IBM’s CEO Denies Offering Bonuses for Racial and Sexual Hiring Bias

IBM’s Indian-born CEO is insisting the company does not discriminate against American job-seekers by race, following the leak of a 2021 video showing him apparently offering bonuses to executives who meet racial quotas.

“It’s a 5 percent change” in bonuses to ensure hiring “inclusion,” pleaded IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a video released Wednesday by the O’Keefe Media Group:

That means 95 percent of exec[utive] bonuses are driven by business performance. What drives business performance? Having the best people in the role!

The scandal blew up when James O’Keefe posted the 2021 video of Krishna apparently telling his executives that their bonuses would be raised if they hired Americans in proportion to their race’s and sex’s representation in the U.S. population.

“We want to get to the representational demographics of the underlying population,” Krishna said, adding:

I’m not trying to finesse this. For blacks, we should get to around 13 point something percent. On Hispanics, you’ve got to get into the mid-teens. On [sex] gender, we are somewhere in the mid-30s, I think for all of IBM. But I think if I notice right, the [overall female] representational is 50 [percent].

Meeting the goals “leads to a plus on your bonus, he said, adding, “By the way, if you [fail to meet the quotas], you lose part of your bonus.”

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However, IBM does face risks of private lawsuits.

On Wednesday, Stephen Miller’s law firm announced it would sue IBM for discrimination.

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O’Keefe’s second video shows Krishna downplaying the lawsuit implications of his directions.

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Krishna then defended his policy as a rational effort to promote “inclusion” for minority “communities”:

Do I believe that we should be an inclusive culture? Absolutely. I am not changing our mind on that. Do we believe that we should lean in and make sure that all communities feel welcome? Absolutely …

As laws change, as whatever happens, we will always try to comply with the law. But we lean in … We were amongst the first to hire blacks into positions of management in IBM in the United States. I think that was in the 1940s. We’ve leaned in on what today is referred to as LGBTQ … but I’ll admit in the 1990s when we started, it was a good 15 years before it became mainstream …

We want to be inclusive, we want our employees to feel that they can bring their whole self to work. And that is the context. Everything else is a minor tool that helps that context … We do not believe we did anything illegal.

Krishna urged his employees to keep quiet about the scandal:

I have a thick skin, I’ll go deal with it. Our board is quite aware of what’s going on. Between the board, our shareholders, me. we’re going to deal with it. I would recommend all of you should not respond. Anything there just cause more of a response. So I would highly recommend don’t feed this thing.

The alleged hire-and-fire-by-color policy is widespread among U.S. companies, partly because entrepreneurial progressives declare themselves to be champions of groups with lower-than-average visibility or status in multiple professional sectors.

The resulting “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity” (DEI) industry is boosted by the federal government’s inflow of legal immigrants and visa workers.

The visa workers arrive via the uncapped H-1B, OPT, J-1, and L-1 visa worker programs. U.S. investors prefer to hire foreign visa workers because they are cheap and compliant. They are compliant because hiring officers, CEOs, and investors can dangle the huge prize of citizenship to cooperative visa workers, and the pain of a ticket home to uncooperative workers.

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