Anyone who has ever worked with me before knows that this is how I am at work:
It was this Vine, yes that site that no longer exists, that I was reminded of when I was writing this post. It should make more sense as you read on.
In 2015 the Supreme Court ruled that states had to issue same-sex marriage licenses thereby legalizing gay marriage across the United States. Many around the country were elated at the news. Facebook helped people celebrate this by adding a feature whereby you could apply a filter to your profile picture to add a rainbow to show your support for same-sex marriage being legalized. During other major events Facebook added different filters for people to show their support for a given cause.
In 2015 there was a coordinated terrorist attack in Paris, France and many people around the world wanted to show their solidarity with the people of France. Just like in the past with the legalization of same-sex marriage, people applied the provided Facebook filter, this time showing the flag of France over their profile picture. The people’s hearts were in the right place, but after some time people got tired of everyone changing their profile pictures for each event. People saw these actions to be akin to “thoughts and prayers”. Words and profile pictures are nice, but actions speak louder than words. It even became a meme where Ralph from “The Simpsons” helped illustrate this frustration.
June is known as National Pride Month. In an ever growing trend more and more companies are going out of their way to show how supportive they are with LGBT issues by changing their logos and profile pictures to incorporate the rainbow.
This is very similar to the two examples mentioned above. It is awesome to see so many companies publicly showing their support, however all these companies all changing their logos to rainbows in June can come across like pandering. Just like with same-sex marriage legalization and the terrorist attacks in Paris, people have come to see these companies changing their profile pictures as “thoughts and prayers”, and as a thinly veiled attempt to get more money.
I have no issue with companies doing things based on what the public wants in an attempt to make more money. Considering capitalism at its core is to maximize revenue by providing a good the public wants. At the same time though it brings up the idea of protected groups in the United States. These collections of laws were written to ensure that individuals could not be discriminated or fired from their job based on them belonging to one of the protected groups. For example you cannot legally fire someone for being Christian because religion is one of the protected groups. Another protected groups is sex, which the government has since interpreted to also include sexual orientation and gender identity. I do not think that anyone should be fired simply based on their sexual orientation, however I would not go as far as to outlaw it either.
On the face of it the laws essentially state that companies should not prejudice employees based on their personal characteristics. I agree with that line of thinking. If you are running a company and your goal is to maximize profits, part of that would involve hiring the best talent per dollar you can find. If you are looking for a manager to run your restaurant then you should look for a candidate that has the best skills, passion, and experience for the given role. If that person happens to be gay, and you choose not to hire them because of it you are purposefully choosing to get less bang for your buck. Thus contradicting your original goal.
The good news is that society can take advantage of companies being greedy. A quote I have heard before with respect to race being a protected group is:
The only color greed cares about is green.
Unknown
It is expressing the idea that companies will focus on their bottom line and therefore naturally care most about their profit. Profit in the form of cash which is the color green, and not the color of their employees’ skin. This is one reason why I feel that there isn’t a need to have these laws on the books in the first place. Companies on the whole will want to maximize profits so they will serve the widest amount of customers and hire the best talent regardless of who they are.
If a company decides that they do want to be prejudice against someone then that should not be illegal, but they will have to accept any consequences as a result. In 2012 Chick-Fil-A’s CEO made comments about opposing same-sex marriage and gave money to anti-same-sex organizations. Many people called for a boycott of the company while others who agreed with the company also patronized it to support their view. As a result the company’s sales rose around the time of this controversy. While Chick-Fil-A did not end up suffering financially at that time, it does illustrate my point that the public voted with their wallets. It just happens that this time more people chose to spend money there then to boycott it. Chick-Fil-A did end up revoking its funding of all anti-same-sex marriage organizations except one as of 2018. The company definitely felt the bad publicity they got, and made changes.
Companies can react more rapidly then Chic-Fil-A did to public outcry, especially when accelerated by social media. Chipotle fired one of their managers because of a viral video of one of them asking a black customer if they had a means to pay for their order. The amount of public outrage from the video caused Chipotle to act swiftly and fire the manager. It later came out that that specific customer had a history of dining and not paying so the company apologized and reinstated the manager. Chipotle showed they very much care about its perception that one of their employees was racist. To show that they as a company do not tolerate racism they fired their employee. I would have liked to see Chipotle do a little more research before taking action but it’s clear that large companies are affected by public opinion.
Google donated a $1 million grant to the Hidden Genius Project that works on increasing representation of black males in the technology industry. Google sees the lack of representation as a problem. They think that society would benefit and Google would benefit by having a larger pool of employees to hire from. Society as a whole benefits when the most number of people succeed. Google is showing they they value diversity in their employees and that they are putting their money where their mouth is. While Google is doing something that has positive benefits on society, they do look good doing it in the process and that was likely part of that decision to donate that grant. That is okay because the outcome is good for all parties involved.
With more and more companies openly stating how supportive they are to LGBT issues, and as society moves in that direction as a whole, Chick-Fil-A only stands to lose more money if they continue to publicly be against same-sex marriage as a company. So if the public wants a society that supports LGBT issues then companies will follow. Companies will want to be known as an employer that hires LGBT employees, and is friendly to those issues. Plenty of large companies put floats in gay pride parades, and have internal groups for LGBT employees and their allies. On top of that, yes companies will even modify their logos during pride month in order to advertise that they are a company that is friendly to LGBT people. The counter action to companies being able to fire people because they are gay and getting bad publicity is for companies to show how supportive they are.
Companies might only be doing these things because they want to pander to you to get more of your money. In the end though that is what makes the system self correcting. If the public cares about an issue, companies will naturally be forced to care about it in one way or another in order to continue to maximize their bottom line. If the protected groups are removed, some people might get fired for being in one of those protected groups, but by far and in large companies are not incentivized to do so. If a company chooses to do it anyway then they will have to accept any consequences that come their way, and that is just fine by me.
So because companies are going to go out of their way to show you how much they support you, to quote the vine at the top of the article:
In the workplace, being gay just has its perks.
Move I’m Gay Vine
UPDATE 6/26/19:
After I posted this entry on this blog I came across a news article stating that Google employees are asking for their own company to be taken out of the San Francisco pride parade. The employees feel that the company has not done enough for the LGBT community on YouTube which Google owns. So the employees of a protected group are getting together and putting pressure on the company to do more. If they tried to fire an employee for being gay I couldn’t even imagine the blow back they would get if the employees are already this upset. While anecdotal I think this example is important to see as evidence of the continuing self correcting nature of a free market.
I Talk A Lot 