If you’ve watched a YouTube video or a TV show in the last few months then you have certainly seen an ad for one Mike Bloomberg. He’s the other billionaire trying to buy the presidency. His campaign has been beleaguered with him having to answer for his racist policies as mayor of New York City, racist comments he made throughout the years and now the company that bears his name is coming under scrutiny for being a toxic and racist work environment.
I’m not sure y’all but I think this man might be a racist.
A recent investigative report by Business Insider revealed that three women wrote a letter to their alma mater, a historically black college, urging them not to send any of its graduates to work for Bloomberg LP. As you may have guessed from its name, the financial, data and media company was founded by Mike Bloomberg. The letter, sent to the university president in 2019, states:
“Please strongly consider removing them as a partner, allowing them to visit our campus, having them speak in our classrooms or host events with our students. It is truly the only way to guarantee that another [female graduate] will not have to endure this experience immediately after college. In addition, it serves as a reminder that we protect our own.”
Both the letter and the report detail an aggressively patriarchal work environment. Higher-ups would yell and bully those beneath them. Women who worked at the company would report instances of higher-ups requesting sexual favors. They would report these instances to human resources and nothing would be done. The toxicity of the work environment resulted in multiple women taking medical leave due to the emotional and mental toll of the harassment.
Damn. Ol’ boy is a racist and can’t even run a healthy work environment? Bloomberg is president and CEO of Bloomberg LP. It’s not like he’s distanced himself from the company. If I were the head of a company that bore my name, I would want to make sure folks weren’t being harassed. In addition to it being patently fucked up, it just reflects poorly on you. Especially if people are already looking at you some kind of way for saying shit like this.
Who knows, though. America seems to have a fetish for rich, racist billionaires with a laissez-faire attitude towards sexual harassment. Perhaps this will be a boon for the 2020 candidate.