| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Intel Succumbs to Jesse Jackson 'Diversity' Campaign
Anyone seeking a first-hand look at the timidity of corporate America should look no further than Intel Corp. This January, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based semiconductor chip maker announced it would set aside $300 million by 2020 for hiring, training and promoting “underrepresented” racial minorities and women. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich revealed the plan at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas only weeks after he and other top company officials had met privately with Jesse Jackson.
The announcement was a triumph for Jackson’s Silicon Valley shakedown campaign. “It’s a huge first step,” he declared, urging other tech firms to make “parity pledges.” Given the acquiescence of eBay, Google and Facebook to Jackson at their shareholder meetings last May, it is no surprise those companies are making similar commitments.
National Legal and Policy Center long has shone a spotlight on Jesse Jackson. The Chicago-based civil-rights hustler and former presidential candidate, through his nonprofit Rainbow/PUSH, has built a lucrative career in bullying corporations into instituting affirmative action goals, quotas and timetables – or to use the preferred term, “diversity.” Like his New York City counterpart, Al Sharpton, Jackson confronts white executives of a given company; demands they divert resources toward blacks; and threatens a boycott, a lawsuit or other hostile act if his target doesn’t cooperate. Usually, the target does cooperate, and with a generous “contribution” to Rainbow/PUSH or the Jackson-controlled Citizenship Education Fund. Toyota, Anheuser-Busch and PepsiCo are but a few of the companies over the years who have reached historic “agreements” with Jackson. For him, only lingering white racism, or apathy to it, stands in the way of achieving social justice.
Last March, Jackson kicked off his Silicon Valley diversity campaign by leading a delegation into Hewlett-Packard’s annual shareholder meeting, where he skewered the company for its allegedly discriminatory practices. Two months later, he took his act to shareholder conventions of eBay, Google and Facebook. Jackson was indignant that these (and other) information technology leaders hadn’t done enough to hire, retain, train and promote blacks and other “people of color.” Qualified individuals from such “underrepresented” groups can be found, he insisted, if employers made the effort to find them. “The ‘we can’t find them’ syndrome is a thing of the past,” Jackson badgered Facebook management and shareholders. “Who is looking? And where are ‘they’ looking? We can find them, if we look in the right places.” Jackson was operating on the assumption that being a member of a minority group constitutes a right to a job offer. Conveniently, he left ethnic Asians out of the equation. Though a minority, Asians constitute a much higher share of the Silicon Valley labor force than of the overall U.S. labor force. He could not bring himself to ask why Asians came to be “overrepresented.” For all intents and purposes, Jackson was pushing the envelope on behalf of fellow blacks, and secondarily, Hispanics.
One would think that education, skills, work experience and character are the most crucial factors in developing a successful work force. One also would think moreover that the employer, and not an outside force, reserves the right to set hiring, promotion and other personnel criteria. Jesse Jackson sees things differently. Ever on the lookout for “discrimination,” intentional or not, he will pounce on any company supposedly guilty of it. Over the last year, Jackson has made the nation’s information technology industry the focus of his indignation. His latest target is Intel Corp., the world’s largest manufacturer of semiconductor chips, expanding as of late into wearable and mobile devices, and video games. With a worldwide workforce of more than 100,000, the company makes for a target-rich environment. Last December, Jackson sat down with top company executives to hector them for not doing more to hire, train and promote nonwhites, and impose such a regime upon suppliers. Having been properly tutored, Intel, with an apparently unacceptable 24 percent female and 4 percent black work force, responded the next month with public groveling.
On the evening of January 6, Intel Corp. CEO Brian Krzanich, delivering the keynote address at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, announced that his company was pledging $300 million through 2020 to fund the hiring, training, retention and promotion of women and underrepresented minorities. Most of that money would come out of existing diversity programs, though some funds would be diverted from other activities. This “Parity 2020” initiative, Krzanich emphasized, is about inclusion. “It’s time to step up and do more. It’s not good enough to say we value diversity,” he proclaimed. He stated that executive compensation would be tied to progress in reaching numerical goals. By early this year, Intel had created nearly 60 “diversity” metrics corresponding to race, sex and other traits. Overseeing the proceedings from his front row seat was Jesse Jackson. A little over a week after the Las Vegas event, Krzanich, accompanied by Jackson and noted black radical Van Jones (see photo), showed up at the 18th Annual Rainbow/PUSH Wall Street Project Economic Summit, where he reiterated his pledge.
Intel Chief Diversity Officer Roz Hudnell is the point person for the company’s demographic transformation program. She stated at the Economic Summit that the campaign is good for the company’s balance sheets because more females will want to play video games and more minorities will want to form gaming teams. That would seem a thin justification for coaxing an entire corporation into Embracing Diversity in cult-like fashion. Hudnell also issued an implicit threat toward dissenters within the company. In a recent interview with PC World magazine, she summarized the new hiring policy: “You have people who by nature make decisions in favor of people like them, and when the majority of the workforce is men, then you have to put [managers] in place to ensure women have equal access to opportunity.” She noted in the interview that this policy will extend to Intel’s investments in women- and minority-owned companies. “We’ll be very clear and transparent about what we’re looking for,” Hudnell said. “We’ll have a diverse advisory board that will probably make those decisions.”
It isn’t just Intel that is capitulating to Jesse Jackson. The three tech corporations whom Jesse Jackson scolded last May – eBay, Google and Facebook – each subsequently stepped up their already considerable affirmative action programs. Let us summarize.
eBay. Last July 31, e-commerce leader eBay published an annual report on its progress in meeting diversity goals. The company’s domestic workforce composition broke down this way: white (61 percent); Asian (24 percent); black (7 percent); Hispanic (5 percent); and other/multi-racial (2 percent). And its global sex, er…gender breakdown was 58 percent male and 42 percent female. The accompanying statement, a typical mix of self-flagellation and self-congratulation, reads almost like a parody of diversity consultants’ monitoring report:
As our data shows, we have made progress in some areas. But we still have much work to do.
While we are committed to fostering all types of diversity, increasing the number of women in leadership roles has been an early focus. About three years ago, eBay Inc. President and CEO John Donahue launched our Women’s Initiative Network (WIN). The mission of WIN is to attract and engage women to build lasting, successful careers in the company. Through WIN, we have more than doubled the number of women in leadership roles and increased the share of leadership positions held by women. And we have continued to expand WIN around the world. Supporting our commitment to women, we maintain partnerships with the Anita Borg Institute and Lean In. And we leverage insights from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, as well as from leading academics. In various leadership forums, we provide ongoing diversity and inclusion training, including gender diversity and unconscious bias.
Support for our LGBT workforce also has been a strong commitment. We are honored to have received a perfect score of 100 percent on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI) every year since 2009. We actively recruit from the LGBT community and we provide progressive benefits. And we publicly advocate for equal rights for same-sex couples…
In common with others in our industry, we continue to work hard to recruit skilled technologists from diverse backgrounds. We use career sites including Black Planet, Black Women Connect, African-American Careers, National Society of Hispanic MBAs and several others.
One would think this Celebration of Diversity would earn kudos from the mainstream press. Unfortunately, it did not – at least not from Time magazine tech/culture columnist Eliana Dockterman. After praising eBay for employing more women, blacks and Hispanics than its peers in a tech industry “notoriously dominated by white and Asian men,” Dockterman scolded the firm for its “huge gender gap” in leadership positions (28% for women) and lack of blacks and Hispanics (2% for each).
Google. Having been dressed down by Jesse Jackson at its shareholder meeting at Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, Google announced its intent to release company “diversity”
Source: http://nlpc.org/stories/2015/03/26/intel-succumbs-jesse-jackson-diversity-campaign
