With the year 2000 just six years in the offing, one would expect positions to be firm and strategies to have been implemented. As a matter of fact, however, many employers who rushed into diversity and sensitivity training for managers, established skills retaining programs for displaced or soon to be displaced workers with limited education, and embraced work sharing, flextime, and other concepts designed to accommodate specific groups within the workforce have been dismayed to learn that major premises of the WORKFORCE 2000 report were in error. The signal message of the WORKFORCE 2000 report was that the younger white male was going to all but disappear from the pool of new workers entering the nation's labor force. This development, the report implied, would result in a workforce whose overall skill levels will be substandard to those of the 1984 American workforce. While native white males comprised 47 percent of the American workforce in 1984, that population group was expected to contribute on 15 percent of new entrants into the labor market between 1985 and 2000. This "startling forecast soon became dogma to many government and corporate personnel managers," and employers, fearing that they would be required to establish training programs for unskilled minority group workers, establish daycare centers for working mothers, and other similar actions, "began laying their plans."
Alas for these poor employers and many of their more simple minded personnel officers, as one national business magazine reported, "it was all a mistake, a simple editing error that took on a life of its own." In actuality, the proportion of native white males among the new entrants into the labor pool between 1985 and 2000 will be 31.6 percent. As a consequence, employers found that many of the plans made were to accommodate a diversity of the type that was simply not going to materialize in the United States by the early years of the coming ...