GECOM and its employment practices

At the beginning of this month, Dr. Roger Luncheon, PPP Executive and Election Committee Member, claimed PNC Commissioners at GECOM were discriminating against Indian Guyanese applicants for vacancies at the Secretariat by giving those shortlisted low to zero scores during the interview process, while providing high to 100% scores to their preferred candidates.
“If these disclosures are confirmed,” he declared, “it would reveal that the practice continues of excluding some ethnicities from GECOM Secretariat.”
The claim of discriminatory hiring practices at GECOM was repeated by the three PPP Commissioners at their statutory meeting, and they demanded that the ethnic breakdown of the staff be released. However, PNCR-nominated Commissioner Vincent Alexander asserted conclusively that GECOM ‘does not keep information of its staffers based on ethnicity”, even as the Chairman of GECOM, who was unilaterally appointed by President Granger, released figures on just such a breakdown. This proved that GECOM does in fact solicit and record the ethnic identification of persons hired in its Secretariat.
The report showed the following percentages by ethnic group: Afro-Guyanese (46%), Indo-Guyanese (21%), Mixed (20%), Amerindians (12%) and Others (1%). Conjugated with percentages of these groups in the population – Afro-Guyanese (46%/29%), Indo-Guyanese (21%/40%), Mixed (20%/20%), Amerindians (12%/11%) and Others (1%/1%), what clearly jumps out is the overrepresentation of African Guyanese and the under representation of Indian Guyanese in GECOM compared to their numbers in the general population. PNC-nominated Commissioner Alexander attempted to explain this anomaly by pointing to the historical preponderance of African Guyanese in the Public Service.
Accusations of ethnic discrimination by the Government are nothing new in Guyana. There were such widespread accusations during the PPP regimes of 1957-1964 and 1992-2015 against African Guyanese. Similar accusations were made against the PNC between 1964-1992 and 2015-present against Indian Guyanese. If the activities of any individual, organisation or group fall differentially on citizens who have some distinctive characteristic in common, it ought not to be of any surprise that they will enquire whether there are any connections between the action and the characteristic. The problem in Guyana is that governments have not moved legislatively to deal up-front with such accusations and thereby defuse a very explosive situation.
In the US, with reference to the distinctions made above on differential hiring of ethnic groups, their Supreme Court enunciated the doctrines of “adverse or disparate treatment” and “adverse or disparate impact”. Disparate treatment would apply to the scenario claimed by Dr Luncheon, wherein there is an INTENTIONAL selection process that discriminated against persons from an identified group. In this case, for instance, the scores of the rejected applicants could be evaluated vis-a-vis those of successful candidates to determine whether there was bias.
In the case of “adverse impact”, any specified group that is statistically anomalously represented for their percentage in the target population, without the need to prove intent, a rebuttable presumption of “discrimination/racism” is inferred. In 1978, a set of guidelines known as the Uniform Guidelines for Employee Selection Procedures was adopted for four Government agencies (EEOC, Department of Labour, Department of Justice, and the Civil Service Commission). This provided information on what constitutes a discriminatory test surrounding employment testing, as well as all personnel decisions. Typically, adverse impact is determined by using the four-fifths or eighty percent rule. This is “a selection rate for any race, sex, or ethnic group which is less than four-fifths (or 80%) of the rate for the group with the highest rate will generally be regarded … as evidence of adverse impact.”
In the case of the claimed discrimination against Indians in GECOM, 80% of their distribution is 32%, and therefore with them constituting only 21% of GECOM’s Secretariat, the burden of proof shifts to GECOM to prove no discrimination. However, since the 80% test does not involve probability distributions to determine whether the disparity is a “beyond chance” occurrence, other statistically significance tests, such as the standard deviation analysis, may be used to do so.
We commend the US approach to the ERC, where the charges evidently will be laid.