Streaming giant Netflix is being accused of a woke bait and switch for hiring blacks to get woke brownie points only to quietly fire them a few months later when no one is looking.
Netflix reportedly laid off many members of its editorial staff from its in-house publication Tudum only five months after launching the effort. More than ten writers tweeted about being let go, including an editorial manager. Tech Crunch reported that 25 people lost their jobs when the publication was abruptly scaled back.
A spokesman for Netflix maintained that, “Our fan website Tudum is an important priority for the company.”
“Netflix told TechCrunch that these layoffs affected a combination of both contract workers and full-time employees, but declined to share if any other departments at Netflix were affected,” TechCrunch added.
But critics were unamused.
“It is worth mentioning that Netflix actively recruited Black women and people of color just to lay them off MONTHS later without a second thought,” journalist Monique Judge tweeted. “Don’t brag about being inclusive when you treat your ‘diversity’ hires like they are disposable.”
The publication MadameNoire added that many of the released employees had only just gotten raises. And they only got two week’s severance.
One fired Tudum employee told NPR that Netflix heavily recruited blacks for the sole purpose of being able to point to how diverse they are,
“They went very out of their way to hire high level journalists of color who have quite a bit of name recognition and a lot of experience and talent. In some ways, they were just buying clout to lend credibility to their gambit…We were courted pretty aggressively,” the employee told NPR.
“They sold us on the most amazing thing that you could want as a culture journalist or entertainment journalist,” the fired worker added. “They just sold something that seemed impossible anywhere else…But the biggest selling point was the pay…People upended their lives for this.”
Netflix was happy to exploit the accolades for their diversity hires. And then cut them all loose as quickly as they could.
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Tags: Big Tech Commentary Netflix Racism Woke
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