When Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond talks to groups of young people about what the state's work force will look like in the future, he likes to illustrate his point with the changing face of the National Basketball Association.
He rattles off the growing number of stars from eastern Europe and elsewhere.
"Then there's [Phoenix Suns guard] Steve Nash, last year's Most Valuable Player, a white guy from Canada," Thurmond said. "And probably the most famous basketball player in the world isn't [Shaquille O'Neal] or Kobe [Bryant], but Yao Ming."
Mentioning the Chinese center of the Houston Rockets and the other international sports stars shows how business globalization is creating a different work environment. And the trend is expected to snowball as the children Thurmond addresses grow up and enter the world of work.
"When I first heard about diversity, I thought it was about getting white and black people to join hands around the campfire, singing 'Kumbaya,' " Thurmond said. "But it really means having a skilled, world-class work force."
Evidence of metro Atlanta's changing demographics in the work force can be found at the ground level - in shopping centers along the main thoroughfares in Chamblee and Norcross - as well as on the top floors of the region's Fortune 500 companies.
Just measuring increased workforce diversity by race and ethnicity is an inadequate way to quantify the dramatic changes taking place in metro Atlanta's shops, offices and warehouses, Thurmond said. Because the baby boomers are nearing retirement age, number crunchers who study demographics project a labor shortage in coming decades that will encourage employers to include workers who haven't always been considered a viable part of the pool of employees.
Here are some expectations of what's to come, taken from Georgia Workforce 2012, a forward-looking report produced by the Department of Labor with the help of Georgia university professors, Atlanta Regional Commission staff and the business community:
> More people will work past the traditional retirement age of 65. The number of workers in Georgia who are 65 and older is expected to grow by more than 36 percent - to 138,000 people.
> Women will gain ground toward becoming half of the labor force. By 2012, the report says, women will make up 47.8 percent of the work force - up from 46.4 percent in 2002.
> Whites, who represented 65 percent of the work force in 2002, will drop to 61.6 percent by 2012, the report says. At the same time, the percentage of Hispanic workers will grow from 5.6 percent to 7.9 percent, African-Americans will increase from 25.6 percent to 25.9 percent, and Asian and other races will grow from 3.8 percent to 4.6 percent.
It's a long way from the days when the typical father brought home the bacon to his wife and children. It's already easy to see the impact of that change on business employment practices and public policy.
As women play ever-larger roles in the work force, employers are adjusting their policies regarding telecommuting, flexible work hours and employer-sponsored child care. In order to make sure they know how to market their products to the growing number of customers who speak languages other than English, companies, including Cingular Wireless and Turner Broadcasting, are recruiting more people of all races and ethnicities.
One example of the changing labor force's effect on public policy is a debate from the 2006 session of the Georgia General Assembly. While legislators argued about how to address providing services for illegal immigrants - mostly Hispanic - untold thousands of those immigrants worked in Georgia's fields and chicken processing plants.
"There is going to be a
need for Latino workers,
and that will continue," said
Tisha Tallman, legal counsel
for the Southeast office
of the Mexican American
Legal Defense and Educational
Fund in Atlanta.
Georgia is "going to have
an aging work force. And
we are a relatively young
population. So I look at it
from the question of 'How
are we going to have comprehensive
immigration reform?' "
The challenges run from the legal to the cultural for new immigrants.
Lani Wong, chairwoman of the Atlanta chapter of the National Association of Chinese-Americans, said her group offers mentorship programs to help immigrants overcome cultural differences.
For example, she said, many Chinese immigrants haven't been exposed to the same concept of community service that Americans commonly experience as children. Because many corporations expect their top workers to embrace community service as a value, this cultural difference can be a barrier to climbing the ranks.
"We are good workers," Wong said. "We get to work at 8 a.m. and leave at 6 p.m. But we are not used to networking. We need to find a mentor in a corporation to be more of a part of it."
The need to accommodate these demographic trends has spawned an industry of consultants and analysts who help create strategies for companies to keep pace.
R. Roosevelt Thomas, who heads R. Thomas Consulting & Training in Decatur, said most companies still need to tweak their diversity management to ensure they've moved beyond holding themed weeks and numerical checklists.
"Many companies have events, like 'this is Hispanic Week' or 'Gay and Lesbian Week,' " he said. "I'm not saying this shouldn't happen, but it is only part and parcel. One human resources person told me, `We have so many events, it's almost hard to remember what we're trying to do.' "
Thomas said sustainable success of diversity management for businesses requires changes in culture and thought processes.
"There's a mind-set shift, as well as skill-building, in building on the promise of diversity," Thomas said.
To explain the gap between the effort and what he says should be the goal, Thomas offers the story of a corporate executive charged with managing diversity:
"She said: 'First we went after better representation. Then we went into sensitivity training. Then we relaxed. Then we found ourselves working on the numbers again.' And she asked, 'Is this the way it's supposed to be?' "
Thomas doesn't think so.
"The reason corporations do that is society gives you points for trying," Thomas said. "But that's the way it will be, unless you have a cultural shift. As far as the notion of managing diversity, we've only seen the tip of the iceberg."