WaPo Sob Story: DEI Layabouts Fired by the Federal Government Can't Get Hired by Other Corporations Because They Know They're DEI Layabouts

Sad!

Nightmare Vision @GodCloseMyEyes

please read this piece, it was so good. it's about dei officers in the federal government being cleaned out and many being unable to find new jobs because they were put on "dei watchlists" that come up in google searches in the exact same way it did for right wingers who had their lives ruined by journalists. then he starts applying for dei jobs in the private sector but can't get one because no one wants to hire someone with dei shit all over their resume. then they find a conservative activist and ask him if he's happy with all of this and his response is "these people are all anti-white, of course I'm glad they can't find jobs."

This was published late last week but I couldn't find an archived copy until now. (It's paywalled.)

Trump fired him. The 'DEI Watchlist' shamed him. Then came 500 job rejections.

Efforts to purge the government of diversity, equity and inclusion programs have taken a major toll on Black workers who now struggle to find comparable jobs.

Because you produced nothing. You earn nothing, you just cost a company money to push for more DEI layabouts to be hired and cost the company more money.

It's absurd you even had this "dream job" in the first place.

On his 368th day without a job, Dia Harris woke at 8:30, slipped a coffee pod into his Keurig and checked his iPad to see how many more rejections had come in overnight. There were two automated messages from "Meta Careers," thanking him for applying to be a program manager. "Our recruiting team will contact you if your qualifications are a strong match," Harris read. By his count, those were the 560th and 561st roles he'd sought since getting fired from the federal government.

What are your qualifications, Buddy?

After he showered, he found another message waiting: this one from the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that combats suicide among LGBTQ+ youth. Harris, 53, recalled thinking that the Trevor Project's "chief people officer" was the rare posting that felt like something he would be good at and actually wanted to do.

"While your qualifications and experience are truly impressive, they don't fully align ...," Harris read now, and he deleted the latest rejection unfinished.

Probably because they only hire gay people. Live by identity-based hiring, die by identity-based hiring.

He grabbed a bottle of frozen water and a zip-top bag of granola. He pulled on a maroon polo and matching baseball cap embroidered in white thread with the logo of the store where he worked part-time.

Wow, this pointless novelistic detail of the mundanities of simply getting dressed and eating really makes me identify with this unemployed grifter.

Sliding into his car, he drove in the opposite direction from the nation's capital and the limestone-and-brick federal building where he'd once found his purpose and had hoped to remain until he retired.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, nearly 426,000 of the nation's 2.2 million civilian federal employees have left the government.

Beautiful.

....

Of the hundreds of thousands who left, 85 percent resigned or retired early through incentive programs offered by the Trump administration, a Washington Post analysis found. Thirty-two thousand full-time workers were fired. Harris was one of them.

You know that claim that government workers make when their unions press for even higher wages than the already-inflated wages they're currently receiving? That you have to pay them more because they can just walk out the door and get much higher rates of pay in the private sector?

Any thoughts about that perennial claims, WaPo?

Harris was the first chief equity officer for the Administration for Children and Families, or ACF, a large agency in the Department of Health and Human Services that helps vulnerable Americans with foster care, home energy needs and early education. He was among more than 200 employees targeted for dismissal by DOGE after Trump issued an order to rid the government of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which he declared were divisive and destructive and "would have ruined our country."

Diversity programs and initiatives have been around for decades but became much more common after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Businesses and federal and local governments adopted antibias trainings, employee resource groups and recruiting programs and created new jobs, including Harris's federal position.

The mass embrace of DEI programs felt to Harris like the capstone of his professional life, despite growing opposition from many on the political right who portrayed DEI efforts as reverse racism that disadvantaged White people.

I enjoy the fact that the WaPo treats this as some kind of conspiracy theory or contested claim, when in fact the entire point of DEI is to push for the hiring of non-whites, non-males, and non-straights only.

There is no "DEI for white people."

The president's order accelerated that opposition, triggering a rapid retreat from DEI policies throughout government and the corporate world -- and, Harris feared, devastating the field in which he built his career.

It's not a career, it's a make-work welfare program for people who are otherwise unemployalbe.

...

Harris's job search was made harder by his membership in an even smaller group: He'd been named, with 92 others -- two-thirds of them Black -- on a public website called the "DEI Watchlist." Run by a little-known conservative group with ties to the Heritage Foundation, the site claimed to expose "behind-the-scenes bureaucrats who push divisive DEI agendas that undermine merit, fairness, and accountability."

A full page devoted to Harris shared his federal salary and employment history alongside a smiling photo of him wearing a blue button-down.

Harris had been out of government for more than a year, but the site was still the first result when anyone Googled his name. One prospective employer confided to him that the watch list made him unhirable. Harris often checked with friends and colleagues also named on the list, and most of them were still out of work,

...

Harris received no severance. Now, his $16-an-hour paycheck was barely enough to cover utilities. It was supplemented by a second part-time job and help from his 71-year-old mother, who'd recently picked up extra hours at the Hallmark shop where she'd worked for the past two years. But he was also using his 401(k) to pay the mortgage and his credit card bills, and that would be empty by next year.

Pulling into a long, low strip mall, he parked and closed his eyes. He didn't have to clock in for another 15 minutes. He told himself to forget the Dia Harris who'd earned two degrees; the sought-after HR expert who'd drawn six-figure salaries from Fortune 500 companies; the little boy who grew up in North Philadelphia eating blocks of yellow cheese from the government and who swore he'd never work part-time jobs like his mother.

...

IN THE LAST DAYS OF 2024, as his colleagues swapped rumors that the incoming president was going to delete DEI from the government, Harris and his boss came up with a plan to save his job.

As chief equity officer, Harris was tasked with ensuring that the workforce of the ACF resembled the Americans it served. Before Trump's inauguration, he switched to become a "senior advisor" in the Office of Community Services, which distributes funds, diapers and legal services to the poor. He saw it as more or less the same worthy mission: bringing in good people and helping them help the neediest Americans. Who, he wondered, could find fault with that?

Obviously this is the same scam we've seen throughout government and universities where they just create a vague fake new title and assign that title to DEI officers, who continue doing DEI bullshit and getting paid six figures for it.

Then, a few hours after Trump was sworn in, Harris was scanning one of 26 first-day executive orders -- "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing" -- when he noticed a date in the eighth paragraph. The president was ordering the termination of all DEI positions "in existence on November 4, 2024." Uh-oh, he thought.

Seems like Trump foresaw your next grifter maneuver and preemptively blocked it.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:30 PM

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