Campaign reported that Dentsu envisions ‘tremendous competitive advantage’ by offshoring 10,000 jobs. Didn’t bother reading the details—but expect Wendy Clark to leverage any hiring of non-White people from developing countries as a diversity scheme. And don’t be surprised if Ted Royer quietly emerges among the 10,000…
There are two tricks large organisations like this one use when their diversity and equity programmes in the United States fail to progress.
ReplyDeleteThe first is rebranding diversity and equity amongst BIPOC as “global diversity”, so look for this word in their press releases, social media, and investors’ reports. On a practical level it means leaping past Black or brown hires in the US and instead hiring or subcontracting workers in continents like Asia or Africa, or hiring loads of white women in the United Kingdom and tallying them as part of global diversity initiatives.
The other trick word to look for is “entrepreneurship.” This is used in lieu of contracting BIPOC companies. On a practical level it means an organisation will have a BIPOC subcontractor and set them up as a small business. They’ll put that subcontractor’s photo up on their websites and claim them as an employee (although they don’t get the full benefits or salary of their white employee counterparts), and then on paper they are additionally counted as a small business diversity spend.