Company Reveals It Will Lay Off Workers Through An ‘Anti-Racist’ Lens

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson announced on Wednesday that the technology firm would carry out a round of layoffs using an “anti-racist” and “anti-oppression” framework.

The publicly-traded company, which builds programmable communications tools, grew “at an astonishing rate” over the past several years, according to a letter from Lawson — a reality that necessitates a series of layoffs. As inflationary pressures and other economic bottlenecks propel the United States into a technical recession, other technology companies have likewise slowed hiring or decreased payrolls.

Lawson, however, informed his staff that Twilio is devoted to operating as an “anti-racist” company and that the layoffs were executed through an “Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens,” because “layoffs like this can have a more pronounced impact on marginalized communities.”

“This was tremendously difficult. For those impacted today, we applied a rigorous selection process to examine which roles were most tightly aligned to our four priorities,” Lawson wrote.

Other entities in the United States have adopted similar policies in layoff decisions. Last month, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers agreed to a contract stipulating that non-white staff are considered a “population underrepresented among licensed teachers,” which allows for them to be fired after white colleagues — a decision the union later defended as a remedy for “the continuing effects of past discrimination.”

An exclusive report from The Daily Wire revealed a two-hour diversity training at asset management company Vanguard that pushed white male managers to accept “uncomfortable” criticism about their implicit biases. Leaked footage showed a diversity trainer suggesting that Vanguard should provide expectations for how managers “will and should be held accountable” for diversity goals — with one possible mechanism for such accountability occurring through the “performance management process … just like we do for business results.”

Prioritizing diversity among staff — even at the expense of optimizing merit — is an objective frequently pursued at companies that have subscribed to the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement, by which executives tend to mingle left-wing politics with operations within their mandates.

Earlier this year, however, an exclusive poll from The Daily Wire showed that American investors would prefer that companies commit solely to the pursuit of profits. Although 29% of respondents agreed it is a “good thing” for companies to leverage their financial power for political or social means supported by executives, 58% said it is a “bad thing.” The poll also found that most investors recognize ESG as promoting “more liberal positions” than conservative ones. While 50% believe the former and 16% believe the latter, only 21% believe that ESG investing is politically neutral.

In the public sector, President Joe Biden is pursuing a “total transformation of government” centered upon diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“I believe this nation and this government need to change their whole approach to the issue of racial equity,” the commander-in-chief said during a speech days after his inauguration. “We need to open the promise of America to every American. And that means we need to make the issue of racial equity not just an issue for any one department of government; it has to be the business of the whole of government. … Every agency will be involved in this work because advancing equity has to be everyone’s job.”

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