As a student headed into the world of business and marketing I wanted to write my last blog entry about race in marketing and the job place. I found two articles on npr.com that struck appeal to me when looking into lawsuits involving race and ethnicity within the corporate world. The first article that was about how in Chicago, 400 Nike employees who filed a racial discrimination law suit against Nike four years ago. The employees claimed that they were segregated into lower-paying jobs and that racial slurs were used in the work place. Nike denied the claims but paid the employees $7.6 million to settle the lawsuit. Another article that was interesting was the one about how an Intel advertisement was pulled out of the media after there were many complaints about it being offensive. If you look at the ad in the link, you will see a white man standing in-between 6 “bowing” or pre-sprinting posed black men. The ad intentionally meant to say that the computers in the work place were as fast as sprinting athletes, that the performance was similar to Olympic athletes. The ad was taken wrong by the masses and withdrawn from the media. The other page I looked at was the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and what the laws are regarding discrimination in the corporate world. This was interesting because I took into account the other articles I had read, the ones I mentioned, as well as others I have seen. I thought about how the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission and the Civil Rights Act provide for a now enormous amount of protection for minority races in the work place. I know from studying business law that racial discrimination and consideration of race is extremely important in making many different kinds of decisions. I have founds that some decisions are based on increasing percentages of minority race figures within a company. It has become a somewhat bothersome “limit” or “quota” as far as the business world is concerned. I find it sad to see companies needing to flex so much to live up to the standards of the law. There are so many corporations, like Microsoft for example, that hire such a diversity of races that they would never in the life of the corporation be filed against for racial discrimination. They tend to hire for the abilities and skills of the person and not to increase race statistics incase they had a law suit filed against them. This is a good way to hire and practice business.
There is a problem with my findings this week. I also find it hypocritical that so much settlement money is being paid to minorities to settle law suits of racial discrimination instead of actually carrying out the suit. While I do not and will never know what happened with some law suits or will have been in the minority’s shoes, I look at some situations and wonder if people were really filing for just causes. If the company was never charged with racial discrimination, but just settled the suit with hush-money, isn’t that defeating the purpose of the commission? If the Equal Opportunities Commission was set up to protect women and minorities from discrimination, shouldn’t it also protect against the reverse privilege? I just have a question in the back of my mind as to how far a corporation should go to keep its reputation as an equal opportunity employer. I wonder about the legitimacy of some of the cases and the motivation of some companies. I also would like to address that visuals are so important in marketing today. Analogous meaning is not something that should be associated with a visual involving race in the world today. In a world that is stunted with anger from the past of an unfair racial situation, it is extremely important to take care and consideration of every race’s perspective on advertisements. The Intel advertisement had good intention, but was not taken well by society. It is easy to see how one person, experiencing life as a minority, may view it much differently than from the perspective of an average Caucasian businessman. In my blog this week I would like to address how fragile the topics of race and ethnicity are and how fragile they are treated in the corporate world. This topic alone can make or break a corporation’s reputation and business to the many different races throughout the world. It is so important to stay neutral and be very careful in the way which we communicate in the world. Communicating across multi-cultural planes will be a challenge in marketing, I wonder if in the future the general public and media will become a less apprehensive to this topic. (792)
http://www.eeoc.gov/types/race.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12560118
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12370803
1 comment:
This was an interesting article because you it’s true you don’t hear of many cases of people filing against their employers for racial discrimination. But then I realized this is probably the reason for the hush money. Employers could probably take the case to court if they wanted to, and since they can hire good lawyers with their money they’d probably have a good chance at winning. However, the scandal of being a company on trial for racial discrimination in the media would cause them to lose tons of money because it gives the company a bad name. I think this is why they give out hush money so much, despite whether the claims are questionable, because even though they are losing money to people filing claims, they might be losing more by having a tainted company name for a racial discrimination suit gone public. (145)
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