Why Black Workers Are Impacted Particularly Hard By Layoffs?

Introduction

The reality of lack of representation in the workforce is already difficult. People of color are finding it more difficult to advance, as a result of widespread global cutbacks.

Underrepresentation, fewer career paths, and a lack of institutional support are just a few of the obstacles that people of color have faced and still face in almost every industry. After decades of non-diverse hiring practices, many employers, including major tech companies, have only lately started talking openly about the absence of cultural diversity in their labor forces.

Companies Take On the Inclusion Programs

Recently, businesses have spent billions on diversity and inclusion programs in an effort to reduce these pervasive injustices and boost the representation of disadvantaged workers. Research indicates that the majority of these expenditures, notably in technology, happened after the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. Before Elon Musk took over Twitter in late 2022, the firm garnered favorable headlines for employing more black employees: in US locations, the numbers increased from 6.9% to 9.4%. In many cases, these measures demonstrated encouraging outcomes. The US-based telecoms giant Cisco reported a 120% rise in the number of black vice presidents that year, exceeding diversity goals they had initially set for 2023.

But, with widespread cutbacks, these diversity initiatives, along with overall workplace participation for people of color, may be stagnating.

The People of Color Had Been More Impacted by the Recent Layoffs.

Revelio Labs, a workforce analytics company, examined publicly accessible data for 2022 and found that, although representing only 6.05% and 9.96% of the industry, respectively, black and Latino workers made up 7.42% and 11.49% of the business’s layoffs in 2022. Netflix let go of 150 employees in May 2022, and Protocol determined that 26.6% of them came from underrepresented origins.

Nevertheless, there is not enough publicly available data to indicate that employees of color have already been laid off in increasing proportions than their white colleagues generally. These metrics are important for tracking the effect of layoffs on diversity in specific organizations.

Nonetheless, hiring practices, layoff procedures, data on shrinking DEI funding, and other indicators reveal that many marginalized workers are still having difficulty as a result of corporate budget cuts.

Last Entry, First Exit

Many businesses have implemented layoff procedures that take into account tenure and position when making cost-cutting decisions. In the wake of many high-profile lawsuits alleging racial and gender discrimination against businesses like Google, Uber, and Riot Games in 2018, many of these rules were established.

Although neutrality is the declared objective of many layoff rules, selecting employees with less tenure and seniority renders workers of color proportionally more prone to lose their jobs, especially in organizations that have concentrated only recently on diversity-oriented hiring. These positions are more likely to be cut under a “last in, first out” layoff procedure.

Bottom Line

Several executives have voiced fears about returning to homogenous workforces that lack trust and creativity while research on the benefits of diverse workforces on organizational success continues.

Many employees of color may keep finding their advancement blocked as long as mass layoffs continue, especially since mass layoffs don’t appear to be slowing down. According to Tulshyan, “it feels like a big storm is approaching in many aspects.”