Landfree First Nation is located on the outskirts of Kelowna British Columbia. The band has more than 2500 on-reserve members and several hundred more who live in nearby urban centres or other parts of Canada. The band employs 285 people in the band office, the community center, the health centre, the elementary school and daycare, and the four band-owned businesses - the grocery store, the cannery, small oil and gas company, and the cultural centre. During the summer, the band employs about 20 more people through student summer employment programs. Almost all of these positions go to local band members from the high schools and college. Martin Shortleg is the administrator for the band. He is originally from a First Nation in BC. He came to the band a year ago bringing with him a background in social and health program coordination and management in a couple urban Native organizations and, in recent years, was the parks and recreation manager for the municipality of Kamloops. Martin is the direct supervisor of the six managers for the band departments - Education, Economic Development, Health, Social, Cultural and Recreation Programs, and Public Works. Of the managers, four are Aboriginal and two, the Health and Education department heads, are non-Aboriginal. Only two of the managers are Landfree First Nation members. Of the many details and planning projects that Martin is presently involved in, two related issues are consuming a lot of his time lately. First, he is working on formalizing the hiring policies for the band. Second, the Education Manager position for the band school will soon become vacant. The responsibilities of this position entail overseeing the various training and education programs with the band - including overseeing the principal of the community school. One of the teachers, a Land free band member has expressed strong interest in the position. Leonard Bignose holds a teaching degree along with three years teaching experience. Prior to getting his degree a few years ago, he held the positions of youth coordinator, drug and alcohol counsellor and apprenticed as a carpenter for a while. Martin has learned the unwritten policy of the band is to hire, in order of preference, local band members, then other Aboriginal people, and then, if a qualified Aboriginal person is not amongst the applicants for a vacant position, a non-Aboriginal person will be hired. The chief and council have also told him that he should provide every opportunity possible for band members to not only work for the band, but to be mentored by qualified people so they may eventually hold most or all senior management and front line positions in the community. In the long run, he's been told, the objective is to have all positions held by an Aboriginal person. Unfortunately, a budget is often not available to employ both a mentor and a band member at the same time for a position. What seems to have been happening in a number of instances is a local member is hired for a job they are not fully qualified for, then they are forced to learn what they can on-the-job. Martin thought it would be useful to see where the band currently stood with its employment statistics. Through his research to date, he learned that of the 285 people employed by the band: 140 are band members 116 are Aboriginal from other bands across Canada 29 are non-Aboriginal - 25 of which are Caucasian, and four are of East Indian and Chinese decent Martin has also learned that the unemployment rate for the Landfree First Nation community is 45%, while Kelowna and area as a whole enjoys a rate of only 7% - the lowest it has been in twenty years. Another related thought crossed Martin's mind as he contemplated the policies he would be drafting. While working as a manager for the City of Kamloops, he was called upon to assist the human resource manager now and then made strategy to improve the recruitment, selection and retention of Aboriginal people for the municipality. The City had realized a few years back that the cultural diversity of their current employees was not representative of the diversity of the region. For example, although 13% of the population was from a visible minority background, internal human resource reports indicated only 7% of the employees self-identified themselves as being a visible minority member. Apart from this, 5% of the general population in the area was Aboriginal and only 2% of those employed by the City of Kamloops were of Aboriginal descent. Martin sat in his office late that day wondering how much of the principles of diversity in the workplace applied in this case. He knew this would impact the human resource policies he'd be recommending to chief and council. The statistics he'd drawn up glared in front of him, as well as the draft job posting for the Education Manager position. He also wondered how this band and any other Aboriginal organization could put "preference will be given to persons of Aboriginal descent" in their job ads. Didn't that violate human rights?

In your learner teams, tackle the following issues and come up with some guidelines to assist Martin in drafting a personnel policy.

1. What provincial laws and regulations should Martin be aware of in designing a new personnel policy?

2. What are the headings that Martin should use in constructing the personnel policy?

3. What advice can you give Martin about how to ensure that the personnel policies will be followed?