Washington – At 20, Rudy Rodas is looking at a bright future. The bilingual business major, who expects to graduate with honors from George Washington University next May, is the kind of candidate that prospective employers fight over.
The federal government hopes to win the battle for his services with the help of a new campaign launched to solve an old problem: Latinos are the only ethnic minority still underrepresented in the federal workforce, according to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.
“It’s something that’s been an issue for decades. What’s really new is we’re using more media and broadening our approach toward recruitment,” office spokesman Ken Oliver-Mendez said. “We’ve been actively going to Hispanic media outlets. We’ve been working with nonprofits trying to let the Hispanic population know about the federal government as an employer.”
But unless this new program succeeds where others like it have failed, the end result may be no more than a fractional gain: Despite the government’s efforts in recent years, Latino representation in the federal work force rose just two-tenths of a percent from 2005 to 2006.
Historically, ethnic minorities have found federal employment a road to opportunity. Blacks, Asian-Americans and American Indians working for the government all equal or exceed their percentages in the civilian work force.
Latinos, on the other hand, make up 12.8 percent of the civilian labor force but just 7.6 percent of the federal work force. The disparity exists even though Hispanics have made significant gains in federal internship programs at the agencies where they are most underrepresented in the work force.
Government officials insist that their new initiatives will make a difference. The personnel management office aired its first television campaign in the past year, and Oliver-Mendez and others have appeared on Spanish-language television stations to promote the federal jobs website, .
Brent Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said his organization appreciated all of the efforts being made by the Office of Personnel Management and other agencies, but he noted that they might not be the answer to improving Latino hiring and retention.
“There are no consequences for not having fair Hispanic representation,” he said. “Something needs to be mandated to make that happen.”
