The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that making employees shift from work-from-home to showing up in person risks exposing black employees and workers “of color” to the racism that some say that they experience in person at the workplace.
In an article titled “Remote work gave them a reprieve from racism. They don’t want to go back,” the Times reported:
[M]any Black workers and other people of color … found that remote work lessened the racism they faced on the job.
But it forces workers to make a difficult choice — prioritize your mental health or endure for the sake of your career. Remote job opportunities are shrinking as more companies require that workers come back to the office. And even in hybrid workplaces, remote employees can be at a disadvantage for career advancement since managers sometimes forget about them or assume they are less productive than their in-person peers, a concept called proximity bias.
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Throughout the pandemic, survey after survey showed what some workers of color have known for years: Workplace politics and discrimination can make the office an undesirable place to be.
Ironically, in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, reports emerged saying that work-from-home was racist because black and Hispanic employees were less likely than Asian and white employees to have jobs that allowed them to work remotely.
The tech industry, which leans heavily to the left, is one of the industries known to make the greatest use of work from home.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
