Comment by raxxorraxor a day ago
With DEI you had to care about the same "structural issues®". It wasn't exactly employee representation and much more of a HR tool to sanction mostly low level employees.
Usually I don't care about race and sex at work and I am not sad that DEI is gone. Creates room for issues much more relevant to work. Like working hours, salaries, holidays, health insurance and general work benefits. Stuff that matters.
I am an ethnic minority, not visibly though and not from any DEI bucket. But that doesn't matter. Some DEI proponents perhaps meant well, but the way the went about was simply the wrong one. Criticism wasn't welcomed at all, even treating everybody the same regardless of sex or race was looked down upon. Words like racism were redefined and you had to adhere to certain dogmata.
The classic approach to treat everyone equally is still better, even if there is some prejudice left. And that doesn't preclude any program that helps those in need. And here the same thing is true: Race and sex are irrelevant.
Some proponents of DEI had their own problems with prejudice to solve in my experience. So perhaps the onus should be that everyone works on their own personal prejudices for now.
Some things will be unfair, but introducing more unfairness doesn't solve any problems. And here DEI simply failed in its approach. A bad job market doesn't mean we can discriminate those that might have been more lucky regardless of reasons. The task would be to fix the job market.
To propose two groups of minorities against some diffuse ethnic majority is simply childish, comes with multiple problems and it doesn't provide tangible benefits to anyone in the long run. I would argue it even entrenches prejudices and pits people against each other.
My experience of DEI was as ideological cover to offshore jobs to India.
While the executive team performed sweeping layoffs to push up the stock price and increase their own compensation, they paid lip service to DEI as if engaged in a karmic balancing act and that was their cheat code.
And the company culture degraded as a result. Far more inter-group fighting, more politicking, more backstabbing, less cooperation.
I’m not there anymore, but I hear they are trying to revert things back, slowly. Basically every project since then has been a failure and they’ve been coasting on their original success.
Good people don’t need three letter acronyms to treat others fairly, and if someone is selling you new holier-than-thou rules, it’s worth asking what moral cost they no longer feel they need to pay.
Sure. And those with power will protect their groups first - or lose that power.
Which has been playing out for years now.
And DEI took the ‘we don’t go racist/sexist/etc’ off the table, as the various groups were being blatantly racist, sexist, etc.
So now it is being used against those groups.
DEI explicitly took ‘we don’t do that’ off the table, by proactively discriminating based on those factors.
And at first, when the pie is growing, that doesn’t threaten entrenched groups as much, so it mostly can happen.
In a zero (or negative) sum game world (layoffs, hiring freezes), what do you think is going to happen?
People with power will use the same tools to protect themselves or even acquire more power, and those without power will be ground under the same gears.
I’ve seen it happen in every major society - from India to Chile to Europe to the US.
In the US it’s getting particularly out of control (in both directions) for a number of factors - and very high publicity - but it’s way more blatant almost everywhere else in fact.
That's because you are not impacted I assume. If you are from the DEI bucket then there is nothing more important. Every few years they come out with a study where all they do is change the name on resumes. Having a black sounding naming still, in modern day, greatly reduces your chances of getting an interview. Except, during the most current rendition of this study found that wasn't true at all at companies that had DEI policies. That is huge if people can determine your ethnicity based on your name.
All your "more important" issues are predicated on the idea that you can get a job. For those who are unfairly discriminated against, they don't even get to your point. Who cares about employer healthcare when you have no employer?