The Negative Impact of DEI on Salaries at IBM (and Fedora)
ONE very common criticism of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is that it collectively lowers salaries by bringing in people willing to settle for a lower salary.
To be clear, we do not oppose DEI, we just want to illuminate what it does in practice and how often it gets used to suppress criticism of corporations/managers (who conflate censorship with "safety" even when inapplicable or when seeking to censor information about abuse of women, minorities etc.), as one might expect perhaps.
In the past 10 days only 4 people spoke in the DEI 'channel' (room) of Fedora, which is known as "Fedora Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Team". Some rooms are locked or restricted, probably to avoid undesirable messages, but DEI is open to all.
It has already been pointed out that almost nobody in IBM and Red Hat really cares about this. But it is often leveraged by managers for their more political agenda, sometimes economic too.
An hour ago in the IBM layoffs-centric forum somebody said "North America laid off employees will be replaced by cheaper younger ones in outsourced countries" (such as India).
A few days earlier someone shared these numbers:
USA headcount by yearYou decide if it’s a rumor or not
2012 = 106,975
2013 = 102,971
2014 = 102,242
2015 = 91,726
2016 = 84,982
2017 = 81,703
2018 = 78,737
2019 = 73,105
2020 = 69,696
2021 = 64,315
2022 = 54,151
2023 = 51,708
No source is provided for this, but let's assume this is true.
The comment after that said: "I might add that IBM is also hiring at much lower band levels than what they used to. They want experience but do not want to pay for it."
If race is being used for a race to the bottom (of wages), then people should be able to talk about it without being baited into "racism". It's not even about race. It's about workers being paid less and less for the same job/s. If people cannot speak about these class (or economic) issues without being presumed "racist", cui bono? █