I was threatened with mandatory attendance, but then the company started layoffs and lost interest.
Have you ever had to do DEI training days at your workplace?
(I think maybe a lot people here are self employed tho)
#asknostr
I think it's more prevalent in certain sectors and perhaps reached its peak a year or two ago(?). I wonder what the stats are on how much money is spent on this by companies? How frequently they do them. How many companies provide these services and what they charge.
I think as an industry it seemed so obviously an opportunistic scam, but apparently it was also a bit of a thing in the 70s. I remember learning that in this radio4 episode of 'New Gurus', which was surprisingly interesting.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001g9ws
There's quite a few in the series. Another episode was about Bitcoin gurus which I haven't bothered listening to as I'm quite familiar with this sort of thing lol:
Discussion
We do ours online and it's easier to click through it than it is to tell them no. I got kids to feed and all.
I was bitter about it because they refused to respect true, effective egalitarian policies like transparent pay scales, supporting men and women who wanted to take parental leave, or allowing for remote work, but wanted to pawn us all off with some pronoun stickers or company board quotas, or whatever.
DEI washing, is a thing.
Companies want these training days to point at something in case they have complaints or lawsuits. Hey we did our best, we spent x amount of money, we sent all our employees to the courses. Companies which provide this 'training' get money for very little, pointless work. Employees just have to sit through the process. I think that is my reading, I don't think anyone involved 'believes' in any of this. (?)
Yeah, checking the compliance boxes, but improving nobody's working conditions.
Yes, it's easy. Pay off this scam company. Both pretend they are helping.
They pretend to care. We pretend to believe them.
But everybody knows it's all make believe. Where are the believers? How does something like this stop?
It's an industry. Government couldn't afford to make more pretend desk-jobs for middle-class, overeducated daughters, so they outsourced IT to private industry with these special compliance positions.
You can tell the difference between real and fake DEI because the former tends to make the company a more-attractive employer to a wide range of people. Including straight, white guys.