News/Commentary

LA Times claims remote work gave blacks a ‘reprieve from racism’

August 9, 2023 | | Print Article

Pushing a “reprieve from racism,” one corporate media outlet went out of its way to support its favor of remote work using “the only argument they know.”

Coupling new reports on COVID data and a slow resumption of mask-peddling with anti-productivity work trends like “quiet quitting,” a new piece from the Los Angeles Times seemed determined to justify keeping away from the office.

As such, Tuesday under the “Business” banner, they offered up a gem titled, “Remote work gave them a reprieve from racism. They don’t want to go back.”

“It’s 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,” wrote business reporter Samantha Masunaga before proceeding to emphasize general workplace concerns.

“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,” continued the article. “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.”

As highlighted on X by the End Wokeness account that captioned the story “LMAO how is this not satire?” the piece pulled data from a 2021 survey that found “just 3% of Black white-collar ‘knowledge workers’ wanted to return to full-time in-office work, compared with 21% of white ones.”

“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,” claimed the Times with only one survey to show as support.

BizPacReview had covered a similar study produced by the same source at the time, and while the narrative appeared the same, the data showed a trending increase in more people ready to go back to the workplace just two months later with roughly 16% of black men and 22% of black women ready to get back to the workplace.

In other words, it appeared as though the effort was to scope out the most dramatic figures to support the original premise. One individual boiled down the report’s conclusion to what they saw as the simple explanation, “Because it is written by people that [don’t] want to go back to the office and that is the only argument they know.”

Mind you, the systemic racism crowd was the same group promoting the plan after lockdowns to prioritize the return of in-person learning for “black and brown students” in the name of “inequity and racism, and classism, and all of these other things,” as a Chicago-area superintendent had suggested in 2020.

It was readily apparent that a narrative was getting pushed by the Times and social media users called them out over it.

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Kevin Haggerty
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