A man named Javier urgently needs my help. He’s just hired a new associate named Raphael at the company where he works as a manager. Raphael is openly gay, which Javier is fine with, he quickly assures me — but some of his colleagues are not. Another employee, Tina, has been shunning Raphael at work and calling him “queer” behind his back. Javier is beside himself: what should he say? What should he do?
Fortunately for Javier, he doesn’t exist. He’s a figment, a spectre, a ghost in the machine of the diversity-industrial complex — and a character in the anti-harassment and discrimination training that I had to complete last month. This training, accessed remotely via an online portal, is an annual requirement of my part-time job as a yoga instructor. Designed by a third-party contractor, it covers all manner of workplace sins: sexual harassment, discrimination, plus various isms and phobias.
It also takes two hours — as in, 120 minutes — as required by state law. In 2019, Connecticut governor Ned Lamont put his signature on two pieces of legislation known, collectively, as the Time’s Up Act. Touted as a “proactive approach” to combating workplace sexual harassment, the law was inspired by the #MeToo movement (along with, presumably, the movement’s fancy Hollywood cousin, Time’s Up.) Among its accomplishments was a mandate that the employees of any company comprising three or more people must complete two hours of sexual harassment training, no exceptions.
The above information is contained in the training itself, for what I’ve concluded must be two reasons. The first is that the authors of the training want you to know exactly who is responsible for making you sit through an interminable lesson in why you shouldn’t refer to your co-workers using homophobic slurs. The second reason is that, man, two hours is a lot of time to fill.
To be fair to the creators of the training module, they have done their best to make it interesting (more on that later). But, having been employed at the same company since before the passage of the Time’s Up Act, I’ve noticed something intriguing: all this content is virtually unchanged from what it was several years ago, when the law required just one hour of DEI compliance training. It’s not just the same concepts, but the same actors, the same scripted scenarios. Is this a two-hour training? No: it’s a one-hour training in a two-hour bag padded out with a bunch of foam packing peanuts. Having noticed this DEI twist on shrinkflation, it’s impossible to unsee. The sheer volume of gimmicks, whereby the training designers manage to convey the same information in double the time, would be awe-inspiring if it weren’t so irritating.
Each hypothetical harassment scenario is described four times: in a short text essay, then in a first-person video, then as a word problem followed by a multiple-choice quiz, and then, finally, in a post-quiz recap that reiterates the same information all over again. A segment about the professional hazards of social media is similarly laborious, making you click through six panels of an alleged confession by “Sarah”, who wrote a social-media post with a “discriminatory tone” before boarding a long flight, only to find herself dogpiled when she landed. (It’s hard to know what’s worse: the time-consuming structure, or the blatant, uncompensated rip-off of the Justine Sacco story, as if that woman hasn’t suffered enough.) And in the section detailing the content of the Time’s Up Act, the legislation is broken into eight bullet points, each hidden behind an interactive drop-down menu that you have to physically click on three times — once to open it, once to close it, and once to advance to the next one.
Have you ever been stuck in the supermarket checkout line with a cashier who insists on breaking a bunch of bananas into eight individual bananas and laboriously scanning them one at a time? It’s like that, but worse, because you can’t eat the sexual harassment training. But if the form of the training is categorically absurd, what it attempts to teach isn’t much better. At best, these concepts are common sense, a reiteration of the basic norms of human interaction that most of us learned in preschool. Don’t exclude, don’t name-call, don’t touch people who ask you not to touch them — and no, Javier, I do not think you should tell Raphael to “stop being such a drama queen” about his co-worker referring to him with a homophobic slur.
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SubscribeOh no! Usually with these things you can click through and guess the answers at the end, pass and finish the course.
Then they started forcing you to watch the whole video – even if you got 100%.
It’s not about the video; it’s about compliance, submission and indoctrination via the HR department. Why are HR departments full of such SJW snowflake activists?
For years my Tech team has made laughing stock of the pathetic HR groups we have encountered… This is their chance at revenge…
Because the meta-lesson of the training is that you are a weak, impotent slave and you will perform these meaningless tasks for your managers and put on a happy face as you do them. It’s about beating you down.
Because the company that employs them has to justify the money they spend on them!
I had an online anti money laundering course today, and mercifully, I could still click through to the end, as you say.
It will be a sad day if they stop us doing that!
Our politicians have failed to stop crime.
But here’s the answer: a law to make all crime illegal! That should reassure the voters that Something is Being Done about Crime.
Oh… and an annual 2 hour mandatory training module for all adults about Not Doing Crime.
Sorted.
NOT doing crimes?! Are you sure?
I wish someone had told me!
Haha! Exactly. “Oh, don’t be a bigoted perv—I must’ve misheard you at first!”
How depressing. I’m not a yoga instructor, but as a licensed attorney I have to take continuing education courses for the California bar. They are a joke. Here are the new requirements:
— 25 hours over 3 years
— 12.5 of those 25 hours must be participatory
— 4 hours must be for legal ethics
— 2 hours must be for elimination of bias; 1 of those 2 hours must be for implicit bias
— 2 hours must be for competence; 1 of those 2 hours must be for prevention and detection of substance abuse or mental health issues and the other 1 hour for attorney wellness
— 1 hour must be for technology
— 1 hour must be for civility
I am going to need more than 1 hour training in civility to be civil dealing with the bar association. My temper is boiling, especially since I have to pay to get all this training both in time and money. And it’s all worthless. In all the years I have had to do this I can’t remember learning a single thing. My biases (both implicit and overt) remain.
Luckily some cut-rate operators sell complete training packages for $60. The videos I get have some rudimentary watchdogs that pop up for me to click on, but I can usually time those well enough that I can do other things while watching. But still.
The Devil provides mischief for idle hands. The massive increase in post 16 years of age education since WW2 in humanities courses with no practical or useful function has produced a vast numbers of middle class people looking for gainful employment. DEI is superb at providing employment for middle class people with humanities degrees with no useful or practical purpose.
If they read Civil, Mechanical or Electrical Engineering they could replace infrastructure in a poor state of repair but this would mean actually having to study difficult subjects such as maths, physics, chemistry, technical drawing. Gravity, strergth of materials, density, rates of reaction, velocity, etc do not care about feelings.
Spot on!!
Infrasctructure is not crumbling primarily because of any lack of know-how, but too little willingness to mobilize and pay for repairs and improvements. Nor could a majority of unpublished poets or Bureau of Oppressive Fairness employees have ever become innovative engineering minds. For a few of highly versatile intelligence, sure.
I agree that many humanities degrees are wasted, but not every music, art, history, or literature major does nothing of artistic or social value with their fancy book learning. And not every engineer puts that degree to important or socially responsible use.
In our prior exchanges this has been a point of strong agreement: Too many people of middling intellect or lukewarm interest get university degrees nowadays, especially advanced degrees. This results in a large scale waste of time and money, and waters down both the real and perceived value of many higher ed. programs.
Still, a great deal of targeted training and other scaffolding between the ages of 16 and 20 or so will be needed to produce (engineer?) capable citizens in today’s world. They don’t need critical theory—let alone Art History from a Feminist Perspective—but their schools do not give them much by age 16, and could hardly do enough by that age given the society and economies we live in.
Since you are very knowledgeable about the history of education and work (especially in England) I offer this challenge:
Can you sketch or even detail a program of young-adult education & training, one mostly for those of unexceptional smarts, motivation, or discipline? I propose a target age of 16-20, with some able to start the program or leave for employment a bit earlier or later.
I’m not expecting, let alone demanding anything in particular from you, sir. But I genuinely think you have a lot to offer in this regard. Can you say a little more, on a nonspecific-but-urgent schedule, and in a way that reaches some who don’t already agree?
This is the problem of Laws of Compulsion – they are hugely costly and hugely wasteful. The difference is subtle, but outside taxes law-makers should focus on Laws of Prohibition (eg ‘do no harm’). Laws of Compulsion are massively expensive. Two hours at $50 a hour (so $100) for one million people is a $100 million cost. How much harassment is reduced by that £100m of waste?
Unfortunately we have huge amounts of Laws of Compulsion hitting the books in the past two decades – requirements for GDPR, visa requirements, requirements for business policies, know your customer for financial services. Huge enormous spend generating a huge enormous set of career administrators and inspectors to check the Compulsory Items are completed and audited. With computers forms and rules are so easy to create, no one thinks of the actual cost. Millions of people are forced to comply to try to prevent rogue behaviour that numbers a few hundred or a few thousand, and that would happen with or without the forms demanded by the Laws of Compulsion.
Exactly. There has been no cost benefit analysis applied to all these burdensome legal requirements that stifle productive use of time.
Brilliant and novel assessment…
Expect this nonsense to be making its way over to Wales. Their record on health, education and infrastructure is appalling but they’re all over DEI, it’s their top priority, no part of its citizens lives should be left unmanaged.
Devolution working its magic again.
You could write to the Deputy Chief Medical Officer and ask why it is so importabt in health to spend as much time and effort on all this when it takes resources away from providing quality care and support. I am sure he will come back with a great answer…
The failing Welsh Health Minister is now First Minister of Wales.
‘Another employee, Tina, has been shunning Raphael at work and calling him “queer” behind his back.’
I thought it was now compulsory to use ‘queer’.
What does the Q in LGBTQ stand for?
Yes, really! Tina should get a promotion and a raise.
Perfect use of AI – design an App that does the courses while one does something productive (or has a nap).
Have you ever been stuck in the supermarket checkout line with a cashier who insists on breaking a bunch of bananas into eight individual bananas and laboriously scanning them one at a time?
What kind of freaky-deaky alternate universe do the cashiers at your supermarket come from? Everywhere I’ve ever shopped, bananas are priced by the pound. Incidentally, if you’re ever at the self-checkout, the code for bananas is always 4011–it’s literally the first code they teach you when training you as a checker.
cursed matryoshka doll
Good idea for a movie.
Having noticed this DEI twist on shrinkflation, it’s impossible to unsee. The sheer volume of gimmicks, whereby the training designers manage to convey the same information in double the time, would be awe-inspiring if it weren’t so irritating.
The paradox of the DEI employee: the only way to justify your existence is by demonstrating that your existence isn’t justifiable.
I would refuse to accept or pay for a bunch of bananas if the cashier insisted on separating them.
How many half-bananss in a dozen?
Another way of the state forcing employers to be burdened with the useless, unproductive and indeed counterproductive employees and contractors at great cost.
What a wealthy society we must be to be able to afford this!
Bullsh!t jobs as David Graeber would have said
The last part reminds me of an English textbook I had at school, back around 1970. Every story had questions afterwards. One was “Do you think this is an utterly beautiful story? If not, please read it again.” (It was about lambs being born, since you ask.)
If it asked whether it was an udderly beautiful story, it was about calves being born.
A good point that needed to be made.
“This is what makes the Time’s Up Act and its ilk so toothless, and frankly so offensive: it pretends to address the abuses of powerful men by condescending to and wasting the time of ordinary working people.”
Got it in one
Yes, DEI is a racket, and a very lucrative one. Robin DiAngelo hit a vein of gold when she discovered the magic formula of white fragility (If you’re white, you have white fragility; if you deny having white fragility, that’s definitive evidence of your white fragility). Her success resounded like James Marshall’s discovery at Sutter’s Mill. The rest is history: a mad rush to get a foothold in the DEI bureaucracy and with it a steady meal ticket at minimal effort.
And it’s also damning evidence of an overweening authoritarian impulse to impose one particular style of moral philosophy onto everyone, while at the same time piously bleating that all prior forms of moral philosophy (whether religion-based or simply traditional) are null and void because they infringe in one way or another on personal liberty.
What a steaming mess!
I quite agree! Laws like the example in the article are not designed to resolve problems, for resolving problems puts large numbers of overpaid, unskilled, and over-credentialed persons into the job market and reduces the wealth and power of the state.
“This is where the mandatory training comes in — a training which I would estimate prevented exactly zero incidents of harassment, unless the would-be offender happened to be stuck completing it at precisely the day and time when he would have otherwise been harassing someone.”
Brilliant!
Wonder how much money the company packaging and purveying the ‘instructional’ video is making? The parasites feeding out of DEI trough are getting very, very fat.
Find a cause and you will have a job for life. This defines the nature of activism no matter the cause. The point is not to address or resolve whatever the issue is; it’s to perpetuate the grievance and when possible expand on it. A resolution would mean the end of the grift. People would lose money or status or the ability to order others around in some meaningless pursuit.
Kat wasn’t being punished for being sexist, or any number of crimes, but for being efficient and capable at what should does.
This sounds very similar to the two hour Safeguarding course that is mandated in the UK to ensure everyone is aware that grooming the young and “vulnerable adults” is something everyone needs to be perpetually aware of because it is wrong.
As the author has grasped it shows that politicians have done something and provides some flimsy legal protection to the organisation requiring this when grooming in fact takes place. It may be a chocolate fireguard but something has been done at the expense of the time and inconvenience of those that are not complete idiots.
On the other hand, the woke scum could definitely do with a two hour Safeguarding course multiple times weekly to remind them that turning a blind eye to Pakistani paedophile rape gang culture is wrong.
And letting rapists into women’s prisons and crisis centres, hospital wards; fetishistic men into girl-guiding; gender-nonconforming youth into the hands of therapists and doctors who want to mutilate them, yadda yadda ….
What a racket.
My US State now requires this kind of training for license renewal. It does not really impart any information, or anything that is just not common sense. (I aced the test without enduring the tedious videos).Sure, respect differences. It clearly is more perfomative and symbolic. As professionals, part of our legitimation is to pledge allegience to the gender and DEI ideologies du jour.
This article’s lovely as a rose and sharp as a razor.
This sounds like a similar “training”: Safe Sports. This must be taken annually by most coaches/volunteers of all sports–from K-12 schools to US Sailing adult racing to the Olympics. Sounds like it was written by same DEI company. Very boring, very redundant, very full of nonsense. Yes, there is some good things in it: sexual innuendo/harassment of females is wrong. But this is largely supplemented by trans junk. But all the sport industries (from the Olympics on down) buy into this thought control.
” At best, these concepts are common sense, a reiteration of the basic norms of human interaction that most of us learned in preschool.”
Years ago I read an inspirational/self help book (don’t know why; never did again), called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Robert Fulgham. It was actually a very fun read; about exactly what the title implies. It should be required reading. Perhaps as part of the process of getting a driver’s license.
BTW, the author followed up with another called It Was on Fire When I Laid Down On It, that began with a story about a woman injured in a mattress fire. Fulgham is a man with a true understanding of human nature!
If heterosexual ladies are prepared to wait a few years I can assure them that sexual harassment will be a thing of the past. A desire for sex is the principal reason why the vast majority of men freely choose to interact with women (forced interaction as in a work context is an entirely different matter) and within a few years sex with AI robots will be widely available. To be frank most men will opt for that. QED.
and for those who are don’t fancy robot pleasure , there’s always gratuitous violence….
A virtuoso piece of artticulation by KR whose sheer deftness of delivery parallels beautifully (with what i am sure is) the finesse of her yoga instruction.
Thankyou, KR.
Their ‘gender non-conforming’ pictures may be so unlikely because of what I call ‘corporate diversity’ – that you can’t illustrate people really rejecting the status quo because those individuals aren’t biddable. Instead, corporate diversity maintains that everyone regardless of sex, gender, ability, race, religion, sexuality, and so on, has to want the same things and live the same way. Black, for example, but not too Black. Gay but in a non-threatening way. People who still want to be parents and lift weights in the gym. See, they’re just like us! No really they are…
Jordan Peterson syndrome. I think people who legislate for these sorts of red tape should show up in stocks at the town square on food waste recycling day.
A good start would be all judges who think it’s a good idea: https://dailycitizen.focusonthefamily.com/canadian-court-orders-jordan-peterson-to-take-re-education-program/
The DEi educational material reminds me of the 1936 film Reefer Madness. It’s so funny and hammy and ridiculous that no one took it seriously. Unfortunately though people do actually get drug psychosis sometimes and some drugs are addictive and they can wreck your life. Real discussion and debate is best. Propaganda never works for long.
I found this article unnecessarily long and repetitive.
I didn’t.
Missed the irony, there!
Yes, completely. I’m worried now, it’s not the first time.
And making yoga the object in the title was irrelevant,
Never in my entire life have I read such a brilliantly well expressed overview of what is wrong with all this unnecessary “compliance” rubbish. Very well done.
Who makes the rules? Remain confused!