Certificate railroad stock

WELL, I FINALLY did it. I bit the bullet and got certified as a WOB: a woman-owned business. It took a roots-up, religious-type conversion--I'd walked in darkness, then I saw the light. And now that I am a proud--or do I mean "humble"?--official victim, my company is entitled to all kinds of preferential treats. Whether ordained by law, as in government contracting, or as an example of aggressive good-guy-ism in the P.R.-conscious private sector, or even as a hopeful prophylaxis against employee or shareholder lawsuits, a passel of lucrative work is reserved for those with the best-crafted claims to prior oppression.

Well-wishers had been after me to go WOB for years, but I refused. Until my revelation, I regarded set-asides as strictly a pat on the head for second-raters. My company, Art-kraft Strauss, has been providing signs and outdoor advertising-and paying taxes--since 1897. We'd never imagined ourselves qualified for charity. Our firm gets and keeps customers by fulfilling their contracts, not by invoking their pity. Besides, using sex to get work smacks of a profession even older than sign building. The whole endeavor struck me as disreputable.

But then I realized I was a victim of something even more pernicious than discrimination: pride.

My chief of operations, Jimmy, put the matter into perspective. "What are you, nuts?" he asked, reminding me of how many hoops we've jumped through and rings we've kissed over the years to get jobs. "How's this different?" he wanted to know. "If a job is set aside for guys named Jimmy, my name is Jimmy, I'll take it!" Jimmy was right: Business is business.

A bank's name change provided the tipping point. We sign people love bank mergers. Every sign, canopy, directory, ATM, teller cage, and nameplate has to be replaced--sometimes, in the spirit of the famous Asiatic Fire Drill, overnight, per schedules set forth in the new company's new charter.

This particular changeover involved nearly 1,000 branches in five states. And as I learned when my phone started ringing off the wall with joint-venture pleas from companies I'd never heard of, the taking-over bank had a "utilization rate" of 18 percent. That is, nearly one-fifth of the money spent on construction work would go to WOBs or MBES (i.e., minority business enterprises; presumably for reasons of euphony, minority-owned businesses generally are called MBEs rather than MOBs). Given how rare such businesses are in the sign trades, at least here in the Northeast, this cake had been baked for me.

Indeed, at the pre-bid conference, the bank's construction consultants were thrilled to see a genuine WOB among the bidders. Apart from the responsibility of physically reconfiguring a thousand banks, they had the head-scratching duty of coming up with the magical 18 percent of oppressed beings.

Their faces fell, however, when they learned I lacked certification. It turns out that it isn't enough to be a WOB; one has to be an officially certified WOB. The contract was to be awarded in only to days, and all the paper had to be in place. But state certification can take six to eight months, they told me, because of the volume of applicants and the demanding nature of the process.

Not to worry, I told them.

While Jimmy and his crew worked on the bid, I worked on the red tape. Getting certified as a WOB is something like getting certified insane: It takes time and talent. As I filled out forms and assembled documentation, I wondered how people who are authentically disadvantaged--or who may not have certified public accountants and English majors on staff--manage it. Anyone who can produce three years of audited financial statements, five years of income projections, a sheaf of valid "Rated-A" insurance certificates, answers to stacks of multiple-choice and essay questions, a book of "minority utilization reports," and a portfolio of supplier and customer references, bank references, and character references probably qualifies for a $100 million line of credit, if not an MBA.

In went the bid, marked "Certification Pending," and into the bowels of the New York State Division of Human Rights went the WOB application.

Undercover Brothers

Not 36 weeks but a mere 36 hours later, the Division of Human Rights called to schedule my interview to complete the process. How did I accomplish this feat? In an example of the old-fashioned "networking" that affirmative action is supposed to obviate, a confederate at my insurance company called a counterpart whose sister-in-law works in Albany, and our application miraculously migrated from the bottom of the pile to the top. But hey, by now I wanted the job.

The prospect of an investigator's coming in to establish my female bona fides evoked the image of a burly guard out of a 1950s Women's House of Detention movie marching me into the ladies' room and demanding to see the cut of my undergarments. Instead, the investigator turned out to be a grave young man attired in a three-piece suit with Edwardian collar and gold watch fob. He requested my company's original charter and certificate of incorporation; all minutes and bylaws and amendments from inception to date; all stock certificates issued, canceled, and outstanding; and the factory's original certificate of occupancy--a complete set of century-old documents, much of which I managed to produce by sheer luck. The investigator took careful note of my office d,cor, plants and curtains evidently witnessing more in my favor than cordovan leather and sports memorabilia would have.

What he was really looking for, he explained, was uncles and brothers hiding under the desk. "You'd be surprised," he told me flintily, "how many people try to put one over on us."

No, I wouldn't. Not with all those set-asides in the offing. Add the 10 percent price bonus the designated oppressed are entitled to charge--"price evaluation adjustment," in federal procurement-speak--and the incentive to fudge becomes overwhelming.

Set-asides and "evaluation adjustments" are as pervasive at the big-business end of the private sector as they are in government contracting. Expensive and inefficient these programs may be, but lawsuits are worse. The best defense against discrimination claims, corporate officers are constantly told, is an explicit, detailed, and overarching "affirmative action program" respecting hires, fires, and contracting. Point to this program, and a bevy of bugbears, from disaffected employees to muckraking journalists, will disappear. Besides, it's good P.R., and it allows corporate policy makers to feel good about themselves. They're entitled to some self-esteem too.

These incentives give rise to preferences of mind-boggling complexity. Consider the "utilization chart" from a bid that came across my desk. It's for $9.5 million worth of work at a laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. The categories can be sliced and diced indefinitely, creating a dazzling array of permutations. They may specify non-Dominican Caribbeans or non-Korean Asians, disabled people of various stripes, or inhabitants of selected neighborhoods.

The utilization rate for suppliers of "No. 1 Diesel And No. 4 Fuel Oils" adds up to 300 percent, a footnote explains, because "incumbent supplier is a disadvantaged, women-owned, HUBZOne small business." (A HUBZone small business is one in a "Historically Underutilized Business Zone.") Try competing with that!

I suppose it's not so different from the old days, when the incumbent supplier was apt to be the project manager's brother-in-law--but it certainly isn't an improvement. The old-time project manager wasn't forced to hire his brother-in-law, and he might even have had a chance of exercising some quality control over him. In this new, desperate rush to hire one-eyed Central Asians from south of the railroad tracks, price and quality necessarily weigh second at best.

My investigator congratulated me on passing his tests, apologized for their complexity, and shook my hand. My WOB documentation came through the next day. To my disappointment, it was not the fancy, frameable certificate dripping with ribbons and seals that I believed all my effort and angst--not to mention my newfound oppressed status--entitled me to, but just a faxed letter from the New York State Division of Human Rights.

Why'd We Wait?