“I retired at 60 just over a year ago, as I got fed up with all the wokery. This included compulsory online courses in pseudoscience like unconscious bias and microaggressions, relentless curtailment of free speech, and worst of all, relentless over-promotion of minorities in search of equity.
“My boss’s boss, a black woman based on the west coast of the US, was utterly clueless – the very definition of a ‘diversity hire’ – she could hardly read out her own slides, never mind presenting anything in a persuasive manner. She was incapable of handling an escalation, such as when I made a complaint about a sales manager – she did precisely nothing about this except sympathetic words and lots of HR jargonising.
“The final straw came when the Silicon Valley-based CEO, on the quarterly ‘results’ conference call, spent five minutes on financial performance and 25 minutes chatting to a trans person about their ‘lived experience’. Utterly bizarre.
“The choice was to retire or to push back and probably get kicked out.
“It’s all happened so fast – they hired me at 54 and they were delighted to get someone with my experience. They were shocked when I left and that division has struggled. But there’s no way they’d hire a ‘me’ now – identity is now prioritised over competence and that will not end well.”
As Gary Becker pointed out, taste discrimination costs the discriminator money. Therefore we’ expect a market system to weed it out over time.
Wokery posts an employer money. Therefore we’ expect a market system to weed it out over time.
How much time, ah, well, but it will die in the end.
I expect 24/7 running electricity and indoor plumbing to be denounced as evidence of white supremacist witchcraft by 2030, Tim.
Labour are already a couple of steps ahead of the game, now describing the predictable effects of their own Climate Change Act as “institutional racism” against “BAME people”. The point isn’t to undo the evils of greeniebollocks: the point is to hybridise it with racialbollocks in order to better Mau Mau the general public into the new hierarchy.
Guardianistas think we’re heading for the Demolition Man future, but it’s more like a cold South Africa. Thanks, Conservatives.
I think the rich will end up equipping their houses with off grid electricity, heating and storage. On top of that, obtaining the rights to make their local neighbourhoods gated communities.
Just like in many parts of Africa and South America.
@Salamander – Not just the rich, even us peons with barely two farthings to rub together have made what provision for electric and gas shortages we can.
I’ve got 2 gas stoves with about 28 CampingGaz canisters tucked away in the cupboard in case we lose gas supply this winter (unlikely, but possible and no easy alternatives in a 2nd Story rented flat)
As for electricity backup, I’ve got camping lanterns charged up and ready to go, 4 * 10,000mA USB power and 5 x 12volt batteries and a 240 volt inverted.
When our substation blew a cable last year (and we were out for a couple of hours), that little package of backup heat and power turned an otherwise miserable few hours into little more than a mini adventure (combined with cooking a meal on and so on), the power came back on before we’d used a fraction of our reserves.
I’m guessing I won’t be the only one doing something similar next time the lights go out for real.
Given our governments self-delusion over NetZero, I doubt it will be very long. In fact it’s probably only the mild winter that has prevented any blackouts this winter.
However, UK Gov won’t KEEP getting away with it, that’s for certain.
I must be getting old and senile. I struggled over the first two paragraphs because they looked as if I had written them somewhere, but I couldn’t remember doing so.
Seems like there are 3 ways this could play out:
1 – the cost of wokery does hurt businesses enough that it dies out, or at least gets tamped down
2 – the wokeists are able to institutionalize it and legislate it so widely that everyone has to play the game and we’re all a bit poorer for it
3 – we end up with businesses that are woke and those that are clean, consumers choose their side
Very hard for all those contributing to the article. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to cut down to part/time work with the financial security to walk away altogether should that become intolerable.
It affects every single one of us as we all depend to a greater or lesser extent on public sector services be it the nhs, the police, the judiciary, the educational establishment etc etc. Institutions which as well as being dummed down increasingly manipulate their services to the detriment of those born white, straight and fortunate enough to be assigned the correct gender by their doctor or midwife.
Even those working for relatively sensible private sector companies are at the mercy of the overwhelming power of ESG ratings.
Klaus Schwab is only half right. Yes we will own nothing but no we won’t be happy.
“I’m guessing I won’t be the only one doing something similar next time the lights go out for real.”
We’ve got camping stoves and bottled gas, a small genny, battery operated LED lights in every room. My sister in law has installed a wood burning stove, we have a boarded up fireplace in one room which could be opened up if we decided to install one. I think that the best approach is to be able to utilse as many different types of fuel as possible. Does anyone else think that it is effing unbelievable that we are actually discussing this?
As for the mild winter, winter isn’t over yet. Wasn’t the winter of 1947 really mild until it wasn’t?
“As for the mild winter, winter isn’t over yet. Wasn’t the winter of 1947 really mild until it wasn’t?”
Didn’t start until second half of January apparently. Winter of ’63 only kicked off just after Christmas ’62, and lasted until March. And of course our own recent ‘Beast from the East’ was in late Feb/early March 2018. So plenty of time for cold winter weather yet.
I literally haven’t seen any wokeism working for various people, but this is mostly about who I work for.
If you work in the sort of organisation that is nervous about its image, because it’s either a company selling overpriced stuff (luxury cars, iPhones, fancy vodka, designer plimsolls) or a pointless part of government, you are going to get woke. These organisations depend on idiots supporting them, and a whiff of scandal will have them running elsewhere, perhaps discovering that a Moto phone will do what they need for half the price.
And I have little sympathy for most of the people complaining because they are little more than parasites on a bloated organisation. They joined the company not to make great things but in the hope of eventually finding their way to getting business class travel and a million dollar salary. Or in the case of government, just not doing much all day.
Go and do something that is useful and you avoid woke. And that includes government. I’m working in a bit of it at the moment, and they do have some stuff on the intranet about it, but in terms of day-to-day work, it hasn’t affected me in the slightest. But it is a useful bit of government. It matters that it’s done well. It’s not like DCMS or BEIS, where you could dump both departments and no-one would notice.
Counterpoint: I work for a big American company too. We have some wokeness: the company has long sponsored LGBT orgs; recently it began sponsoring Black (sic) orgs too. Pronouns are starting to show up on email signatures, and every other month we get all-company emails about [ethnicity] History Month. And that’s all. No day-long seminars on trans rights, definitely no diversity promotions, just getting stuff done. It’s not that bad out there.
It won’t… most organisations tried to fix their diversity problems by filling their HR department full of birds. Being birds, they’re mostly completely fucking useless. However, unfortunately, they’re proving really hard to get rid of and are universally responsible for this woke bullshit.
@aaa
I think they’re ahead of you. The latest wheeze is menopause awareness. Picked at random –
https://www.ihasco.co.uk/courses/detail/menopause-awareness-training
What happens if you say you now identify as a black, trannie lesbian, name of Rhianna? I mean, for a start it’ll shrink the gender pay gap, eh?
Esteban,
“3: we end up with businesses that are woke and those that are clean, consumers choose their side”
If you’re buying something from a woke business I can almost guarantee you that there is a non-woke business producing something of equivalent quality at a lower price. I would go as far as to say that this is a trigger to go looking around for something cheaper.
Woke is a differentiator in an already mature market where the generics and low brands are as good as the cheap brands. If they had any product differentiation they’d be marketing based on that. Celebrity endorsements, eco, woke are all signs that you should find the cheaper competitors.
The BlackRocks of the world likely know this, but they’re happy to make that relatively short-term gain. Would be interesting if employers subsequently began discriminating against job candidates with any history at those firms.
Klaus Schwab is only half right. Yes we will own nothing but no we won’t be happy.
But if you’re not happy, that will be justification for euthanasia, see Canada.
Bom4
The trouble is that “woke” is now an embedded overhead. If you buy a car, the company will have a “modern slavery statement”and a “gender pay gap” statement. Useless bullshit that costs serious money to create. We have a so-called Conservative government of Trotskyite infiltrators
“Winter of ’63 only kicked off just after Christmas ’62, and lasted until March.”
Boxing Day, apparently. My mum recalls that it started snowing on boxing day as we came home from my dad’s parents. First day without frost after that was 6th March. Being not quite 5 months old on that Boxing Day, my recollection of this is limited.