New York City Mayor Eric Adams appears to be engaged in blatantly unconstitutional discrimination, under the phony guise of trying to increase “diversity” among the city’s workforce.
According to Politico on Thursday, Adams is obtaining headshots of potential City Hall employees as candidates go through the already lengthy hiring process for jobs that range from assistant commissioner to departmental press representatives.
The report quoted a number of anonymous officials who said Adams’ request clearly is an effort to hire more ‘diverse’ staffers, but the mayor is claiming that no, he just wants the headshots to help him better recognize employees in the city’s vast workforce.
“Everyone knew what it was. There was no question. It was the first thing everybody said: ‘We’re going to start counting complexions now,’” a recently-departed City Hall employee told Politico.
The New York Post added:
The majority of the officials interviewed by the outlet — who requested anonymity to speak freely about the internal measure — said they supported a more diverse workforce but worried the practice is already causing the Adams administration to make hiring decisions with a greater emphasis on race and ethnicity than merit.
Compounding the issue, nearly every official Politico spoke to also said the headshot request created another snag in the drawn-out hiring process — straying away from the mayor’s signature motto of “get stuff done” at a time when city job vacancies are unusually high. About 8 percent of municipal jobs were vacant as of April, according to data from the Citizens Budget Commission.
Politico obtained emails sent by the mayor’s team to about a dozen high-ranking officials at other city agencies asking them to submit headshots of people they hope to employ for Adam’s own review.
An April 19 email contained an attached template of photos and job descriptions of current high-ranking agency employees.
“Clarifying also that the avatars in the attached should be actual photos as the Mayor likes to begin to recognize folks faces,” a mayoral staffer wrote in the email, according to the publication.
Meanwhile, another official said they were verbally informed that the mayor said he wanted city agencies to hire people who “reflect the constituencies we serve.”
While hiring managers are not required to ask for photos from city applicants, they are grabbing them from social media sites like LinkedIn in order to satisfy Adams’ demand, sources told Politico.
“The whole hiring process this City Hall set up is difficult enough, and the photo requirement just takes it from hard to bizarre and uncomfortable,” another high-ranking source told the outlet.
No doubt the mayor has set himself up for criticism that his request is blatantly racist and as such, unconstitutional and a violation of current federal civil rights and labor statutes which forbid discrimination on the basis of a number of factors including race.
It’s a convenient excuse for Adams to claim that he just wants photos so he ‘knows who works for him,’ but the notion that this is about ‘diversity’ is really the fly in the ointment here, because to the left, ‘diversity’ tends to lend itself to hiring persons who check off left-wing cultural priorities.
If true, let’s hope that there is a legitimate civil rights organization out there already gathering depositions and evidence for a massive lawsuit.
