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Steve Ballmer Responds to Discrimination Issue
sriram_2001 writes "In a long email to all Microsoft employees, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laid out the reasons for Microsoft changing its stance to neutral on the anti-discrimination bill. He explains that Microsoft wanted to focus on fewer legislations and that the anti-discrimination bill was one of the bills that they didn't have the resources to follow. Also, far from caving in to Rev.Hutcherson, Microsoft told him to take a hike when he asked them to fire 2 employees for testifying during the legislation consideration period. He goes on to explain how though he personally supports the bill, a lot of employees and shareholders don't. Finally, he raises the question on whether corporations should get involved in social issues."
"Finally, he raises the question on whether corporations should get involved in social issues."
They may as well. They're the only ones with any influence other than organized religions.
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So it's not just my PC that lacks resources.
I prefer "Rube Godwin's Law": anytime someone comes up with an outlandish contraption, someone asks "But can you go back in time and kill Hitler with it?".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
>He explains that Microsoft wanted to focus on fewer legislations Which legislations are they focusing on instead?
That would be economic and fiscal policy, dear. I have to agree that corporations should stay out of social policy, however. Corporate leaders involved in the political maneuvering we hear so much about are extremely wealthy individuals whose experience is largely limited to the upper echelons of urban, business society. How can people like this possibly represent the majority of Americans? The fact is they can't. Rather than taking our moral lessons from Steve Ballmer and the rest of the elitist business class, we should go to our local diners, town halls, and places of worship to find the way in the complex social environment of the modern world. It is regular people, not urban elites we should be listening to!
-- Molly Lipton, Born Again Technologist.
So I guess if this were the 1960's Microsoft should have not supported legislation that ended racial discrimination too? Just because "many people in America are opposed" to it does not make it wrong.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
RTFA
The bill is about giving gays the same rights as anyone else in the work place. Nothing about race, nothing about quotas or affirmative action.
Microsoft realized that while they have a lot of money, they don't have an unlimited supply of political capital.
Rather than take a PR hit trying to change social policy for other companies, they chose to use their limited political capital on issues which more directly affect their ability to separate users from their money.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
No they should not. They are not real persons, and by definitions have no interests except profits.
Yes, large corporations should maintain their present trend of social unaccountability.
No they should not. They are not real persons, and by definitions have no interests except profits.
And individuals petitioning congress never have self-centered motivations and propose things beneficial to themselves but harmful to society overall? And none of these individuals have loads of money?
Wrong. This holds to the idea that "only whites can deal with whites", "only Asians with Asians", etc. A sort of apartheid when dealing with customers! You are also dealing with just the small part of the staff that works with the public....
"The best person does not always have to be hired in every case"
The best person must be hired, period.
"especially when the wider company or society would suffer because of it"
Certainly the wider company suffers because, by putting real qualifications on the back burner, you have increased incompetance. A lot of problems: the bottom line suffers, and you have a lot of resentment of incompetants who were hired for their skin color. Society suffers too.
"Nowadays people are smart enough to look at the "big picture"."
Not if the "big picture" involves discriminating against applicants just for their skin color.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I think that this statement from the letter sums of the problem rather well:
"What message does the company taking a position send to its employees who have strongly-held beliefs on the opposite side of the issue?"We have dealt with this same question in my company where the leaders in the company have strong feelings about social issues and are tempted to use the power of the corporation to foist those opinions on the employees. I think Ballmer gets it right when he indicates that Microsoft has an interest in taking a stance on legislative issues that affect the business in terms of competitiveness and other less-social concerns. A company as large as Microsoft has employees that will have opinions on social issues that cover the entire spectrum. It's threatening to employees for the corporation to take a public position on these kinds of personal issues. I think that it's healthy for corporations to set a tone for it's workers that focus on cultivating a work environment focused on productivity and cooperation. I applaud Ballmer.
Microsoft using scarcity of resources as an excuse is something I find dififcult to accept.
Economic and fiscal policy IS social policy, dear, no matter how much you may try to pretend it's not. To suggest otherwise is disingenous.
And no matter how much you don't like it, corporations call the tune on everything these days, from economic policy to social legislation to national defense. Why? Because the outcome of that liegislation affects them too. And they've got more resources than you or I can muster to get their way.
Don't like it? Start working for legislation that will change the legal status of corporations. Oterwise, they'll just continue to shove laws you don't like down your throat, and there's not a damn thing you or I can do about it.
You can't fire someone because they are black, female, or Christian. You can, in many places, fire them for being gay.
The worst people should be fired, regardless of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation.
The anti-discrimination bill was one of the bills that they didn't have the resources to follow. For a moment there, i thought that microsoft was a multi-billion doller company with huge and a vast number of signifigant influences that the corporation could use in helping this bill. My Bad.
Semantics.
There's this fictitious line between social/fiscal/political that is just rediculous. See, fiscal policy impacts people, and is therefore to some extent, social policy. Same with political policy.
The biggest canard, however, is the belief that corporations don't already impact social policy... that's historical revisionism of the grandest scale. Things like HR policies, work environments makes a big difference for the many people who work for the corporations, not to mention their families and relatives.
I'm not saying it's Microsoft's responsibility to support or oppose certain legislation, but to say that corporations should stay out of certain areas because "they shouldn't impact social policy" is bullshit. The reality of today's situation flies in the face of that idealist view.
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Reverend Hutcherson is a crack-pot. He threatened Microsoft with a boycott if they didn't back down on their support. Now MS says they just didn't have the resources to support this bill. Their "support" in previous years amounted to just sending a letter of support for the bill.
Two employees of Microsoft testified in support of the bill, but not as representatives of Microsoft. Hutcherson wanted Microsoft to fire them as well. You think it's OK for someone to be fired just because of their personal views? Its nice that Microsoft declined to fire these employees, but what about the next company that caves in when threatened?
If you think this is not news, look at what is happening today, the so called "Justice Sunday", where every religious wacko out there wants to go nuclear because they don't get their way.
Wake up people!!
The ironic thing in all of this is that discrimination towards homosexuality is based on the belief it is a choice which has strong evidence against it (i.e. the fact gay rats can literally be manufactured and there is data from WWII-era German births providing a link to the same phenomena in humans). They also somehow believe people wake up one morning and say "I want to be a member of the most vocally hated minority in the US." and such.
The ironic twist is that, assuming being gay is a choice, the same arguments against gay rights based on choice also negate civil rights based on religion. You choose to be Catholic/Protestant/Jewish/etc. so why should they get protection based on that then?
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
As long as corporations employ people who are affected by social legislation, then the difference truly is slight. Despite every impression to the contrary, first and foremost a corporation is a network of relationships among real live human beings; the money is simply an abstraction of certain types of value.
Historically, the very first laws against child labor (in the UK) were brought into existence at the behest of a coalition of factory owners, who wanted to stop the practice, but could not do so unilaterally and remain competitive: the only way that they could have the practice stop was to remove the possibility of competitive advantage from employing children. Likewise, Microsoft has gay and lesbian employees and shareholders, and their well-being is directly affected by the absence of this legislation.
My hat goes off to you -- your cynicism is awe inspiring.
I hate Microsoft's software and their business tactics, but I actually liked Ballmer's letter. He is personally in favor of diversity and will do everything possible to ensure that Microsoft is a diverse environment. But he will not use the vehicle of the Microsoft corporation to advance any particular social policy because (1) this is not appropriate and (2) because his personal views might be different than the personal views of others (employees, shareholders) with a financial stake. This is a moderate approach that I find hard to criticize.
Stop trying to justify racism.
Oddly, all the things you list as negatives, I think of as positive. The Internet stops you knowing if the person talking is a minor? Good - maybe we shouldn't use our age to discount opinions. Doesn't pay taxes in your area? Shouldn't matter - they still have to argue against the consequences to convince those who do. We should be able to accept the truth from Mickey Mouse if it is the truth. And likewise, we should be able to use rational argument against those who would otherwise use volume, intimidation or mobs to drown us out.
Reducing people to making their case in a written form where we can read at our own pace, re-read at our leisure and respond without the pressure of being interrupted, lays bare that which we should be basing our decisions on - the ideas and the logic, not the people.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Our government is not and should not be christian. The majority of americans may currently be of some christian denomination but, that does not negate the rights of the minority. Majority rule - minority rights.
Furthermore, most of the founding fathers were deists. Deist believe in god but reject christianity. See http://www.deism.org/foundingfathers.htm for a good overview of the religious views that the USA was founded on.
For an eye opening look at how civil rights are being eroded by christianity look here:http://www.theocracywatch.org/
Really, just try thinking for once.
"Homosexuality is a sin"
People do not wake up one morning and decide to be homosexual. It is who they are. If so, and you believe we are all made by your god, did he/she deliberately make them sinners?
"Every deviant lifestyle"
Do you mean just homosexuality? Or do you mean homosexuality, sex outside marriage, following another religion (or none)? Who decides what is "deviant"? Are, for example, S&M enthusiasts "deviant". Should they also be prosecuted for it, because someone find it offensive? I personally find christianity offensive. Does that mean all christians should be prosecuted? Your views are not the only ones in this world. Why should everyone be made to fall in line with them?
"All the changes in society will harm the USA"
. Black people gaining the same rights are whites? How did that social change harm the USA? The Sufferagette movement?
"The USA no longer values life."
This, sadly, is correct. In regard to Mrs Shivo, is lying on a bed being fed by a machine considered life? Would you say that she *HAD* to be kept alive, even if she would never progress from that state? Further more, may I add that the USA still has the death penalty, but I dont often hear arguements against it with the same "pro-life" stance.
"Old fashioned values"
. What do you mean? Slavery (condoned in the bible), torture (approved by the church on many occasions) and so forth? Do you really want to go back to that? There was a time when christianity set the laws - it was called the Dark Ages.
"the deeply held beliefs of any employee"
Just as long as that employee is a christian, no doubt.
It is regular people, not urban elites we should be listening to!
The idea that "urban elites" are somehow a separate group from "regular people" is one of the stupidest ideas politics has ever had inflicted on it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Good - maybe we shouldn't use our age to discount opinions
I disagree; back when I was a teenager, I was a font of wisdom. Now I'm puzzled by quite a lot. We should definitely discount the opinions of middle aged and older people.
Point of order: You don't have to be a "lefty" to hate Bush and all he stands for.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I'm paraphrasing (and not very eloquently) a passage I read by Andrew Sullivan but can't locate for the life of me. He was traveling with a woman who remarked that she didn't have a problem with gay people as long as they didn't talk about it and kept their private lives to themselves. He responded, "But you talk about your private life all the time. Why should gay people not be allowed to?" When she said that she had not talked about her private life, he said, "In the past 5 minutes, I learned that you have a husband, that you're on your way to pick up your kids to take them to sports practice, during which you will visit your husband's sister."
His point is obvious, that in casual conversation with other people, even those we don't know on a friend or acquaintance level, we drop lots of details about our personal life. This is no different in the work place. For example, while I never discussed details of home life with my coworkers in my current job, or my previous job, I knew if they were married, or had significant others, if they had children, the general ages of their children, what they did over the weekend, where they went on vacation, etc.
If you're queer, you can't take part in those conversations unless you are prepared for people to know that you are queer. Think about how many times in a given week you talk about your spouse, significant other, and some of your plans for the evening (i.e. going out to a movie, dinner, etc) in casual conversation. Now, imagine censoring that all into the most bland conversation possible. That's the situation with a queer person.
So, yes, while your sexuality isn't something immediately noticable, such as ethnicity, it is something that takes quite a bit of effort to completely conceal.
You also ignore the fact that chance meetings occur outside the workplace, and if you think rumors don't fly, then you're completely naive. So, consider that when you're on a date with someone, you can't hold hands, walk closely, or share a quick kiss for the fear of being discovered by someone you know or knows someone you know at work.
You, and others, seem to be under the false impression that these laws are going to allow queer people to makeout in the copy room with no job-related repercussions. Straight people can't engage in such behavior, why should queers? These laws are supposed to allow queer people to have some sort of normal social interaction with co-workers and with their partners without the suffocating fear of discovery.
Humorless sig goes here.
Saying that he called the people psychotic merely because of a disagreement is clearly misrepresenting his point of view. If you read what he said, he called those people psychotic for having what he saw as "megalomania, religious flagwaving egotism, and the 'membership' into the 'Big Fat Christian Gun-Toting Whiteman kicks the Worlds Ass' Society" as a source of pride. If you disagree, that's fine, argue away, but it's unethical to misrepresent his views.
And here you actually do call people psychotic over a disagreement (about how the post should be moderated), rather than a personality trait of the person in question.