Starbucks ordered to pay extra $2.7M to employee who said she was fired for being white
Starbucks ordered to pay extra $2.7M to employee who said she was fired for being white
A New Jersey federal judge has ordered Starbucks to pay a former employee who was awarded $25.6 million in a wrongful termination suit an extra $2.7 million in damages.
A jury previously awarded Shannon Phillips $25.6 million.
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Huh... So companies can't be racist against white people?!?
I hope this brings about a whole ton of new lawsuits as workers finally say enough is enough with token hires which push out white employees only to fill a position with a minority just to fill some arbitrary and rather bullshit diversity target.
I hope this brings about a whole ton of new lawsuits as workers finally say enough is enough with token hires which push out white employees only to fill a position with a minority just to fill some arbitrary and rather bullshit diversity target.
Middle aged white guy here. I've been in my field about 30 years. I've had a lot of different jobs in that field. I've worked with a lot of people who weren't white. Somehow, in all that time, I've never run across one of these "token hires" who were only there because of their skin color.
I've met a lot of bigoted, racist white folks though. When you look like the stereotypical maga, folks are pretty free to share their ugliest opinions with you. Most of them have no idea (and will never try to deepen their understanding) about why the benefits of diversity are more than just not having exclusively white faces around.
Ditto here: I've actually seen "token" hires on gender (and only in one place), never on race.
Furthermore, that one place which had gender quotas and which at least in the departmemt I was working with clearly had hired some people for their gender, not their competence, had massive corporate culture and even profitability problems (think bankrupt bank with strong political connections that got unconditionally rescued with taxpayer money after the 2008 Crash and just kept losing billions and getting even more disfunctional).
It makes zero business sense to care about anything but competence when hiring somebody, and I say this as somebody who has actually been part of hiring decisions in a few places.
Old lady here - I was the first woman in my role in a couple of jobs back in the 80s and was accused of being a token plenty of times. Had to slog my way uphill through a mountain of sexist shit every single day while seeing men cruise along because they played golf with someone high up.
The "old boys network" is still alive and well, though its "membership" criteria are usually on things other than gender specifically: for example in the UK "membership" is often having gone to the right exclusive private schools and as those are often gender-segregated (i.e. "all boys schools" and "all girls schools"), you end up with discrimination in both the gender and social class one was born in axes.
Personally I find the whole "being buddies with the boss" type career progression extremelly unprofessional and any manager who is taking decisions in a professional capacity based on who his or her mates are, is working against the best interests of the company and needs to be replaced.
Then again, my professional training during my core professional learning years was mostly done in The Netherlands so I'm very strict on such things in the context of the management cultures in other countries I worked in such as the UK and Portugal were cronyism is rife in management, often linked to the kind of pre-existing relationships formed in non-gender-neutral situations.
PS: And the place were I saw "token" women openly had quotas and the incompetent but somehow working here thing only affected permanent employees in management positions. The interesting part is that of the 3 female low level managers in my department one was clearly very competent, one was clearly very incompetent and one was unclear. Further, this was the single most sexist (as in, very machist) place I ever worked (and my career now spans two and a half decades and 4 countries).
I get the feeling that the very competent manager there who happenned to be a woman lost from there being quotas for female managers rather than gained from it (she constantly had to prove her competence and was often not take seriously), whilst clearly the incompetent one was only there because of quotas and in meetings acted as an "attractive female provider of adoration" for her manager.
None of this justifies the unjust treatment you suffered, by the way.
There were two women that were rumored to have been hired/promoted into a VP position and a Director position only for their gender about 6 years ago. I didn't work with either of them closely. They both left the company a year later. I'm not sure whether that was vindication of the rumors, or just a turn of circumstance, but worst case their gender bought them only a temporary position.
Just to be clear - plenty more women in both leadership and technical positions, and have been for years. Just those two were the only ones where I ever got a hint of that sort of thing.
Yeah, this one time was also the only time I saw any such thing and my career spans over 25 years and 4 countries.
I think we're overall in agreement, just putting a finer point on it - On this and the related racial topic, I'm of the opinion that far more people think these policies result in unqualified people getting jobs they don't deserve than ever actually happens. No business has payroll to spare that they can just shovel onto worthless bodies to satisfy diversity goals, and I refuse to believe that there's more than a vanishingly small percentage of folks who remain in such a position longer than the time it takes for management to realize they are worthless.
Well managed places hire the best person for the job and don't need to try to hide the visible results (racial or gender imbalances in a company which cannot be explained by pre-existing manpower inbalances in that professional domain) of the kind of widespread mismanagement which includes treating hiring responsabilities as a license to do favours for one's mates, using yet more merit-ignoring practices such as quotas.
It really isn't a benefit for anybody to be hired as a token anything because places which hire people for token reasons are just covering up mismanagement with it and are thus not good places to work in.
PS: I can tell you from my own professional experience which is quite extensive (as I worked as a Freelancer in most of my career so saw a lot more places than average) that lots of places do have payrol to spare and there's a lot of wastefulness going on in the business world: the idea of a Free Market where there's lots of competition is pure fantasy in a lot of domains and even in competitive areas non-core-business departments often have a lot more budge than they would if they were in an Industry were what they do is core to the business.
On the outside of businesses, the Economy is riddled with markets with less than "flat playing fields" (most of them, actually have barriers to entry, some even being natural cartels and monopolies) and the very same informational-advantages that allow for example companies in expert domains to swindle non-expert customers (say, car mechanics overcharging) also apply inside the companies themselves (which is why people at times discover to their surprise that the CEO of their company is a complete total idiot).
On the off chance you're only stupid and not just a racist arguing in bad faith - did you miss the part where she won the suit and is getting $27m?