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.
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.