John had a post out earlier today on the waning enthusiasm for the palace guard and storm troopers of diversity, equity and inclusion crowd – college administrations and woke corporations. Where colleges are gingerly attempting to pullback the wholesale hiring that’s long been a sacred cow of incorporating DEI into the campus experience, American corporations are having their “come to Jesus” moments even sooner, as they answer to stockholders and economic shifts.

…And that’s what the WSJ editorial is opposing as well. It concludes, DEI “has become a cudgel for political conformity and racial grievance.” But DEI doesn’t just exist on campus, it has also become part of many large corporations. However the corporate commitment, which ballooned during 2020, was already waning by the start of 2023. This Washington Post report was published in April.

In other words, business runs on real money, not the public’s like a university or state government does. So it has less latitude to indulge things that either cost excess money with little return on investment, or loses money profit-wise because their customer base looks elsewhere for firms more in tune with their belief system (see Target, one each).

In tough economic times, who does a firm need more? Someone who counts how many different skin hues are in the breakroom to keep a quota on track, or a whatever color employee who can safely and proficiently run a forklift all shift, loading and unloading trucks or moving boxes expediently?

WAVE BUH-BYE, DEI

Even at tech firms – where virtue signaling DEI programs exploded in the wake of the St. George Floyd fiery but peaceful summer – we are finding the hammer inequitably coming down on the diversest of the employee base. The entire department was set up to be little more than a snitch and spy base in order to promote some special persons, while keeping tabs on other employees for offenses against protected and marginalized classes. None of which makes the company itself any money towards the bottom line.

DEI exists to be a jobs programs for otherwise unemployable mediocrities who ruin everything they touch.

Everyone should cheer as they crash and burn.

— Will Hild (@WillHild) December 27, 2023

Unsurprisingly, DEI is the first vanity project that gets Schlitz-canned when something like #Bidenomics puts a crimp in the balance sheet for even the wokest of the wokesters. For even Google.

Shortly after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in 2020, Google was among many tech companies that set up new programs aimed at supporting Black employees. The goal, CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, was “to build sustainable equity for Google’s Black+ community, and externally, to make our products and programs helpful in the moments that matter most to Black users.”

Google’s vocal commitments included improving representation of underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% by 2025; more than doubling the number of Black workers at nonsenior levels by 2025; addressing representation issues in hiring, retention and promotions; and establishing better support for the mental and physical health for Black employees.

…By mid-2023, DEI-related job postings had declined 44% from the same time a year prior, according to data provided by job site Indeed. In November 2023, the last full month for which data was available, it dropped 23% year over year.

…In line with this broader trend, both Google and Meta have cut staffers and downsized programs that fell under DEI investment.

The year’s cuts have also impacted smaller, third-party organizations who counted on big tech clients for work, despite the continued growth of those tech giants.

…“When George Floyd began to become the topic of conversations, companies and executives doubled down on their commitments and here we are only a couple years later, and folks are looking for opportunities to cut those teams,” said Devika Brij, CEO of Brij the Gap Consulting, which works with tech companies’ DEI efforts. Brij said some of her clients had cut their DEI budgets by as much as 90% by midyear.

When you’re making money hand-over-fist one can afford the posturing. The second the purse strings start to tighten, the rubber – and the dead weight – hits the road.

One of the new age problems, as Google is finding out now that they no longer possess unlimited resources, is that they have enabled a class of entitled “learners.” Now these may or may not be potential employees of the future, but they have been accepted and are employed in an apprenticeship status. These apprentices apparently have over-developed full-time opinions of themselves, all of which is facilitated by their DEI department and Google’s own garbled messaging.

I know what an apprenticeship used to mean. These people are employed in a 20 month long program. The experience and paycheck are not enough.

…Participants in a separate Google program called Apprenticeships also lodged complaints about a lack of pathways and pay inequities in the last year, CNBC found.

“Apprentices become part of our mission to build great products for every user, and their different experiences help ensure that our products are as diverse as our users,” Google’s Apprenticeships website states.

But Apprenticeships participants complained they were getting paid less than other engineers during the course of the 20-month program despite doing similar work. They said they were doing “Level 3” work with L3 expectations and contributing significantly to Google’s codebase while earning half of full-time L3 software engineers’ base salary, according to internal correspondence seen by CNBC.

The apprentices even confronted the executive sponsor of the program, Aparna Pappu, vice president of Google Workspace, pointing out the executive’s prior stated goal “to increase representation of underrepresented talent across Google.”

The company said that apprentices are paid a salary for the learning and training they receive as part of the program, and that it reviews compensation annually to ensure alignment with the market.

OMG. What’s “half” of a Google code engineer’s base salary? I can be trained, too.

See you later, Ed – SIGN ME UP!

These apprentices agreed to a 20 month program, obviously lacking some qualifications, get on-the-job training, and yet are demanding to be paid what engineers working on the same code who had the skillset and quals to be hired immediately at Google are making. They might be awfully smart, but they need to check the M-W for the definition of “apprentice.” You know Google is going to be the bad guy (and believe me, they are bad guys in most respects, but not right here) when they shut down this program just like they had to shut down similar ones previously, and all over the bitching of the ingrates.

This entire CNBC article is one great, howling wail into the darkness about Google and their retreat from those DEI commitments of rosier yore. It’s a veritable gnashing teeth litany of canceled travel to women’s conferences, laid off DEI luminaries, “lost progress” diversifying work forces, third party boutique DEI firms no longer able to live off Google DEI largesse, and RACISTS.

A BACKLASH AGAINST RACIAL RECKONING

…“To say our progress is not in peril would not be truthful,” AnitaB.org’s Wilkerson said, although she’s optimistic the tide could turn around in 2024. “We’re working with multiple challenges in our society, so we have made a lot of the progress but some of that was erased in the last year. Then you have this backlash against racial reckoning.”

The backlash she referred to includes things like the Supreme Court’s June decision to end affirmative action at colleges, as well as backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles. “You have this ‘wokeism’ drama.” Wilkerson said, pointing to Florida legislation such as banning books and downplaying Black history, as well as laws impacting the LGBTQIA+ community.

Give a rest, sister.

The last four paragraphs are such crap, I can’t even.

But it is another perfect illustration of why DEI needs to DIE.