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Google, Apple Call Workers' Race & Gender Trade Secrets
theodp writes "The Mercury News reports that Google, whose stated mission is to make the world's information universally accessible, says the race and gender of its work force is a trade secret that cannot be released. So do Apple, Yahoo, Oracle, and Applied Materials. The five companies waged a successful 18-month FOIA battle with the Merc, convincing federal regulators who collect the data that its release would cause 'commercial harm' by potentially revealing the companies' business strategy to competitors. Law professor John Sims called the objections — the details of which the Dept. of Labor declined to share — 'absurd.' Many industry peers see the issue differently — Intel, Cisco, eBay, AMD, Sanmina, and Sun agreed to allow the DOL to provide the requested info. 'There's nothing to hide, in our view,' said a spokesman for Intel. Some observers note it's not the first time Google has declined to put a number on its vaunted diversity — in earlier Congressional testimony, Google's top HR exec dodged the question of how many African-American employees the company had."
Yes, I'm bitter - perhaps that's because most of the benefits listed above didn't apply to me, and I still somehow managed to accomplish my goal of doing a good enough job as an undergrad to be accepted in a top 5 grad school. Upward mobility *does exist* if you're persistent (or desperate) enough.
So now you know what it feels like to be discriminated against. Now if only there was a restaurant that wouldn't serve you because of your race, and maybe get beaten in the streets. Especially if you're dating a woman of a racial majority... Oh wait, that can't happen to you.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
Women cost more than men.
They have "bad" days filled with cramps and such. They have Bitchy days when nobody in their right mind would even begin to interact with them. They have babies and take time off from working to raise them, sometime never to return.
It costs money to hire and train a workforce. Yeah, reality sucks, and nobody wants to notice the elephant in the room, ignoring it doesn't make it go away.
And no, I don't "hate" women. I have three daughters and a wife. I'm just realistic about what I expect from them.
I know I need to go on a week long hunting trip every month /joke
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I don't know why this is, but I'm starting to get the impression that a lot of US laws or media have actually confused the terms themselves, saying that ethnic quotas are "equal opportunity". They are not.
It probably stems from the fact that for the last few decades, in the US (and yes, I am a US citizen born and raised) race is shoved in your face from a young age no matter what your background and no matter what the situation. I remember that learning that, "Black people aren't different," was one of the first things I ever learned in kindergarten. Honestly, until that day, I hadn't even considered the option that black people could be different. I found the whole lesson confusing and overcomplicated.
... something else about race."
As we grew up (and this is all based on my experiences so take that for what it's worth), every time we had to fill out a standardized test or a medical form or whatever, we had to mark race. Driver's license paper work, mark your race. Bank paper work, mark your race. Insurance paper work, race. and so on and so on. When we started applying for scholarships, there were 1,001 scholarships that had a particular race as a requirement for application. Every school application we filled out, we read a statement that, "This institution is an equal opportunity blah blah blah
By the time my generation came into our young adulthood years, we had been tortured with the question of race. It is so prevalent in our society, and the media makes such a big deal of not being racist that I think most people just got fucking sick of it. In a lot of folks minds in America today, I think, the whole issue of race is just one big stupid waste of time and a joke. Most folk know that history is littered with horrible instances being carried out based on race. Most folk think that sucks. Most folk don't care anymore. In the States, I get the feeling that more and more people are just lumping, "affirmative action, equal opportunity, civil rights, immigration, quotas, etc etc etc." into one big mental group of, "Fuck it, I don't care anymore."
That said, when any of us do decide to discuss the matter, (which we far too often choose to do whether we know anything or not), it's a mental exhaustion to make any kind of distinction between anything that is even remotely in regard to race and instead we just say, "Everything sucks. There, are you happy now?"
=)
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