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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/jh72ja

What are we doing to make sure this never happens again in the future? Well, even before this incident, we hired a VP of HR who has implemented a sensitivity training program for all employees.

Which was evidently ineffective.

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The point of such training is to make it less legally risky to fire people for being insensitive.

Looks like it was effective.

Stupid question: It's already illegal to discriminate and harass on the basis of race. Why do you need a training program to make it less risky to fire people over it?

I think it's less risky because it sends a clear signal to employees that if they're fired for being racist assholes, they don't have any real grounds for to sue for unlawful termination.

Even groundless unlawful termination lawsuits are a pain in the ass to deal with. It's better to discourage them than to litigate them.

If they're crass enough to sue for unlawful termination after being racist, what makes you think 'sensitivity training' will make them not sue?

(I'm not trying to be snarky, BTW, just trying to understand hiring law, and bad employees)

The training makes company policy crystal clear and makes it very difficult for any employee to later claim they were unaware of said policy.

I think the idea is to let them know that they will almost certainly lose which acts as a deterrent suing in the first place.

The hiring clearly took place before the incident; whether the training took place before the incident is ambiguous. If it did, it was clearly ineffective. If not, then we have no evidence one way or the other as to its effectiveness.

Excellent point on the ambiguity of it.

it is worth noting that they let the 4 employees in question go, that shows that they are taking the issue seriously now, IMO anyway

> they are taking the issue seriously now

They are certainly taking the threat of a lawsuit seriously.

Edit: I'd be interested in asking you a question privately. Mind emailing me? My email address is in my profile.

The email field in the profile is not publicly visible.

Go look: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=aaronbrethorst

There's no policy you can implement that will prevent all bad behavior. At least not until your employer goes all Minority Report on you (there's a double meaning for you).

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