Netflix's awful...
horrible...
no-good...
very bad month...
just keeps getting worse:
Alongside 150 full time employees Netflix axed Tuesday, dozens of contract writers were shown the door. Bitter tweets flooded in after the job cuts were announced. Many of those writers were part of Netflix's large-scale diversity communications initiatives, and they said that the struggling streaming giant had left those departments, like the staffers who used to work there, gutted.
"...like the staffers who used to work there, gutted." Oh please come on. I feel for anyone losing a job, but let's not get overwrought here.
Seriously though, the entire social justice wing of Netflix was subject to a serious purge:
Contractors across all of Netflix's diverse social media channels got the ax Tuesday, including the Black community-focused Strong Black Lead, Latinx-focused Con Todo, Asian American-focused Golden, and the LGBTQ-focused Most....Many of these select social media initiatives were only a few months old—Golden had only been introduced in January—but in that short time the platforms were appreciatedby their select communities. Sites like The Hollywood Reporter lauded Strong Black Lead for allowing Black voices to amplify content that appealed to the community while at the same time bringing conversations about Black-focused media into the mainstream.
I guess it wasn't "mainstream" enough. Truthfully, there are countless excellent, top-shelf movies featuring "strong black leads." Those movies are assuredly worth your time if you're into cinema.
The problem, of course, is that everyone has (fairly) come to judge every hyper-conscious, heavy-handed initiative like this not by the merits of the films but by the merits of wokeness. Woke culture stinks; it's toxic and increasingly a death sentence for any brand that gloms onto it.
It sounds like Netflix admittedly could have handled it way better:
Some of those laid off tweeted they were told of their ouster over Zoom. Others took to Twitter to say they didn't find out about the layoffs until they discovered their Netflix Slack accounts had been cut off.
Not cool, Netflix. If you're gonna wipe out entire divisions of staffers, at least have the courtesy to do it face-to-face.
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