities could be found in management-level jobs in any state agency. Blacks actually repre- sented a greater percentage of state employees than they did in the overall state population. But Hispanics, who now comprise at least 8 percent of Illinois' population, have yet to get state government jobs.