Given that last week the San Diego City Council approved a $400,000 contract to retain law firm, Burke, Williams & Sorenson (BWS), to represent the city in labor negotiations, City Councilmembers Todd Gloria and Carl DeMaio should recommend revising the Equal Opportunity (EO) policy.

The EO policy, which requires businesses to account for the percentages of women and minorities in their employ compared with those in the general population, does not currently stipulate that GLBT employees be accounted for. It should.

Further, the EO policy does not currently address how businesses will attempt to increase minority percentages. It should.

Contractors working for the city should be required to document both percentages of minority employees and how they are recruiting them. Doing so would not mean asking for names, only for anonymous self-disclosures. And it would not require quotas or hiring preferences, simply proof of best effort to increase the numbers of minority employees on staff.

The EO policy is designed to weed out businesses that engage in employment discrimination. For example, the largest employer of first-year attorneys is the U.S. Department of Defense; yet, under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” it will not hire someone who is openly gay or lesbian. Similarly, last year the Department of Justice (Office of Inspector General) revealed that it screened out applicants who were members of “PrideLaw” and other like gay advocacy groups. And the National Law Journal reported two years ago that even the nation’s largest law firms report a nominal percentage of “openly gay and lesbian” attorneys.

Burke, Williams & Sorenson is an outstanding law firm that the city has used before to negotiate labor contracts. To its credit, the firm agreed to cut its hourly rates by 6 percent (in support of city employees taking a similar cut). Nevertheless it has a contract worth $400,000 – approximately last year’s price – at a time when legal fees are in sharp decline, many public entities pay lump sums or flat rates and despite Councilmember Marti Emerald having expressed concern that the firm’s diversity hires are declining.

If that’s true, BWS is not alone. Gays and other minorities continue to be discriminated against in business. With regard to law in particular, the bias begins with the American Bar Association permitting certain law schools, such as Pepperdine, to refuse to admit openly gay students and continues into the recruitment process when law firms reject hiring openly GLBT lawyers.

If the city revised its EO policy, it could begin to rectify this by giving preference to those firms that reflect San Diego’s diversity.