As a business executive at a large corporation, the goal is to provide the best services to our customers. This means that we try to hire the best and the brightest employees who are in tune with the needs of our customers and can communicate with a wide range of people. A diverse workforce is essential to any company’s success in California. Diversity allows businesses to understand better their customers’ needs and to be innovative and competitive in an increasingly global business environment. This view, to be sure, is widely shared in the business community. A recent national poll reported that 85% of the top executives at large- and medium-sized companies believe that increasing the employment of minorities and women makes their businesses more competitive (Yankelovich Partners Poll, January 1998). The affirmative action programs described in this book have played a critical role in serving the needs of California businesses. These programs have helped train large numbers of talented minorities and women who now work in the private sector. Eliminating them will undermine businesses’ efforts to recruit diverse workforces and will ultimately impact their ability to compete in a global economy. For instance, California businesses need hard-working, bicultural employees, characteristics that describe University of California student Rosa Manriquez (p. 15). They also want public schools to provide “at-risk” students with the skills and confidence to succeed-a primary goal of the American Indian Early Childhood Education Program (p. 11). Because the benefits of these programs flow well beyond the individual participants, I hope that state and local governments will continue to promote policies that make our institutions more reflective of California’s population. Such programs, in the final analysis, not only promote equality and fairness, but also make good business sense.   Robert L. Harris Vice President Community and Consumer Relations Pacific Gas & Electric Company San Francisco In the 1970s the California Legislature joined in a bipartisan effort to develop meaningful remedies to discrimination in employment, education and contracting. Working with Governor Ronald Reagan we put into place those programs that have moved this state toward closing the gap between minorities and non-minorities, men and women, haves and have-nots. I’m proud of the work we did, and for our role in permitting the disadvantaged to gain a toehold in our nation’s largest economy. But our work isn’t done. Without affirmative action programs that use the legal means of outreach, recruitment, enrichment, tutoring and counseling, the progress we’ve made in the past 20 years will quickly disappear. That’s why I ask my colleagues in today’s Legislature and the people of California to examine the threatened programs profiled in this booklet, and to recognize that there is no good reason, in law, policy or fundamental fairness, to eliminate these programs.   John T. Knox Speaker Pro Tem (Retired) California Assembly (Richmond) [1960-1980]