Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Yes, in the same way it would be a bad idea to require employees needing larger sizes to pay for any extra cost. When you buy a lunch for employees, you don't charge people who might eat more an extra fee either. The whole point of these is to build community within the organization or team. Excluding certain groups is a horrible idea. Doing it based on sex, religion, or ethnicity is a whole extra level of bad and stupid rolled into one.

View on HN

What if you went to a restaurant for a Friday lunch (on the company's dime), and everyone orders a sandwich, except one individual (who may be of different race, sex, or size) that orders a steak and lobster meal? Could you discriminate by denying the request, or asking them to pay out of pocket? Does coming up with a rule ahead of time remedy the potential discrimination?

You probably think you're being clever by coming up with all of these "But... but what if!" scenarios, but you're not. You're just looking like you're trying to excuse their behavior.

this isn't equivalent. In your scenario the single employee is choosing to take advantage of the company's hospitality and I think their manager would be right to either deny that or speak to them afterwards.

Except the world isn't run by some computer blindly following a strict set of rules. Obviously if someone orders a steak and lobster meal, they might not deserve the same treatment. If someone orders a vegetarian meal, or a kosher meal, etc, then they probably _should_ be covered. It's a judgement call with shades of grey, yes, but it's not too difficult to see which side is "right"

Reading your post makes me think that we might need to have two standards: one that employees apply to their employers, and another that regulators apply to employers. I am reluctant to give broad discretionary powers to regulators with limited accountability and insight, but I think that employees make up a fairly good 'jury', as they experience the work environment every day. My next question is whether the employees should have some remedy or options outside of quitting. It seems that people's experiences with 'HR' are very mixed (and often negative), so companies might need some kind of arbitrator, panel, or other problem-solver.

edit: a now-deleted response to this comment said that an 'ombudsman' can fill the 'problem-solver' role. I am not familiar with how that would work, but that comment said that 'ombudsmen' were effective in their case.

HR is already supposed to be an arbitrator; adding another one, external but still economically dependent on one side of the dispute, is just papering over the cracks.

This is why employment laws, with all their warts, are necessary: because the justice system is (or rather, should be) completely independent from capital. The State is the only power that can force employers to act against their own self interest, because it does not rely on their welfare.

What you choose to order at the restaurant is very different from what size or shape you happen to be.

I'll bet that the correlation is good enough for you to prove 'disparate impact'.

That's great except these women didn't choose to be women. Picking a sandwich is a trivial decision and not the basis of who you are. It's telling that your immediate response to this is to concoct some specious argument to show how there maybe wasn't bias.

I am not trying to show whether there was or was not bias, as I don't find Uber's particular case very interesting. I am more interested in finding what the limits of discrimination and accommodation are, and I thought that thinking out loud on HN might allow others to share their insights. I was apparently wrong to do so.

I really think this is the sort of thinking you could have done not out loud. It seems obvious to me that someone who orders a jacket that fits them did not choose the shape of their body, and someone who orders a steak and lobster meal usually (in the absence of some medical condition) did choose to want a steak and lobster meal, and that there's a fundamental difference between being inclusive to people of all body shapes and being inclusive to people of all lunch preferences.

I make this comment out loud because I might be wrong, and if there's some insight here about how this train of thought does not occur to you, I'm genuinely curious.

I agree that there is a difference, but I'll bet that larger people (in height, weight, or both) order larger meals, so you could make a case that not paying for the larger meal was discriminatory.

I agree that the meal analogy is not a great one, but I am using it because it was in the article, and another commenter replied to me with it. I try to avoid 'fighting the hypothetical' by changing the example.

Lets not rush to judgement, please. The gp might just be playing Devil's Advocate here. To be sure, you hear these kinds of arguments all the time and your answer is very helpful and not something I recognized immediately (perhaps I am a little misogynistic? Definitely horrified by that thought and do want to change/learn more).

Fair enough. I think unconscious bias like this is incredibly frustrating for people who can see it and feel its effects.

When you're on the other side and aren't affected by these issues, it's easy to critique legitimate concerns somewhat academically, ignoring how insensitive it looks to others.

A sane manager will pick a restaurant with entrees of a reasonable price, or let the team know beforehand what items might be off limits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com