'Old white guy' can move forward with workplace bias suit against AT&T
reuters.com
reuters.com
To me this is obvious. A plain reading of EOCC employment discrimination regulations make this obvious.
The mere fact that this is deemed as "novel" or newsworthy or intriguing is a poor reflection of society itself. Fortunately the judges all understand it, even if this diverges so heavily from the general population (including employer's) understanding of race and sex inclusion/discrimination.
But it kind of reminds me of academia, when all the students get it wrong, then maybe its the teacher! Leaving everyone to their own devices to implement an abstract concept of DEI and Affirmative Action keeps leading to the same implementation flaws and polarizing resentment over and over and over again.
>To me this is obvious. A plain reading of EOCC employment discrimination regulations make this obvious.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I think this is less obvious when looking at how they define age discrimination. Specifically the protected class is people over 40. Why is that distinction made instead of a blanket "no one can be discriminated against based on their age"? Doesn't that imply it is trying to protect a specific group rather than force equal treatment? Why can't a young person sue for age discrimination? How is that logically different from a white person suing for racial discrimination?
Perhaps people have morphed their internal definition of the word "discrimination" into something that differs from the dictionary and therein lies the objection?
Old people are often just as intelligent as their younger colleagues, and often wiser as well. Of course there are exceptions, but there are poor performers at every age bracket for a variety of reasons.
By that logic, you shouldnt hire women, since they may get pregnant and take extensive leave on your company’s dime. Or men, whose partner could get pregnant (or adopt).
> have/spend time with their families
Applies to anyone over the age of 18. Probably under 18 too.
> theyve already been trained in some other work method
Which is why once you learn one programming language, you are immediately banned for working with any other language.
Although you're presenting this as obviously absurd, taking that risk into account was long practice wasn't it? Forcing companies to pretend women are as likely to suddenly disappear for long periods as men is ultimately an economic choice and debatable as such in economic terms. It's essentially a kind of welfare that companies are made to pay, except instead of being an insurance scheme with actuarial rigor and smooth risk sharing over the entire population, it's a form of regressive taxation that disproportionately impacts smaller firms.
It can therefore be argued that it'd be better for society to take a different approach here, maybe more similar to (non-US) healthcare, e.g. mandatory maternity leave insurance, and then allow companies to simply price in the higher risk of extended absences. If they're no longer on the hook for paying wages this difference would be basically disruption risk and shouldn't be a particularly large difference for any but the tiniest firms, especially as motherhood comes with a much longer notice period than the typical resignation.
When someone is too young, however, there can be some guaranteed deficiencies that don't require any assumptions in order to know the requirements can't be met; for example, if you are looking to hire someone to create and execute a 10-year plan with prior experience doing so, it's impossible for a very young person to be qualified.
We hired them for prior experience on purpose, yes.
> have/spend time with their families,
If that stands out, your company has a serious culture problem.
> have retirement sooner,
Isn't the average time at a job like 3 years in tech? Who cares if they leave for another company or retire at the end? Outside of tech I'm still skeptical that the odds of jumping for another job vs retiring is that different, actually.
Also for all the other comments mentioning experience. Decisions based on experience are not discrimination because experience is pertinent to one's effectiveness in a job. It isn't discrimination if an NFL team decides not to hire a disabled player because the job of being a football player has strict physical requirements. It doesn't matter that the player's disability might normally qualify as a protected class in another line of work. It isn't discrimination because the job requires that selection criteria.
Do you have cases which survived appeal which sustain this? Judges' opinions tend to be way more sober than they're portrayed in the media, which mostly focusses on which side won.
Griggs vs. Duke Power does not, in any way, establish that White males are less protected than anyone else, which was the question. And your rants about it in this post wouldn't make that different even if they were accurate.
> The CRA explicitly allows testing.
So does Griggs. If, and here Griggs quotes the language of the statute authorizing the use of professionally-developed tests, they are not “designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race. . . .”; and the EEOC had, at the time, under its explicir regulatory authority under the act, specifically allowed only job-related tests.
> It was amended to introduce the word “intentionally.”
It's a big act, and I am sure that word exists somewhere in it, but nowhere germane to the case. And if it did, you, being the law-school grad you are, would surely quote it in context, and explain the conflict with the ruling in Griggs.
> The courts ignored the text of the bill and the intent of the congressmen who voted for it in developing disparate impact theory.
No, they didn't, but even if they had, that wouldn't make your case: disparate impact applies equally to discrimination against White candidates as that against blacks.
Right before the word "or."
The word “Intententionally,” specifically, is present in section 706(g) to expressly prevent accidental discrimination from violating Title VII.
You are trying to read the qualifications other than “intended“ in 703h into surplusage, since despite the “or”, “intended” would be the one and only consideration in your reading.
> The word “Intententionally,” specifically, is present in section 706(g) to expressly prevent accidental discrimination from violating Title VII.
706(g) of the Act, 42 USC 2000e-5(g), deals with the terms for equitable relief (injunctions, focus mostly specifically on injunctions for rehiring with back pay ), which, as is often the case with equitable relief, have higher standards than for legal relief (damages). In it, “intentionally” modifies “engaged in an unlawful employment practice”, which acknowledges that an employment practice may be umlawful without being engaged in intentionally (in which case, the type of remedies in 706(g) are not available, but compensatory damages remain available.)
Not only does the Court in Griggs not ignore the legislative concerns motivating the inclusion of the explicit allowance for testing, it relates the debate, it's proximate cause, and the concern cited, and announces a rule very precisely aimed at avoiding the problem the provision was designed to avoid [see, most particularly, Footnote 10, p. 401 U.S. 434].
While there might, I suppose, be a not-insane argument that the Griggs Court took the wrong view of some elements of the legislative history and context, the claim that they blithely ignored it is untenable on its face.
This [1] one? With the majority opinion written by Chief Justice Burger? Burger the Ike supporter and Nixon appointee, now somehow a "liberal judge"?
I can’t fire someone for being male or female. It’s not ok to fire someone for being male, or white. It’s not like only some religions are protected, while others aren’t.
You may want to check into a rebate on that law school tuition.
The details depend on the jurisdiction, but I think we're talking about straight cis white able bodied US born men under 40?
That minority is maybe 20% of the workforce at most?
To not be in any protected class in US labor law, you need to:
(1) Not be a veteran.
(2) Not have a physical or mental disability.
(3) Not be over 40.
(4) Have neither a religion nor the absence of one.
(5) Not have a race (including White.)
(6) Not have a skin color (including any of those typically described as “white” when discussing skin color.)
(7) Not have a gender (either gender assigned at birth, perceived gender, or gender identity; including “male” for any one or more of those.)
(8) Not have a national origin.
(9) Be neither a citizen nor non-citizen.
(10) Not have genetic information.
There is no one to whom this applies, obviously.
Heck, the cass that established gender as a protected characteristic under the 14th Amendment, subject to intermediate scrutiny rather than merely the rational basis test that is the minimum for any legal distinction, was brought by male plaintiffs against a state law placing higher minimum age limits for men in a law controlling alcohol purchases. Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976).
Oof. Seems like an open and shut case if that last quote (or others of its ilk) can be proven to have been said.
If he was in a one party consent state for audio recording, he should've recorded it.
But then, I imagined if the same thing were said to a 58 year old black woman, and immediately realized that it's severity.
Is it just me, or has racism towards white people become acceptable/main stream (at least, much more so than racism towards other races)? I feel as if my lack of a visceral reaction to this is due in part to a form of desensitization that's taken place during my time on social media.
I rarely see this racism expressed as actual hatred, but I very frequently see disparaging jokes targeted towards white people, especially old white people.
What I think it is happening is that people are competing in a who can be the most racist/sexist.
It was nauseating.
Remember when a TV celebrity lunitic got elected president mostly on account of the votes of white people who didn't feel the privilege they were told they all had (regardless if true)?
First the fringe notices, then as the issue gets worse the more moderate people notice and don't say much because it isn't socially acceptable, then it becomes a widely known uncomfortable fact, then it progresses to a point where only a few people are left defending the bad behavior.
^ you can apply the above to just about any social problem where mistreatment goes from the moral imperative to socially unacceptable
What you've done is accidentally sympathized with a core issue of "the other side" (assuming your politics here, apologies if wrong)
It's lawsuit worthy in general, and your post makes it pretty clear you don't pay attention to your company's anti-discrimination training.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fragilewhiteredditor/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fragileblackredditor/
I think whites are the least likely to have fragility issues which is why it’s allowed to continue.
>right-wing politicians, fundamentalist religious leaders, political commentators in mainstream print and television media, and white supremacist terrorists
Which is basically dismissing his argument by calling him a racist. Instead you should quantify how different the situation at hand is than bolshevism or marxism. This would help people who have less information one way or the other to identify the truth more easily.
The modern variant is that everyone is either "white" or "minority", but these labels have nothing really to do with race despite surface level appearances. They're just relabelings of the same old ideas. That's why the immediate reaction when you point out the illegal racism of woke people is they say "you can't be racist against white people because they're in power". That makes zero sense when interpreted literally because it's a direct statement of Bolshevik ideology, just with s/capitalist oppressors/white people/. The original formulation was wrong but at least coherent, whereas the modern formulation is completely nonsensical.
That's why so many people understand that the word "white" doesn't mean the skin color. It means anyone who stands opposed to leftism. If you look at how black conservatives are treated you can see this immediately. Just a few weeks ago a black pastor in the Church of England was fired (by a bunch of old white men) because he insisted that England wasn't in fact institutionally racist. By arguing that, he made himself unapologetically "white" in the eyes of the woke bishops and thus they had no moral difficulty with firing him. This sort of thing is commonplace.
At the same time, I knew a couple of project leads, two men, who were themselves Indian, who openly discussed their hatred of Pakistani people. If a Pakistani person ended up on one of their projects, they would just lie about that person's performance, say whatever was necessary to get them reassigned or fired. People knew what they were like. But no scrutiny was ever applied to these guys.
I don't think "racism towards white people [has] become acceptable". What I think is happening is that racism from white people is getting a lot more scrutiny, but that same scrutiny is not being applied to all people. Many working environments are getting more diverse, so we end up getting exposed to opinions that we've just never had the chance to hear before. If this had been 50 years ago, two Indian guys would probably have the same opinions about Pakistani people. But they also probably wouldn't have been project leads at such-and-such company.
"The Kids in the Hall" Episode #4.19"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1tFbZ5kaY8&t=94s
But do watch the whole sketch.
These laws are still protecting the equal treatment, since the whole "diversity and inclusion" thing is explicitly about giving unequal (more favorable) treatment to people who aren't white/male/cis. (The classic counterargument here is that because of historical marginalization equal treatment is actually unequal and therefore we must pursue "equity".)
It's too bad you see it that way when in a lot of cases it's explicitly about giving equal consideration to everyone rather than giving anyone more favorable treatment. Not every case, obviously, but that shouldn't invalidate attempting to level the playing field.
One of the higher ups in "DEI" at my local office said to me in an elevator, while it was just the two of us, "white guys are just the worst, aren't they?"
Given the bizarre state of American racial politics, it was actually unclear if she was flexing on me, or if she genuinely expected me, a white male, to laugh and nod in agreement sincerely.
Maybe I was simply being tested for ideological and cultural fealty. Pretty sure I failed.
There's nothing I can say or do to counteract what you've experienced, but I will note that successful DEI work is often like successful SRE work: you generally only notice it if you're watching the statistics carefully or if things start going wrong.
What might convince you this isn't totally baseless is if I give some suggestions for simple enough policies that an organization can implement without falling afoul of either the law or ethical considerations. Here are a few:
* Ensure a diverse slate. If you start hiring as soon as you have just a couple of people in the pipeline, the likelihood that someone not in the majority is hired goes way down; correct that by ensuring at least N applicants in the pool are not in the majority before you kick things off.
* Update your job descriptions. A lot of job descriptions have some really extreme and fairly specific demands of skills or experience gained but end up with hiring people who don't strictly meet every one. People not in the majority are pretty especially prone to impostor syndrome (for reasons whose explanation goes beyond the scope of this comment), so don't provide an unnecessarily high bar to entry if it isn't actually there. Include only skills that are actually necessary.
* Take a closer look at your hiring pipeline. Is your pipeline fed from sources that are homogeneous themselves? If so, look for sources that aren't. If you offer a referral program, ensure that that isn't defeating your efforts and encourage those who refer others to share with more diverse groups if they can.
* Ask everyone the same questions. Don't let someone bring their pet problem to an interview or crank up the difficulty unnecessarily. Standardize your questions and ensure interviewers are interviewing the same way by having folks shadow each other.
There are lots of things you can do beyond hiring, but it's what I'm more familiar with. I can say as a quick aside that ensuring everyone gets the same opportunity to level up in their career and making sure they feel welcome goes a long way towards mitigating diversity attrition, but it's not something I'm as comfortable giving suggestions for.
Hopefully this helps you feel like not everyone who advocates for DEI is out to get you or make your life worse for the sake of making others' lives better.
In other words, if you are unhappy that you no longer have an advantage because those rules are being implemented, you are seeking to benefit from policies that would otherwise advantage you as a result of your attributes, ones that make the lives of those with other attributes that much harder. There is nothing acceptable about that, even if in a technical sense this makes your life harder.
I'm very tired of hearing about all the advantages I have from people born with the silver spoon, just not white. It's very common to run into such individuals in tech.
Race-focused DEI is very beneficial to people like this because they have all the elite pedigree without any of the racial baggage. Rarely do I see these efforts help truly disadvantaged people.
Your suggestions are all well and good. They would help someone coming from a background like mine.
Unfortunately, they bear little resemblance to the DEI efforts and departments I'm familiar with.
I think this is where some people get hung up. Suppose that before a company implements this change, it gets some set of applicants X, and after it implements this change, it gets some set of applicants Y. It's entirely possible that applicants in set Y are as good or even better for the company than applicants in set X, no doubt. But in instances where they're not, then isn't it the case that implementing this change is unfair to the best applicants?
So, to start with, I'm not sure that it would be necessarily unfair, even under the assumption that that would happen. If I were looking for the absolute "best" candidate, I would have to offer the absolute best pay, the absolute best working conditions, and so on. It would obviously narrow down the set to the extent that it could be really challenging to find anyone, let alone someone outside a majority or something like that.
Most of the time, you're not looking for that person. You're looking for someone who's qualified for the job. You can't really even sample the population widely enough to identify which candidates are "best". In that sense, there are no "best" candidates, just those who fit better than the other folks in the rest of the hiring pool.
Maybe put another way, one's sense of "best" might be worth reexamining. Maybe one particular candidate is really highly qualified in a general sense, but in specific comparison to the team they're being considered for, maybe there are enough of that kind of person already on that team. https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes comes to mind here; you can't have a team that is all Solvers or all Tech Leads or whatever. You can try to reevaluate your definition of "best" such that it enables a more diverse set of perspectives to take part in a team, where you're optimizing for the broadest possible set of e.g. synergistic psychological traits rather than just a specific performance against a specific test set.
But even assuming it were unfair to the teleologically/meritocratically "best" candidates, that that concept isn't flawed:
Don't hire bad candidates.
Keep your standards high enough that people aren't often getting fired. Ensure inflows to your pipeline don't have surprisingly bad success rates. Track down which parts of the pipeline are failing to keep bad candidates from getting to the interview phase or getting hired and be relentless in optimizing them.
That might not sound like novel or DEI-specific advice, and that's because it's not. You should continue to run your hiring pipeline in a way that produces good outcomes. The only difference here is that you have an advantage in finding lots of different kinds of people and that you're providing opportunities to people who often aren't getting them.
For those reading this: Lyft's local offices don't have DEI people. Lyft hardly has a DEI team, and they're centrally located.
The office was two floors, with hundreds of employees, in the middle of Manhattan. It would have been conspicuous (and quickly remedied) if there wasn't anyone representing DEI there.
The story is true. If you want to accuse me of lying so be it. In that case it would be my word against your disinclination to believe me.
That being said, you are totally incorrect about DEI staff at LBS NYC. I politely ask that you verify this (or admit you don't have the necessary context) and retract that part of your statement.
There was not a DEI team member in the office though. That team consists of 3 people, only in SF headquarters. Maybe you're mixing up recruiters and DEI team members?
Unless these recruiters were there early on, it couldn't have been them.
You mentioned you were a frequent visitor to the office. Did anyone from the DEI team ever make the trip? I know I met this person at lunch at least twice but I suppose I never saw their desk.
What happened at that office is awful. Clearly it needed to be cleaned up. Including any DEI staff acting unprofessionally.
However, my limited experience with them is I can’t figure out their data driven decisions. For example, my org is 25% African American and 70% female and DEI gave a presentation on underrepresentation in the workplace and how we need to shift hiring to increase African American and female new hires. When asked to square this goal with our current employment demographics they made some hand waving about “looking into the data” and when the questioner refined their question to say the data already is gathered and seems clear the DEI head didn’t answer and just moved on.
Not sure what their goal is.
EDIT: this can also apply to various other functions within a company. Doesn’t have to be DEI.
In absolute terms, it should be equal. In relative terms, the treatment is ostensibly better than it would be without any DEI efforts.
It's a lot more than just "not every case" though. Every place I've ever worked, we have explicitly hired inferior candidates due to their racial/gender/etc characteristics. I know this not just from intuition but also because of the many times that "adding diversity" has been given as a justification for extending an offer to person X who was clearly not qualified.
I will agree that DEI initiatives are not all bad all the time. The ones that are based around improving communication, and not in the "fire this person because they used the wrong pronoun" sense but the "actually put down a set of principles for what effective communication looks like" sense, have been pretty positive IME. Also at my current company there was some drama several months back where blatant power plays by one of the execs (they fired someone who was beloved by the department presumably so that they could climb the ladder more) got reamed by the head of DEI (happily, for entirely non-racial/etc reasons). So it is nice when the ring is held by someone who's on your side ;)
In another comment downthread, I explicitly say " Don't hire bad candidates. " I'm well aware that there are lots of folks who do DEI wrong or justify bad decisions with it. Moreover, I get why this happens. Lots of people want or need the needle to move, and culturally speaking a company might not be ready yet to actually move that needle. It's growth hacking as applied to DEI, and it sucks. Rest assured that there are people working on fixing this, some in their roles at individual workplaces and others as an industry-wide effort.
> I will agree that DEI initiatives are not all bad all the time.
That's really what I'm going for here. I'm hoping we can all agree that we could do more to make hiring and promotion and such fair, and just in general that things could be improved in a way that benefits us all. Once we're all in agreement and understand the value prop, we can start holding each other accountable and making sure that we're being fair to everyone.
I am not saying there is no racism against people with other skin tones or sexism against women. But it's actually possible to have discrimination against everyone at the same time, where individuals with best talent, experience and character are passed over in favor of tribalism of decision makers. Actually shareholders should sue tech companies to implement individual merit, transparency and work environment free from racial harassment.
It sounds like, essentially, this judge is allowing the argument that attempting to rectify discrimination is illegal unless you can do so without generating new discrimination.
And I'm very excited to hear people who think that's possible.
Fleets of middle class people lost their jobs in the decades predating this for the same reasons, and I bet the majority of the high earning staff are probably more likely to have been white men as well (because they were likely the most hired demography hired into those roles made redundant).
To quote my most beloved demotivator, "The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the lawn-mower."
The article doesn’t give the department demographics but it’s hard to believe that the entire department was over 50 and white.
It will be open and shut if the department has multiple age groups and races.
If you’re overlooking someone because of their short “runway,” and then telling them that, you’re going to get sued. Because you are clearly, provably discriminating based on age.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)
Who's doing the classifying? Most of the time it's you checking a box in some application form
If it's just a social construct, theoretically what's stopping you from identifying as a different race? An honor system?
Since there is no legal assignment of race, what's keeping people from just lying?
Because that social construct doesn't involve self-selection. The construct is that society puts people into racial buckets.
So let's say you apply for a job somewhere and they ask the race question on the job application. I highly doubt that interviewers are given this information. Who exactly is holding people accountable in this system?
Again though, these modern PC culture groupings that make reference to "white privilege" for all Caucasian looking people fall into the ignorantly ridiculous, or obtuse. I'm Eastern European, from the Balkans, my family and me were war refugees who never had much serious privilege in our lives but I've had people lecture me about white privilege as if I somehow have fault for an arbitrary genetic manifestation on the skin and am thus little different from any caricature of self indulgent wealthy, institutional white business men (not that there's anything specifically wrong with them either by the way).
Ironically, in my direct "privileged white" family, a paternal grandfather was a concentration camp inmate and a maternal great grandfather was an ostarbieter for the Nazis, deported to the Reich during the World War as.... a real-life 20th century slave.
Eg - When the Irish/Italians immigrated here in the 20th century they were initially seen as "other" but after a few decades "graduated" to white. So yes you do benefit, even if you don't realize it.
What's more, your simplistic, ignorant color-based dismissal of an entire and enormous range of historical, cultural and personal history differences between certain eastern Europeans and certain other Europeans is no less insulting than the kind of low key racism that some people apply by labeling all blacks or brown-skinned people the same. The differences in both cases are emphatically not negligible. That you openly think this way is likely only because it's been instilled as politically acceptable. It sure as hell has no real merit.
That some so-called progressives often think this way today is a sad reminder of how old stupidities can come full circle to infect new generations.
In a functional sense when compared to darker skinned, non European people; in the US specifically, European cultural differences are far less significant as they are in Europe.
This isn't limited to Europeans, clearly.
Which PC narrative suggests otherwise? I'm not familiar which one pretends and relies on the exclusion of various slave trades, can you elaborate?
Note that youth is not a federally protected class in the US – the ADEA protects people who are 40 years and older. Some states have laws protecting young people from age discrimination, but it is not universal.
Wow. Just wow. They admit racist discrimination is illegal, admit ageist discrimination is illegal, but argue that racist+ageist discrimination is legal?!
> both laws require proof that the plaintiff would not have been injured but for the particular version of discrimination each law prohibits
So the racial discrimination requires proof that you would not have been injured except for the racial discrimination. But if there is age discrimination, then you would still have been injured anyway, so the racial discrimination doesn’t apply. And vice versa.
I hope the judge won’t let it fly, but it’s certainly a logical inconsistency in the way the laws were written.
I think the intent is to prevent people from claiming discrimination when there were other reasons, like being unqualified, that would have prevented them from getting the job or whatnot.