You can't make this up. The LA Times may have won this week's gold medal in the woke olympics by publishing this opinion article. Under the title, "Remote work gave them a reprieve from racism. They don’t want to go back" business reporter Samantha Masunaga (who also predictably has pronouns in her Twitter bio) tries to make the case that remote work helps employees escape racism in the workplace.
The piece starts off with a sob story of some tech employee in California: "As LeRon Barton weighed his options, he realized what he had to do. If he took a pay cut of $5,000, he could have a fully remote tech job that would let him roam the country and give him the flexibility he craved."
"Or he could keep his salary and stay at his current job — a network engineer position based at a San Francisco hospital that required occasional site visits and kept him tethered to the region."
"Working remotely during the pandemic showed him a whole different lifestyle: no commute, more time with his family and a break from the onslaught of microaggressions and other racist behavior he’d had to endure," Masunaga writes as if racism is so widespread in American offices in the year 2023.
Despite the endless amount of money and time on HR departments in companies in the United States, not to mention endless hours of mandatory and nauseating "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion" trainings, Masunaga writes that working from home to avoid corporate racism is "a sentiment expressed by many Black workers and other people of color who found that remote work lessened the racism they faced on the job."
She writes that "In 2021, just 3% of Black white-collar “knowledge workers” wanted to return to full-time in-office work, compared with 21% of white ones, according to research from Future Forum, a project backed by instant messaging firm Slack."
"The research found that hybrid or remote work arrangements increased Black workers’ feelings of belonging at work and boosted their ability to manage stress," she added.
This entire article is absurd. Wanting to work remotely isn't a desire shared by only people of color. There are people of all races, ages, and sexes who prefer to work from home.
Despite what leftists like Masunaga and the LA Times think, not everything has to do with race and racism.
