Affirmative action 2.0

What happens once the hiring, promotion and firing of people based on their race, gender or sexuality becomes acceptable?

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

A couple of months ago, I started receiving regular emails from the HR Director of the Australian edition of the Guardian. My connection with the Guardian is tenuous; I wrote a couple of ‘branded content’ articles for it early in 2022. Nonetheless, it was apparently of the utmost importance that I fill in a “confidential, anonymous demographic survey” detailing my “age, gender identity, cultural background, LGBTQIA+ status, carer status, types of disability and socioeconomic status” to provide my erstwhile client with “a better picture of our current staff, allow us to measure and track our progress against our diversity goals and help set Guardian Australia’s agenda for diversity and inclusion”.

As a pale, stale male with a growing distaste for the kind of upper-middle class identity politics the Guardian champions, I no doubt did inject a bit of diversity into the Grauniad gene pool. But I’m guessing it wasn’t the kind of diversity the HR Director hoped to uncover. I haven’t heard anything further about the survey. But at some point, I’ll undoubtedly be seeing plenty of self-congratulatory headlines about how trans/ethnic/gay/lesbian/intersex/disabled the Guardian team is.

I was bemused to see “socioeconomic status” was tacked on at the end of the list. Like pretty much all publications nowadays, The Guardian pays all but a handful of its A-list superstars modestly. Unlike most publications, the Guardian devotes a great deal of attention to exploited workers. Curiously, it’s relaxed about exploiting its own workers, which led to its freelancers mobilising a while back.

Here are some choice quotes from ‘The Statement from Guardian Freelancers’:

Precarity is rampant within the Australian media industry. By relying on the labour of freelancers, major outlets create a layer of underpaid, overworked employees living from paycheck to paycheck, and erode wages and conditions for permanent staff… We are proud to contribute to a progressive publication. We believe our work has helped the Guardian to establish its strong presence in Australia. But we want it to exemplify the values it claims to uphold… We want the writers, readers and subscribers who have welcomed the Guardian as a progressive voice to join us. Together, we can urge management to do the right thing: meet with us and sign a collective agreement for freelancers.

I don’t know what ended up happening with Guardian freelancers’ conditions. But I’d bet a lifetime supply of fair-trade soy cappuccinos that their conditions didn’t improve much, if at all.

(Full disclosure: I was treated in an offhand manner – par for the course in my line of work – but paid reasonably during my brief sojourn at the Guardian. But I would have paid far less if I hadn’t been writing advertorial copy for one of the publication’s deep-pocketed tech company clients.)   

As a 51-year-old, heterosexual, non-disabled, Anglo-Celtic male, I hesitate to man-hetero-Anglo-splain on behalf of less privileged demographics. But I’m sure those ink-stained wretches churning out copy for the Guardian on a freelance or employee basis would, given a choice, much prefer a decent word rate or salary rather than having the office festooned with rainbow flags during Gay Pride Month. Indeed, if I was a more cynical man, I might be tempted to believe that Guardian management – like C-suite types at many other businesses – was using the bright shiny object of feel-good identity politics to distract the workforce from their material conditions.

No company for old white men
I was reminded of the Guardian diversity survey when reading two recent stories, one foreign and one local.

A lot of tech companies have been laying off staff recently. One tech company CEO was foolish enough to, as our American friends say, say the quiet part out loud. As I suspect plenty of tech company CEOs have been doing, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson decided to use a round of layoffs to improve the diversity of his workforce. Or, at the very least, make sure enough straight white males were given the heave-ho to ensure his workforce didn’t become any less diverse. (The tech industry is obsessed with diversity, in part because it’s not itself particularly diverse.)  

Lawson issued a statement that, among other things, proclaimed,

As you all know, we are committed to becoming an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression company. Layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities, so we were particularly focused on ensuring our layoffs – while a business necessity today – were carried out through an Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.

As my fellow Substacker Max Meyer put it, “The Chief Executive of a publicly-traded company seems to have admitted – in writing – that he conducted race-based layoffs in order to minimize impact on ‘marginalized communities’ that he personally favors. Besides being an insane thing to admit, it’s also illegal.”

Last week, KPMG ended up in the headlines when it was revealed it was asking job applicants questions such as, “Do you have a trans or other gender diverse experience or history (including but not limited to Brotherboy/Sistergirl, Third Gender)? Do you have an Intersex variation?”

KPMG argued it wasn’t compulsory for job applicants to answer the question and that any answers they did give wouldn’t affect their applications. That may be technically true. But the type of individual smart and ambitious enough to be applying for a graduate role at a professional services firm has enough nous to realise (a) They definitely should fill out that section of the questionnaire and (b) They should do everything conceivable to claim membership of at least one and ideally several oppressed groups.

Many organisations now aspire to a 50-50 gender split for senior roles. KPMG has bellowed, “Hold my Penfolds Grange,” and gone one step further. It’s committed to a 40-40-20 split. If you haven’t already guessed where that mysterious 20 per cent comes in, let me refer you to the firm’s Inclusion and Diversity statement: “To improve gender balance in senior roles, in July 2020 we launched our target to have 40 per cent women in partnership by 2025. Underpinning this target is the principle of 40:40:20, which enables us to include those who identify outside the binary.”

If I was a more cynical man, I might expect a disproportionately large number of KPMG employees to suddenly become deeply confused about their gender identity once they reach their mid-thirties.

How far do we want to push the diversity agenda?

If you’re black, gay or female you can, at least to some extent, get away with mocking the wilder excesses of the diversicrats. But if you’re a straight white male who raises objections, you invariably come across like a whiny bitch, as Steve Price recently discovered.  

So, I’ll tiptoe over the standard Oppression Olympics landmines – Who can legitimately claim membership of an oppressed group? Just because someone can claim membership of an oppressed group, does that mean they’ve been oppressed in some meaningful way? Is there a point where a group (for instance, Asians, Jews, gay men, biological women) goes from being oppressed to being “part of the problem”? How badly does a formerly non-oppressed group (for instance, white, working-class men) have to be doing before it’s entitled to a leg-up? What happens when the interests of oppressed groups (for instance, Muslims and homosexuals) aren’t in alignment? – and simply make the following two observations.

*Amoral corporations are fair-weather friends
Younger readers may be unaware that from circa 1950-1990 many large companies were as conservative as they are now woke. Back in the 1980s, plenty of US corporations were happy to be part of Reagan’s ‘three-legged stool’, comprising social conservatives, military hawks and corporate heavy hitters keen on deregulation, free trade and tax cuts. The idea that Corporate America would be championing transgender rights and butting heads with prominent Republican politicians over gay issues would have been unthinkable not so long ago.   

Much to its confusion and dismay, the Right discovered Big Business wouldn’t hesitate to sell it down the river as soon as it became convenient. One day soon, the Left will similarly discover that Amazon, Airbnb, Google, Facebook, IBM, Mastercard, McKinsey, Microsoft, Netflix, Paypal, Salesforce, Starbucks and Twitter are highly unreliable allies.      

Also, as illustrated with my Guardian case study above, while businesses are more than happy to engage in woke-washing, they certainly aren’t embracing what’s left of the Left’s economic agenda. Apple might have a gay CEO and campaign for criminal justice reform. But it won’t be redistributing wealth from shareholders and senior executives to its lower-level employees any time soon.

Steve Jobs colluded with senior figures at other big tech companies to forge and maintain a ‘no poaching’ deal that depressed engineers’ wages. Here in Australia, even the lickspittle union representing retail workers has been moved to protest the agreements Apple has attempted to foist on the bright young things who populate its Genius Bars.

(Apple recently tried to put in place an agreement offering below-inflation pay rises, no evening penalty rates and clauses that could have seen staff work up to 60 hours a week without receiving any overtime payments. A union official was moved to observe, “For a company that is making at least $11 billion in profits annually from its Australian operations, its behaviour is simply un-Australian.”)

*Those who don’t identify as being part of a protected class also get a vote
I’m sure it’s possible to find polls that show both support for and opposition to affirmative action measures. My sense is that most people support, or at least don’t vehemently oppose, groups that have had a rough trot receiving a certain degree of preferential treatment.

For instance, for many years public-sector and private-sector employers in Australia have gone out of their way to hire and advance the careers of Indigenous Australians. By definition, that means non-Indigenous Australians have missed out on jobs and promotions they would otherwise have got. Nonetheless, this doesn’t seem to have engendered a sense of racial resentment among Australians who aren’t indigenous. Certainly, no noticeable political backlash has yet occurred as a result of Australian employers putting a thumb on the scales for Indigenous job applicants and employees.

So far, so good.*

But the problem – and this is always the problem with political activism – is that once the snowball starts rolling, it invariably gathers mass and speed until it runs into a brick wall.  

An organisation that starts out positively discriminating in favour of Indigenous Australians or women or lesbians can soon end up just plain discriminating against Caucasians or men or heterosexuals, often on the most specious of grounds. Most of the time, those Caucasians, men and heterosexuals don’t murmur a peep of protest for fear of being piled on. But neither do they forget what has happened to them or people like them.

Every three or four years, they get to go into the privacy of the ballot box and decide whether they want to erect a brick wall in front of the snowball.    

*As Eric Hoffer observed, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” I’d argue diversity was once a great cause, but it’s currently somewhere between being a business and a racket.