I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping.
If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are.
That then makes it harder for the minorities you claim to be "helping" to stay in the room anywhere else because of bad will generated by some company that wanted the headlines to include their diversity push.
Edit: In summation, do not conflate your layoffs with your "diversity".
This creates three problems. The first is that some white people who were affected will believe it was because of their race. The second is that minorities who were not affected may be assumed to have been kept because of their minority status.
But the most harmful is for minorities who were laid off. That signals that they were really subpar, even more than the average laid off person.
It seems like this policy has two negative impacts on minorities and only one on white people. Some would say that's a disparate effect on minorities, and the policy is therefore racist. /s
edit: these are just the perception problems. There's also the fact that it is possibly illegal and unethical.
But is it plain illegal. For employment purposes Race is a protected class (at least in USA) and racial discrimination while hiring or firing violates federal law. How would they get away with this?
I'm pretty sure if you are white and laid off, you will have a pretty strong case for a lawsuit. I can't believe someone in legal wouldn't warn the leadership that putting out a press release stating this was a good idea.
This is San Francisco. When I worked there (2015-2020), most of my co-workers openly endorsed hiring bias against demographics that aren't considered "diverse". I'd be highly skeptical that a jury would side with a plaintiff alleging anti-white discrimination, no matter how solid the proof. If a community widely thinks activity that is de jure illegal should be allowed then it becomes de facto permitted because even if a company engages in this behavior and gets sued they won't be held liable.
I worked in SF during the same time period, at a small startup. There would have extreme fury at the idea of hiring/firing based on anything but ability.
Again, this was a small company. Every person mattered. Every talented hire advanced the company, and every talented departure put us at risk.
Even now at the big company I work for, the small team sizes mean each dev either contributes or drains. We even have an informal budget of how much we expect contributors go drain/gain (junior devs can drain for a while, senior devs make up for it, etc).
The sort of “anti-racist” methodology suggests a mindset I don’t quite get.
Every company I know of has an extemee backlog. Product isn’t getting shipped because there aren’t enough devs.
Are people seriously saying it’s ok their company doesn’t ship as much product if it benefits historically oppressed devs?
By contrast, I was at two successful unicorns. They were both large (1,000 and 2-3,000 employees). We had the luxury of having significantly more applicants than headcount. I think the mentality is more that the product is already successful, and we have a responsibility to ensure that that oppressed people don't miss out on that success.
The irony is that most "oppressed" people hired at the companies we very well off. I'm Latin myself (a fact I don't advertise in my workplace precisely because of this discrimination) and I had a very privileged upbringing. Same with another Trinidadian engineer I spoke with. So in the end, it was a bunch of privileged white people patting themselves on the back for hiring privileged Latin and Black people.
> So in the end, it was a bunch of privileged white people patting themselves on the back for hiring privileged Latin and Black people.
While whites and Asians born into poverty, who struggled all their lives against overwhelming odds, were deprived of these opportunities due to the color of the skin they were born in.
It’s beyond ugly and the irony will be that progressives who are so concerned with how history will judge them will be judged harshly by these positions.
That's why the key point for me isn't that it's illegal (though it is): it's immoral, even if it was legal.
Discrimination against blacks in the South was legal. Plenty of people defended racism on these grounds back then: "it's legal, the courts have approved it, and therefore it must be right."
These are not the people progressives are celebrating today. In fact, they'll cancel you for being at all similar to these people. Yet they are just like them.
I think of this as the Left having lost its way (in its own sort-of marxist terms). It's overly obsessed with identity and forgets the much more important discriminant of class. A cynical analysis is that the upper classes are using this as a successful divide and conquer tactic...
It’s a communist tactic to sow division in society by raising tension along identity lines like race, etc. Of course schools usually cover this part of history as “McCarthyist nonsense.”
Legal probably approved the word "lens". And if this ends up in court they will say that "lens" means that we are aware of the impact layoffs have on our society, but does not change who we fire during a layoff, meaning even if we didn't do this through a lens the person suing would have still been let go.
If the layoff was done through the lens of racist consideration, and minority races were given preference, then the odds of a white or Asian person getting fired were higher.
That's already illegal. Even if you can somehow prove in court that "white worker X" would still be fired had he been black (already a dicey and likely impossible feat), just the fact that the employer already admitted that this worker was under more risk for getting fired due to his race, a-priory creates a cause of action against the employer.
If I say "I give preference to hiring men over women", and a woman is rejected and then sues, trying to show that I would not have hired her even if she was a man is arguing from a losing position.
As an aside, the Latin words you wanted are a priori, but you're right that race is a protected category and putting out a statement saying "we made firing decisions based on a protected category" is a bad idea for that reason.
Then the laid off employees should organize as a class action so that "this specific person would have been let go" is no longer an acceptable defense and the question can be focused on whether using a "lens" to fire people based on race is illegal. If they argue that the lens means something else or that they didn't use the lens then Twilio has potentially just filed a materially false statement with the SEC.
a lens translates things to a different view. so they either justified it somehow, or it changed the outcome. not a hair I'd want to be splitting in court.
Exactly my point. White Male CEOs are afraid of an article in a major newspaper showing them being rich next to a picture of a poor minority that they just fired. So they put a PR spin on the firings.
It's so vague and weasel-wordy - if it's genuinely 'anti-racist' then (why mention it‽ and) it doesn't disproportionately affect white people, or anyone (race-based).
I agree the implication seems very much like an intended 'affirmative'/'positive' action role-selection policy though. (I think such things are stupid - whether hiring/firing/anything - and bad for everybody, but I am white, so I try to keep that a 'lightly held' opinion.)
In the UK the law is similar to your description, but large companies also have to publish stats, and the implication seems pretty much like quotas are good/the law, it's hard to imagine anyone/entity being found guilty of (as-written) illegal discrimination on the 'positive' side that tilts you more towards balance, IMO. (IANAL.)
I don’t think this is right. Affirmative action has been upheld by the courts, and is currently in practice at some private employers (and is mandated for government contractors).
You are wrong. There is one judgement that upholds a form of affirmative action in very narrow circumstances (education) and only in very limited form, and even that is challenged in SCOTUS and likely to be overturned:
Racist discrimination is an ugly thing, even when you call it pretty names like "affirmative action".
If Affirmative Action was universally legal, than nothing would prevent racist/sexist discrimination as long as you have a nice-sounding excuse for it, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would be rendered vacant.
Women outnumber men 1.3:1 in college admissions, so Affirmative Action would let me openly discriminate in favor of men in hiring and promotion, as they are evidently a disadvantaged population compared to women.
Men actually do benefit from soft affirmative action in college admissions because of this disparity.
You can look this up for yourself, but here's one source[0]. Men are admitted at a higher rate, with worse grades and test scores, by selective universities that want to make sure they have a "balanced" class of undergraduates.
Yes, as mentioned above, there is (unfortunately) a controversial ruling (Grutter v. Bollinger) that allows for a form of discrimination in college admissions specifically. This is wrong and should stop. It's an example of SCOTUS judges allowing their political views to to override a clear interpretation of the law.
Affirmative action is not illegal. If you take action to prevent adverse impact to any protected class, that is not discrimination. If a company hires only white men and rejects every Asian candidate they have ever interviewed, or only fires Asian employees, what is your proposed remedy? Status quo?
Check out the section Discrimination v. Affirmative Action [1] and a sample of significant discrimination case outcomes.[3]
A company (Twilio) is executing a mass layoff, and is implying that it will protect certain racial minorities from this layoff. Doing this, they are necessarily discriminating against any employee who does not belong to these racial groups.
If you have employees A and B, both earning $100k/year, and your declining financials require you to save $100k/year, you must fire A or B. If you decide to fire A because s/he is white, even if it was just one factor, then you just fired a worker for their race, and violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
If you manage to implement a policy that benefits a protected class (such as a particular race or sex) without depriving a different protected class, it would not be illegal. This is not the case we are discussing here, of racial considerations affecting hiring or termination decisions.
Regarding the links you posted: It's no secret that the current administration is in favor of racist discrimination. They support Harvard's racist discrimination against Asians:
The law remains the law, and racist discrimination remains just as objectionable, even if the current administration supports it. I personally hope that any employee who was subject to racist discrimination will seek justice in court.
Change the framing from “white person was fired” to “black person was retained” and you’re suddenly back into affirmative action territory and the case whether it’s a civil rights violation becomes iffy.
You don’t actually have to avoid depriving a protected class of anything by relative omission. Otherwise affirmative action and diversity programs would be illegal, and until the courts change their mind they’re currently allowed. If you allow your reasoning to be unconstrained there is no way to provide any benefit whatsoever in any form to particular races because that would be necessarily be depriving that benefit to the compliment.
> Change the framing from “white person was fired” to “black person was retained” and you’re suddenly back into affirmative action
Change the framing from "a victim was robbed of $1,000" to "a poor person gained $1,000" and the clear crime of armed robbery becomes a positive event!
Fortunately, playing these types of games with language doesn't change the facts, or else there would be no justice; you can always "change the framing" to make any crime sound positive, by emphasizing its positive impacts and ignoring the adverse impacts.
As a matter of law, the SCOTUS unfortunately let their political views override a clear reading of the law in one case (Grutter v. Bollinger), and allowed a very limited form of affirmative action in a very specific context.
Discrimination based on race or sex in hiring and firing is still very much illegal. It's not hard to see why it's both immoral and destructive if we allow it in our society.
Your example doesn’t work because you’re just pointing out some positive aspect, it doesn’t make it not robbery. In my case the difference between firing a white person and retaining a black person changes the nature of the act as it’s viewed by the law. What is in the mind of the person carrying out an act that affects different races disproportionately matters. And if we’re we following precedent this would probably be allowed as another narrow case.
So I don’t disagree with your overall point but I also don’t think anyone is going to win a lawsuit over this without a huge case that makes it to scotus because the practice of diversity hires is common and currently tolerated. And “we looked at all our employees and chose who to retain” is isomorphic to regular affirmative action.
> I don’t disagree with your overall point but I also don’t think anyone is going to win a lawsuit over this without a huge case that makes it to scotus because the practice of diversity hires is common and currently tolerated.
According to this pessimistic viewpoint, there was no point in the civil rights movement of the 1960s that led the to revolutionary Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Black people would look around, and realize that discrimination against them is "common and currently tolerated", especially in the South, and just throw their hands in despair and live with it.
Fortunately, they didn't. And if even a single Twilio employee was fired for his race, I hope he doesn't, either. Not just for his sake, but for our sake as a society.
I don't want to live in a society where people are judged and treated according to the color of their skin.
No it isn’t, in fact private companies are encouraged (and in some cases required) to have an affirmative action policy in place.
The thing you think affirmative action means “hiring less qualified employees because of their race” is illegal. You can’t base your hiring decision on someone’s protected characteristics but you are totally free to base other things on that.
Here are some anti-* takes that are totally legal.
* Someone you’re interviewing is Latino that has only worked on small projects or small features and when asked about it they expressed that they always asked to be given bigger projects but was always turned down. You get the feeling that this was likely due to his race and so you don’t hold it against him.
* You’re interviewing a trans woman who recently quit her job while not having anything lined up. She describes the last few months as suddenly having her workload increase, her code reviews getting more critical, and her pto being denied that never had before. By your estimation it seems like she was quiet fired because of her gender alignment and so you don’t consider it a red flag.
* You have the unfortunate task of needing to drastically cut payroll expenses and finance says it will be around 20% of the workforce. You talk to your senior staff and managers to recommend low performing candidates and collect metrics like cards worked and performance reviews. You’re reviewing a woman selected for termination and notice that she seems to be closing more cards than some of her male teammates which is odd, and when you dig into the PRs they’re fine, she’s seemingly not taking on easier work, and from the comments her teammates seem to love her. So you ask the manager’s manager and find out that she’s very much a girls
girl and usually passes on the “boyish” team building activities that always get voted on like doing a work fantasy league and fishing. You think it’s pretty clear what’s going on and pick someone else from that team.
> You get the feeling that this was likely due to his race and so you don’t hold it against him.
What would cause someone to get this feeling? Does a candidate just have to indicate that he wanted bigger projects but didn't get them? Seems like the exact same thing that would happen to someone who was not ready for bigger projects.
Would you do the same thing for a dev with a strong southern accent who worked at a company with mostly left leaning employees?
> Would you do the same thing for a dev with a strong southern accent...
Abso-fucking-lutely. In fact I've actually done something similar, when you work in the somewhat affluent urban blue specs on the political map you will find genuinely talented engineers, usually self-taught too, who grew up in a small town/village and just don't have the usual pedigree of a CS degree from a random college and tech internships. I felt so bad for this one guy we hired, dude was and still is a fucking wizard at networking -- he literally runs his own ISP now as a side hustle but in the interview he didn't even have to say it, it was clear from how defensive he was saying stuff like "I know you would be taking a chance on me", "I would be fine with a probationary period" that he was getting rejected other places. So we had to interview him differently to set him up to show off what he was good at because random whiteboard algo problems wasn't it.
So it's not exactly textbook discrimination, but it is recognizing the systematic disadvantages this guy had as a result of who he is.
They're betting that a lawsuit would be so wildly unpopular that people would rather leave the money (and the principle) behind than face social exile.
Imagine being a minority applying for a job after being laid off from twilio... Like you said this is awful as hiring managers will assume they must really suck. Horrible. Horrible. It would have been fine for twilio to do the layoff the way they did but they should have just kept their mouth quiet about it instead of virtue signaling. They have done more harm than good.
However, it avoids a perception problem which may be far worse: the hypothetical perception that the people drawing up the layoffs were racist and that they disproportionately affected minorities. They wrote "Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused.." on making sure they did not.
If they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people at random, there's a chance that someone later would say "Twilio employees are 35% female, 33% Asian, 9% Latino, and 6% Black, but the laid-off employees were 11% Latino! Racism!" and turn a mob against them. Once the media/Twitter/mob believe that Twilio HR and Twilio executives are racist, those execs might try to defend themselves by saying: "We weighted based on performance reviews, added a bit of statistical noise, and then did a random selection. We believe those performance reviews to be objective and free of racial bias. We didn't even realize that Latinos were slightly over-represented in the layoffs until you mentioned it, but it looks to be merely statistical chance. We actually fired slightly more white people and more men than the statistics would suggest, we're not bigots."
...Do you think that would work?
It's far easier to defend against the accusation of being overly woke than it is to defend against the accusation of being racist, so while you'd rather be neither, it's better to overtly and publicly fail in the safer direction.
The EEOC will have something to say if your layoff disproportionate effects a protected group. The right thing here is for management to keep their mouth shut and point people to the EEOC if they believe this layoff was disproportionate.
The issue is that the layoff will disproportionately affect protected groups. Engineering is disproportionately male, east asian, south asian, and white. Companies with explicit diversity targets make up for this by compensating in other company orgs (HR, marketing, sales, admin) making them disproportionately female, black, and hispanic.
This means when you keep good engineers but lay off HR, marketing, sales, and admin employees, the layoffs look really bad in terms of affected protected groups.
Bingo. This is the double-edged sword of heavy affirmative action in hiring. If things get tough and you have to make cuts to save the company, the people who you should let go are disproportionately from affirmative action groups.
Obviously the answer is to fire the expensive engineers (keep a skeleton crew for maintenance and bugfixes) and keep the sales & marketing folks. If 20 years working in engineering has taught me anything it's that sales and marketing is where the real money is made.
> f they ignored race entirely, and just laid off people at random, there's a chance that someone later would say "Twilio employees are 35% female, 33% Asian, 9% Latino, and 6% Black, but the laid-off employees were 11% Latino! Racism!"
It's not a chance, it's a guarantee. Every layoff gets lawsuits claiming discrimination and has so for decades. Which is why virtually every company does this analysis as a normal part of executing a layoff... and has done so for decades.
Is the first problem not the immediate implication of laying people off through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens? You have to assume that the lens selected not exclusively on merit, but also on factors like race, gender, orientation, or creed, in some measure, or in at least one instance. Otherwise, the lens could be said the exist, ever vigilant in its purpose, and yet was not required in this particular batch of layoffs, thank God. The belief that individuals were affected due to their race, orientation, gender, or religion, may be far more pervasive due to the framing than is actually warranted; that I concede.
They say anti-racist but they really just mean racist. They are taking race into account when making staffing decisions. It's as illegal as the extra "side pot" of raise money my company has for diverse employees.
Companies care about diversity numbers when they have a lot of cheap funding.
When funding is tough, pure capitalism takes over woke values and it is up to whether your monetary value to the company>your monetary cost to the company.
There are lots of studies claiming that diversity makes companies more successful. But all that I've seen are correlational studies. And those are equally explained by the idea you mentioned. When companies are flush, they spend money on affirmative action. Therefore companies that have heavy affirmative action tend to be more successful.
All the 3 are immediate implications of that statement.
The belief that individuals were affected due to their race, etc will almost certainly be pervasive because the upper management claimed that it's what happened. And that will be despite the fact that upper management is almost certainly not competent enough to decide on the competence of the people they are laying off (they never are).
They apparently laid off white people at a higher rate than they would have. Otherwise the statement about using an anti-racist lens would be incredibly misleading.
"Than they would have" if what though? They just allowed subconscious racist biases to affect their decision making?
It's not like we lack evidence that this does in fact happen.
If an "anti-racist lens" means anything other than "processes to help avoid the effect of subconscious racial bias" I'd agree it's a problem.
There are actual studies showing 95-99% of us have subconscious racist biases.
And so what which races they favour? I'd call it a massive fail for any "anti-racist lens" if, say, only whites were fired.
(You also mention "men" - subconscious sexist biases are just as universal. For highly skilled roles unfortunately they very much typically favour men.)
The field of subconscious biases suffers from several fatal defects. The scores people get on subconscious bias tests vary wildly over time, even short periods of time. This is a fundamental flaw and should be the end of the inquiry. If we can't measure the thing, we can't draw any conclusions about it.
Also, there has never been a linkage drawn between scores on subconscious bias tests and real world actions. Are racists probably "subconsciously biased"? Sure. But the reverse has never been shown.
Actually we can and do measure it and such linkages have been demonstrated. There are probably more succinct references, but here was one of the first I found:
Another study found that anonymizing resumes actually hurt minority candidates. [1] This is because the companies were trying hard to help people with minority sounding names and no longer could.
Anonymizing seems like an appropriate way to handle layoffs as well. It may be hard to do because some managers know the people involved. But they could force all decisions to be justified and externally reviewed by others who don't know the demographics.
No one would have had a problem if they described a rigorous process of anonymizing the layoff decisions. It swings the pendulum too far to go full on anti-racist. Others point out it's also illegal.
"Anti-racist" to me simply means "against racism; actively ensuring racism doesn't occur". Maybe it means something different in the US.
The idea of a company trying hard to "help people with minority sounding names" sounds pretty absurd to me.
As a Latino, I too am growing tired of the way some leadership and HR departments in tech callously, carelessly push and promote these diversity initiatives in a way that creates resentment. Combating racial bias is a sensitive topic. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that. And yet companies continue to make statements like this without the tact it deserves.
Let's give them the benefit of the doubt, and say that they really were trying to fight inequity in the system. Instead of saying something like "Historically layoffs in tech have disproportionately affected minorities, pregnant women, and older employees. Here's a link to a study showing that data. With these layoffs we ensured that no group was affected unfairly", they just throw out the term anti-racist, and let the audience draw their own conclusions.
Because at the end of the day, making sure their layoffs don't unfairly target X or Y disadvantaged group--or really any group--is just doing the right thing. Why brag about the fact that your HR policies are not systemically flawed? It's as if you came home to your partner and proudly stated that on your drive back home you did NOT run over any elders or toddlers with your car. You're expected to do that. If anything taking credit makes people wonder.
In this case, it comes across as virtue signaling by Twilio's leadership. The same desire to curry favor when laying off people that makes CEOs tell their employees how hard the decision was for him or her. Trying to pat yourself in the back while announcing layoffs seems wildly tone-deaf to me. And at the expense of the groups they're allegedly trying to protect.
Curious how you feel about the term LatinX that all tech companies are embracing? Reason I ask is I have a few really good friends who are Hispanic(Nicaraguan, Dominican, Mexican) and they all despise that term. I don't know why its used and it seems strange as its been forced on us the past few years with no consulting or buy-in from any of the Hispanic employees at these companies. Even outside polls found that a huge majority (96%) of Hispanic people dislike this term but its still being used.
While I appreciate the sentiment behind LatinX, my main issue with it is that it's mostly a distraction. I can't speak for women, but I imagine their top worries are things like the amount of violence against women [1] (at least in Mexico where my family is originally from), unequal pay, how much the burden of having children rests on their shoulders and limits their careers, etc. You know, stuff that has a significant impact on their lives. Spanish defaulting to male form of words is an archaic reflection of how male-centered the culture is, but it's not the wheel that needs greasing. Trying to change the language to make it less male-focused is both awkward and also seems like a consolation prize that moves the needle for women exactly zero amount. It creates an illusion of progress, while not solving any of the big problems.
The people that tend toward terms like Latinx treat non-white folks like children, constantly getting offended on their behalf and denying them agency. It's ironic that many "anti-racists" act in a racist manner.
Most of the people I've heard self-identify as LatinX are queer Hispanic people who grew up in an English-speaking country (ie. second-generation immigrants).
Their primary language is English, so any difficulty pronouncing LatinX in Spanish doesn't matter as much to them. They're not necessarily looking to solve the gendered nature of Spanish overall, and may not even speak it fluently. Also, similar early English terms for gender-equality/non-binary identities were equally difficult to pronounce (the title Mx., neo-pronouns like xie/zer).
I'm curious how the data would look split by gender/country of origin/LGBTQ+ or not.
I’m Spanish and have friends all over Latin America. we often laugh about the term. Some people in the US decided to put a rich variety of cultures and historical backgrounds in the same bag.
Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico… all have fascinating cultures and histories on their own. All erased and stereotyped by a bland externally imposed term like Latinx that is not even pronounceable in Spanish. It feels like the colonialism that some are supposedly trying to fight against.
It's believers in the cause (either genuinely or performatively) trying to rise above one another in moral status. Sometimes it sticks, sometimes it backfires as it did with Twitch: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56251452
I find the whole Latino/Latinx switch attempt especially shortsighted, because it is commonly just used as a catch-all term for "person from Central/South America".
But, there are millions of native people from those places who don't view themselves as Latino, and, if anything, see the Latins as invaders/colonizers/oppressors. For example, if you're a K’iche’ speaker from Guatemala, you may not even speak Spanish, and you probably don't self identify as "Latino".
> they just throw out the term anti-racist, and let the audience draw their own conclusions.
It's pretty clear what antiracist means:
> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
Yes, the difference is that responsibility is diffused in the former and nobody can be held accountable for it, despite a similar outcome.
And there are plenty of institutions (law enforcement in particular, but there are many others) that actively behave in a racist manner. Again, since there's no policy, nobody in practice can be held accountable for it.
So no, nobody should be surprised that racism is alive and well in 2022. It thrives in the intersection of personal bigotry and the wide open space of discretionary power exercised by figures of authority.
One cannot logically conclude from a "racist" outcome, however that is defined, that the inputs to that outcome are also racist, because the intervening interactions are so complex and uncontrollable (that is, it is a chaotic system) that the outcome that emerges is almost always not what anybody intended. That is, the activities of institutions with no "actively racist" policies may very well result in "racist" outcomes. I believe we are in agreement here.
Where we disagree is on the thesis that you can control for the outcome of such a chaotic system, especially using something as flawed as the postmodern "anti-racist" movement that is in vogue. Many eggs have already been and will continue to be broken in service of the anti-racist omelette, and we will all be the worse off for it.
I don't get why they had to make that public statement in the first place. They could have kept that to themselves and complete the layoff just fine without the inflammatory statements, while still practicing whatever fashionable principles they choose. Is this a way to signal piety to the tech community in the hopes that more people aligned with those politics will apply there in the future?
I think your religious metaphor is exactly on point and it makes perfect sense if you take it seriously. Why do Christian companies talk about God when they make business decisions? They're not implementing some complex sociopolitical strategy, they just think God is important so they like to spread His message whenever they get the opportunity. It's the same phenomenon.
> Why do Christian companies talk about God when they make business decisions? They're not implementing some complex sociopolitical strategy, they just think God is important so they like to spread His message whenever they get the opportunity. It's the same phenomenon.
I find that equally obnoxious. If I wanted to hear about "God", I'll go to a local church/fellowship/insert whichever place of worship for any religion...not from a soul-less business.
I think hardly anything should be conflated with diversity tbh. About 5 years ago nothing was really attributed to diversity, except maybe in some remote areas. The new push to call everything anti-racist is making everyone very racist. It's a very weird moment.
>If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are.
I mean, this isn't a question. They're saying it outright. When picking who to layoff, race was a factor. If you don't like it, take it up with people making those decisions.
It isn’t. The law is race neutral on this; and hiring/firing discrimination on the basis of race, against any race, is a good way to open yourself up to lawsuits. It’s up to HR departments and ultimately their bosses if they want to play with fire or not.
In large part because the argument has been, from Judges like Justice Ginsberg, that you aren't taking away anything from anyone by offering "marginalized people" special privilege. Which is an awful rationale since seats at a university or at a job via affirmative action are in fact using a limited resource, but the argument has some semblance of logic in that the position is virtual until it is filled. In this case, you are literally taking a thing away from people based on their race and there's no possible argument when the CEO states it in plain text.
> The law forbids discrimination when it comes to any aspect of employment, including hiring, firing, pay, job assignments, promotions, layoff, training, fringe benefits, and any other term or condition of employment.
This makes it sound like affirmative action is illegal. But it is currently allowed and many companies brag about doing it.
What Twilio is doing is basically the same. It's like affirmative action for layoffs.
I agree that GP was wrong to say that discrimination is mandated, which it is not.
Affirmative action in hiring for jobs in the US is illegal. University admissions are different, but it is straightforwardly illegal to say, "I'm hiring a software engineer, I have two candidates, I prefer the one who is black because of his race."
I don't think that link is using the term the same way you are. It's more focused on making sure there's a wide recruiting funnel and having boring mandatory diversity trainings. Not taking race into consideration for hiring/firing decisions.
Consider: It is illegal but very difficult and expensive to prove in court. Not even your average software dev could easily eat the legal fees required, and therefore they are incentivized to shut up and look for another job.
It is still a question. There could people who are clearly not performing and then are let go that just so happen to not be a part of the "protected group". People are not being let go because of who they are, it's just a part of the calculus. It may not be the significant factor.
> People are not being let go because of who they are
This is a common tactic from progressive in that they flat out deny the reality that everyone else see. They just say "it doesn't happen" when the CEO in a letter that was filed stated they specifically did this.
Dude, I don't know why you're trying to paint me as something when I'm the OP of the thread that has taken umbrage with the layoffs. First, go outside and breathe.
Second, the statement clearly says that it is a part of the calculus. Nobody is fired because they are white or black or whatever. The statement is just that it is taken into consideration (which is something that I have issue with).
Please (and I mean this in the most considerate way because you're on the internet just randomly labeling people) touch grass.
"Part of the calculus" is just a euphemism indicating that race was a criteria that was possibly the reason someone was layed off. Let's be honest shall we instead of trying to play mental gymnastics.
Imagine if the response to the Civil rights movement was "its okay stop complaining, race is just part of the calculus we use to determine who gets to go on the front of the bus, no one is forced to sit in the back because of race, it's just part of the calculus". No one would fall for that lame excuse to cover discrimination.
First, you're responding negatively to me about something that I ORIGINALLY said that I didn't like. So I'm not sure where the energy is coming from, but that's fine.
Secondly, busing does not compare to at will employment? The analogy also ignores the power dynamic behind racism (and all -isms), but that's a longer discussion than I'm willing to have here.
Lastly, I'm not sure who the "we" was there... but whoever the in-group that you're associate with is, I would suggest they look more at the socioeconomic conditions that we are all living through that lead us to these conversations filled with baseless accusations and labeling rather than making minorities the targets of your fears of replacement.
I cannot think of another reasonable interpretation of what the CEO said than "we considered race/class/some other attribute as part of a person's performance and suitability for continued employment at the company". If two people were otherwise equal int heir performance, but one was black, and the other white, I woudl expect that to be the determining feature.
I don't have any insight into what they are actually doing.
They said it was a factor. Twilio I'm sure had said they've been trying to diversify their workforce for years and you didn't care (which is the same thing, just through hiring instead of firing).
It is you parachuting in to be offended that is the disingenuous thing here.
The US Civil Rights Movement's hard-won successes in the 1960s were essentially the beginning of something resembling equality-before-the-law for black folks in the US, and it's still well within living memory.
Mind, I'm also not particularly comfortable with racist hiring practices, no matter who's being targeted. Just pointing out that widespread de jure inequality based on race, plus various extremely-racist practices that were carried out and weren't illegal (as distinct from the law calling for racial discrimination explicitly, which was also still a thing then) were major factors in the US until not that long ago, including, crucially, housing and financial discrimination that left black people behind in the post-WWII economic boom—the short version is that they were flat-out banned from many of the best up-and-coming neighborhoods, and if they could find a good neighborhood that'd let them buy a house, they'd have, all else being equal, a much harder time securing a loan than a white person. This had measurable and pronounced effects on poverty rates and general financial well-being for them and their families, decades later.
And even the US Civil War wasn't that long ago. There were still a handful of former slaves alive in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was going on, IIRC. The US Civil War was the early and mid 1860s, about 100 years earlier—there were no combatants left alive by the 1960s ("fun fact": a few married-later-in-life widows of soldiers were still alive and receiving Civil War pensions, though!) but there were surely at least a few born-into-slavery-in-1865 slaves still alive 95-100 years later. The war freed them from slavery but they spent basically their whole lives under regimes of legally endorsed racial discrimination, with the tide only turning as the last of them died.
I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I mean just look at Ahmaud Arbery, whose 3 white male murderers were initially not arrested or charged with a clearly obvious murder. In 2020!
Thanks! Was trying to keep it concise and tight enough to be both informative and interesting to someone who's not American, while still hitting the "highlights", especially the relative recency of outright racist laws and of how recently private and public racial discrimination was legal (if not always required by law) and normal.
> I'd also just like to highlight how much extrajudicial violence there was perpetrated by white men against minorites, which while technically illegal was just completely overlooked by the white male dominated political and judicial system. For example the Tulsa Race Massacre.
... which is why I didn't even try to cover these instances of what I guess could be grouped together as something like "civil strife", which actions were or are explicitly outside the law, not simply not-illegal, but have been or are often tolerated or overlooked, but you're absolutely right to bring them up.
In the case of the Civil Rights Movement it wasn't only (though, to be clear, it was mostly) black people being killed by racists, often with no consequences for the perpetrators—several white participants in civil rights marches and rallies were also targeted and murdered. Often Quakers or (IIRC?) Catholics, participating in part due to their religious convictions—the whole "social justice" angle held greater sway in US Catholicism then than it does now, I gather, which was also evident in the anti-war movement of the 60s and 70s. These killings weren't legal, of course, and I expect they'd have been quite unpopular if you'd polled the whole US population, but such actions had enough support locally, including among public officials, that many of the killers escaped justice anyway, so long as the killings were in the name of preserving white supremacy, even if that meant killing some white people, too.
A read over a Wikipedia timeline of 1960s US history is pretty wild—the entire decade was batshit crazy, not to put too fine a point on it.
The person you are responding to didn't mention slavery, and knowing the etymology of a word doesn't mean that you know how the phenomenon may have historical echoes.
The etymological relationship between "slav" and "slavery" (which is a contested relation at best) doesn't answer the question about your depth in American race relations?
The answer also shows a lack of knowledge about anything other than the headline "slavery".
serious question - instead of debating the issue, why do you quiz them on their personal knowledge of history? If you'd like to make a point, make it. but demanding they justify their knowledge of history isn't a point in your favor, it rather appears you're incapable of providing a logical argument so will ad hominem their knowledge of history instead.
Who are you to quiz random people on the internet on historical context, and what does that have to do with the legality of hiring or firing based on race?
It seems to me like you're trying to justify institutionalized systematic racism on the basis of 'historical context'.
Race is a social construct that only has any relevance in it's historical context. If somebody is not aware of the relevant context as it relates to the US (they specifically said they were not from the US) then of course it would be very difficult to understand the point of the policies.
Most people are willfully ignorant and like to "play dumb" while making bad faith arguments about issues like this. I was merely trying to inquire if the OC was ignorant and willing to learn or willfully ignorant.
>Race is a social construct that only has any relevance in it's historical context
race plays a role in college admissions, and now in this layoff, and maybe hiring at the same company. so clearly it has relevance today in its current context.
>it would be very difficult to understand the point of the policies.
which policies? making hiring and firing decisions based on race is illegal in the USA.
>Most people are willfully ignorant and like to "play dumb" while making bad faith arguments about issues like this. I was merely trying to inquire if the OC was ignorant and willing to learn or willfully ignorant.
You didn't make any arguments at all, you just started quizzing them on their knowledge.
Again, it just seems like you're trying to legitimize systemic institutional racism on the basis of 'historical context' of a 'social construct'.
race "the social construct" is still closely related to genetic history. Pretending there is no relationship isn't very useful. In making your response, assume I am a scientists who knows facts.
I’m sorry, but present racism is not absolved by last racism. There is no “historical context” that excuses a society from promoting race based discrimination. Period.
The historical context makes it all even more unfavorable towards Americans as a group. They come out as fundamentally incapable of not being racist or xenophobic. They are only able to fight discrimination with discrimination, and „antiracism” is racism because no matter what sign you put to it, you’re moving along that bloody axis, and it’s being on that axis at all that is the problem, and that you are incapable of derailing yourself from it. It’s just what you do.
But I bet you’ll say that I don’t make sense and that I don’t understand anything, and that history this and context that. So be it. Proves my point, in a way. Dragonslayers turning into the dragons they’ve slain and all that.
And what do you imagine the effect of that "factor" would be?
Taking offense to unfair firing practices also doesn't mean one doesn't take offense to unfair hiring practices. But the topic at hand is layoff, not hiring.
The argument seems to be "a little discrimination is okay". So, I guess the question would be, what is an acceptable coefficient for the race variable, for it to be okay?
"Part of the calculus" implies there is a specific point at which racial discrimination stepwise goes from bad to not-bad, and I'm curious what that weighting value is.
Obviously if I institute a total no-blacks policy, that's a problem. But what if I only mark down black people, say, 20%? Are EEOC investigators going to rubber-stamp my racist employment decisions then?
Perhaps when you do layoffs naively, you can accidentally adversely affect certain groups. For example, if your policy was last in - first out, you would likely be letting go a disproportional number of young workers.
I can't say wether anything like that was the case, nor would I counter the experience of responders here saying that they as minorities find actions like Twillio's harmful. Nor do I comment on whether the messaging was done well. Only that the situation can have nuance.
I agree with you but it's nothing new. The same thing happens all the time during hiring and college admission decisions. I think the unintended consequence of all such programs will be resentment and mistrust.
"I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping."
How do they know who is what race though? If I am 50% latino / 50% asian what does that mean? Do you get to pick? Or do they test my skin color? Do they have forms to fill out what race you are? Do they do genetic testing? Depressing racism is back.
Soon after George Floyd, my manager came under immense pressure from HR to inquire me about my race. I declined to comment. So they decided to mark me as a minority based on my ethnic name. It still bothers me to this day that my race is so outright asked in the office to used to determine my employability, recognition, bonuses, and promotion. It was a turning point in my career. I thought to myself, "wow, here we are. I didn't think we'd get here, but I now work for a racist company and society at large."
When I refused to log my race in our HR system they said they would use “perceived race” to report my race to the government. I specifically asked them to not guess my race and they said tough luck they are doing it anyway. It’s outrageous.
Making an assumption, so far I have only read the CNBC article.
Many of the recent tech layoffs included entire departments not entirely related to the operation of the business, the core product. For example: recruiting departments. When entire diversity departments were terminated, many considered the move racist. Perhaps Twilio found themselves in this scenario?
i think everyone's point is taking race into account in any shape or form is illegal, so not firing black people but still needing to fire 11% means in turn you are firing more non-black people to fill the gap, meaning those people were fired based on race and not performance, which IANAL is illegal
The problem is not just the letter of the law, it's the culture that would even create such a policy in the first place. The law can help some, assuming SCOTUS knocks this down, but it doesn't address the root cause. The people who came up with this will still be in positions of power.
Every layoff I've seen is analyzed for a disparate impact against protected classes. This is straightforward defense against a discrimination lawsuit, where the demographics of the layed off population and the retained population will be compared as exhibit 1.
I suspect this is just Twilio trying to get social justice credit for standard HR practices.
When one looks at the industry as a whole, one might conclude that the aim is to turn the working class against each other. It's almost as if the thing corporate America is most afraid of is a unified workforce.
The issue is that it becomes necessary as marginalized candidates are given preferences during the hiring phase. So if the same privilege is not extended during layoffs it will unfairly impact them.
It is brutally unfair to hire by one standard and then suddenly hold them to a higher one. And fairness aside, if you do not look through an anti-racist/anti-oppression lens you would destroy years of work of improving company diversity.
Does this imply that you think that minority candidates that were hired were not as qualified as non-minority candidates? That's the only way I can parse your statement that these affirmative action hires were hired by one standard and then held to a higher standard when fired.
To be marginalized is to be cheaper. All else equal, the cheaper worker will be given preference during hiring. So long as the worker remains cheaper, all else equal, the cheaper worker will also be given preference during layoffs. If the worker works their way up into a position that they are no longer cheaper, they won't be given preference, but they also aren't marginalized anymore so you would't expect preference.
They should clarify that race, gender, etc. was not a factor in their decision making process. Although then it would be hard to make sense of their statement.
Reading the post in context, I think it seems like they were trying to say that they went out of their way to ensure race was not a factor in the layoff decision process, but it does come across… as not a great look.
It reminds me a bit of the “asbestos free” xkcd comic. Like, I’m sure there are some companies still who would try to first fire the black folk or the Indian folk or whatever. But… is there really a big tech firm where that’s a possibility? I kinda doubt it.
I feel like the statement that the layoffs "were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens" puts a target on the backs of the people who you claim to be helping.
If you're affected by layoffs described this way, you then question whether that was because of who you are.
That then makes it harder for the minorities you claim to be "helping" to stay in the room anywhere else because of bad will generated by some company that wanted the headlines to include their diversity push.
Edit: In summation, do not conflate your layoffs with your "diversity".