There's often a lot of discussion on here about the quirks, trials, and tribulations of workers, so I thought the sub might find this interesting…
(Note I'm using the terms tolerant and intolerant… I don't want to to stereotype politics, since intolerance of others isn't an explicitly political issue. This isn't meant to be anti-anyone, either, but I can see how it might be perceived.)
I recently interacted with a 'small business' (as a consultant) who now has a hiring policy (I can't confirm if it's in writing or purely in agreement with HR) that they will no longer be interviewing or hiring anyone with a personal residence in the states of Texas or Florida, or who has a high school diploma or university degree from a TX or FL institution dated after 2022.
An HR rep further confirmed that certain other 'like-minded' states are pending consideration and exclusion. Luckily the state I'm in is not one under consideration.
When I probed a couple of executive managers on this, their reasoning was actually quite simple: they already had a very diverse workforce (e.g., gender, races, national origins, religions), and did not believe it was pragmatically worth the effort to interview people from locations where they considered discrimination, racism, and/or religious zealotry as being prevalent/significant in the population, only to gamble on hiring them and potentially upending the cohesiveness of its employees.
Yes, they knew it was also possible to hire such people not from those states, but they applied the “80% rule” (their words) to justify that excluding these states as whole was good enough, and it was an easy filter to do from their end. I guess they had had several bad experiences, and their lawyer/golf buddy had told them – somewhat obtusely – that they didn't have to consider people from certain states if they didn't want to.
They took the ball and ran with it.
In other words, they decided it would be easier to mass exclude whole states of people from their pool rather than wasting time sifting through and hiring a candidate only to find out the person was a douche after-the-fact. (e.g., “It felt like like damn near most of the Texans we hired turned out to be PIAs, so we're just not gonna hire them anymore.”) They noted the education calculus came from their concerned that those states had – how did they put it? – “intolerant state-level policies” and that meant that there was a strong possibility that the persons were raised and educated contradictory to the company's values, too.
SO… intolerant of intolerance?
If you didn't know, there are many things you cannot discriminate against, but AFAIK it IS legal to discriminate based upon a person's U.S. state residence or political position.
In practical terms, I was told they didn't announce anything… they simply had an executive-level agreement that HR took any application with that state on the address or listed degree and filed it in the circular file.
FIRST THOUGHTS: I'm not saying that this is the right way to go, but not every company is going to go head-to-head like Disney, either. Clearly some progressive businesses are going to remain quiet but still take action in their own way. For businesses that need diverse workforces, apparently they will ultimately make decisions that protect their and their employees' best interests, including the wholesale exclusion of certain populations, if necessary.
I considered how this could just as easily work the 'other direction', too, if you catch my drift, but if I may be so blunt, I'd say it's a lot easier for a tolerant person to pretend to be an -ist and fit in if absolutely necessary, than it is for an -ist to pretend not to be. (“I love Michael Bolton.”)