06/23/2018
Re: Thomas O. Meehan’s article Starbucks’ Delicious Dilemma — Virtue-Signaling While Safe
From: Phil Shannon
It turns out that Starbucks could have saved their dough and cancelled the “unconscious bias” training which shut down the entire business for half a day. From a most unlikely, but highly authoritative, source, the Diversity Council of Australia (DCA), comes confirmation that workplace “re-education” sessions which aim to enlighten workers about the primordial, sotto-voce voices in their heads urging them to discriminate against minorities, are a waste of time. “Research shows that training has mixed results and limited success”, the DCA concluded in a recent message to its members, concluding that: “It can be a lot easier just to de-bias the environment rather than take on the might of the human mind, with all its complexities and implicit biases”.[Inclusion Nudges: A snapshot, Diversity Council Australia, May 22, 2018]
The DCA is the peak “diversity” body in Australia, a 450-member What’s What of the great and good from government, academic and corporate Australia. Theirs is thus a remarkable admission, conceding that “unconscious bias” workplace training is a load of baloney.
But, rather than accept that the problem is a hoax, the DCA have latched on to a new corporate solution, “Inclusion Nudges”. These aim to prod, rather than hector, staff “towards more inclusive choices”, thus “outsmarting and interrupting” those biases apparently built into our lizard brains.
One example of a “nudge” is to use cardboard imitation eyeglasses by personnel selection teams to filter out bias by seeing their decisions through a “gender lens” or minority prism, a physical “culture shock” that “interrupts business-as-usual decision making”. Or induces eye-rolling mirth, if you are a normal person.
Not that quack cures for a non-existent diseases are entirely pointless — they earn diversity brownie points for companies as a hedge against perceived bad PR and potentially costly legal suits by shake-down Blacktivists and other professional victim grievance-whiners.
They are also a wonderful distraction from more pressing, and real, workplace issues such as good wages and job security for Australian workers which are often under threat from the cheap immigrant labour that shelters under the umbrella of Diversity.
Phil Shannon is a veteran Australian working class socialist and VDARE.com supporter.See previous letters from Phil Shannon
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