Do Not Trust Employee Resource Groups (ERGs)
They’re no replacement for a union. In fact, they’re often created to distract from collective bargaining efforts.
This piece was originally published to Medium on March 1, 2023. Why I’m migrating my archive to Substack.
As a public academic who writes about anti-productivity and neurodiversity, I’m often invited to speak at organizations’ Employee Resource Groups (ERGS). In the past year, I’ve given talks at everywhere from Indeed to Nike, from Salesforce to Reverb, and from The University of Michigan to Griffith Foods.
During talks like these, I describe the needs of neurodivergent and disabled workers, and share the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network’s resources on how a company can better accommodate them. I explain how corporate norms of overwork and micromanagement have their roots in white supremacy. I review the robust literature showing that the average worker can only be productive for about three to four hours per day, with any additional hours on the job yielding diminishing returns. And I point to the decades of data showing that flexible work hours, remote work options, and treating employees with autonomy and trust leads to better outcomes for everybody involved.
Usually, these talks are pretty well received by both employees and management — until the moment comes where I suggest that finding a healthy work-life balance cannot be an individual effort. We aren’t all burnt out because we’re unrepentant workaholics with bad boundaries and no sense of time management. And the struggles of Autistic & otherwise disabled employees can’t all be attributed to us “masking” our true needs either. We all do too much because we are forced to. And the only way that will change is if we come together as workers and agree to stop.
That’s usually the point in the talk where all momentum grinds to a halt and organizers start behaving awkwardly. Question and answer periods are unceremoniously ended early. Employees’ complaints about their company’s culture suddenly disappear from the Zoom meeting’s comment box. I’ve had event organizers laugh uncomfortably at my remarks, and tell me that employees at their company do not need a union, because they have their (employer-sponsored, boss-monitored) ERG.
And then recently, after delivering a workshop focused on workplace mental health to a company’s neurodiversity-focused ERG, an employee tracked down my email and privately contacted me. Their boss had been denying them basic disability accommodations for months, the employee told me. After continuing to self-advocate, their boss had told them they’d either have to learn to work with their company’s workflows as they currently were, without any accommodations, or they’d have to quit.
Many marginalized and lower-paid employees had their questions and chat messages censored during my talk, this person told me — including remarks about their company using invasive worker surveillance software that micromanages processes and makes it difficult for them to do their jobs. I’ve always been outspoken about employee monitoring software being unhelpful and more importantly, inhumane. Even the mainstream business community agrees with me on that. If I’d known the company I was speaking to used such programs, I would have spoken up and condemed them during my talk.
Instead of getting to support this mistreated employee or speak out about the company’s unfair policies, my presence at the ERG was a completely pacifying, symbolic gesture — a performance of acceptance while the actual concerns of neurodivergent workers were literally silenced.
Productivity Will Go Down This Year
But you probably won’t hear business leaders talking about it.
I take workshop gigs like these because they pay pretty well, and I need money in order to survive. My own disabilities make it difficult for me to work, and Autistic burnout steals more skills and resolve from me with every passing year, and it shows no sign of ever giving them back. I’m planning to retire relatively early in life, because the alternative is unsustainable for me. Plus I have Dump Trucks to feed.
Usually, I show up to speak to these ERGs with the hope that my research and advocacy will make employees’ lives easier, while also sustaining myself.
But that’s getting harder and harder to believe.
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Employee Resource Groups are something of an emergent trend in the professional diversity and inclusion realm. Though the very first ERG was formed by Black employees at Xerox back in 1970, the ERG as we know it today has really only become widespread in the past five years. Today, approximately 40% of companies have employee resource groups, a 9% increase from last year. Relatedly, 70% of companies have rolled out new diversity and inclusion initiatives in the past year, many of which involve the organizing or formation of ERGs.
Typically, employee resource groups (also sometimes called “affinity groups) are organized by marginalized employees within an organization, always with endorsement of the company’s higher ups. ERGs usually center themselves around a particular oppressed identity category — such as race, disability status, gender, or queerness — and provide regular workshops, networking events, and sometimes promise to help oppressed groups negotiate for improved policies from their employer.
ERGs receive their budgets from the company that houses them, it’s important to note, and so they can’t push for any initiative or programming the company does not approve of. In some cases, the leaders of ERGs do their work on an entirely volunteer basis, without any additional compensation. Sometimes, marginalized employees are “voluntold” to lead the charge of ERG efforts — just as faculty of color are frequently pressured into chairing academic departments’ diversity and inclusion committees.
ERGs have very limited power for the same reasons that, say, my University’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion has very limited power. It’s existence is tethered irrevocably to the organization’s budget, and therefore everything it does must be approved of by the organization. If an ERG (or a DEI office) were to push for any change that leadership deemed too radical, or that really threatened the current distribution of power, it would then cease to exist. Or the hardworking Black, brown, female, disabled, and queer employees who leant their energy to such efforts would be summarily removed.
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When I was first asked to speak to a large company’s neurodiversity ERG, I have to admit I had no idea what an ERG even was. I assumed it was some kind of workplace club or brown bag lunch series that employees had created, so that more disabled people at the company could get to know one another. I didn’t think that sounded too bad.
Historically, many ERGs were focused on building affinity and providing chances at deeper workplace socialization. In past decades, employee alumni groups, single parents groups, and remote worker groups were among the common types of ERGs. But today, ERG’s are nearly always focused on an employee’s marginal status — and these groups are presented as a means of attaining racial, gender, and disability justice, rather than providing a safer space for minoritized employees to hang out.
In this way, ERGs now function to siphon off energy that unhappy employees might have otherwise put toward organizing strikes, walkouts, or even just talking about grievances privately with one another. They also divide up groups of oppressed employees who might have many struggles in common — such as Black and LGBT employees — and prevents them from recognizing and treating their frustrations as shared.
ERGs also actively encourage employees whose marginalizations are not visible (such as closeted queer people or those with invisible disabilities) to be open about those identities at work. At one disability ERG that I visited, employees spoke frankly about their mental health diagnoses and crises, declaring that their company was a welcoming “family” where people could be forthright about just about anything. At another corporation where I spoke, a professionally edited internal advertisement was played, with numerous employees smiling at the camera and declaring their stigmatized identities out loud. “I have ADHD and I’m a part of this team” one cheery worker said. “I have seizures and I’m a part of this team,” said another.
When I spoke last fall to a large company’s LGBTQ affinity group, a newly out nonbinary employee was asked to sit on a panel with me, as a representative of queerness at their company. Though this person had just barely come to terms with sharing their own gender identity with others and were in an incredibly vulnerable position, their ERG expected them to serve as a representative for their entire group. They were offered up as a resource, asked to answer everyone’s questions about transness and to express what being a queer employee at their company was like. Rather than taking steps organizationally to embrace and protect queer workers as an oppressed class, the ERG offloaded all responsibility onto a single symbolic sacrificial lamb.
As I’ve written about in my book Unmasking Autism, it is potentially dangerous for employees to be open about their disabilities at work. Though I’d like us to all live in a world where difference is genuinely celebrated and difficulties accommodated, in reality to be open about one’s marginal status is to put a target on one’s back.
Companies are all too happy to put the smiling faces of Black, brown, disabled, and queer employees on their websites and brochures, to advance an image of themselves as accepting and forward-thinking places. But organizations quickly dispose of those very same workers the moment their concerns are at all challenging to deal with — and “being challenging” to work with often means making any assertive declaration of selfhood or need whatsoever. A majority of Autistic employees who come out at work go on to regret the decision, in large part because they either receive no beneficial accommodations upon doing so, or they are suddenly penalized for seeming too ‘strange.’
One Autistic, transgender engineering worker that I spoke to told me they regret coming out to their boss about their mental health struggles. “I was the pet diversity project. And I failed to be the fantasy they imagined of the servile and grateful underling, so proud of the once in a life time opportunity they were granted,” they said. After opening up about their marginalized identities, they became the only person on their team to not have their contract renewed.
By taking stigmatized identities and employee concerns out of the safe darkness of privacy and out into the light of company scrutiny, ERGs have the power to quash worker agitation and organizing long before it begins. And by treating systemic oppression as a problem that can be solved through personal pride, ERGs prevent larger, stronger coalitions of marginalized workers from forming, and demanding better of them.
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You don’t have to take my word on all this. After months of giving unrewarding talks at ERG and hearing worrisome complaints from employees here and there, I decided to reach out to labor organizers and ask them what they thought about ERGs. I spoke to dozens of people — internal organizers, union representatives, worksite organizers, council representatives, and more — and the quotes below are representative of the prevailing themes that emerged in their answers.
“ERGs are no replacement for a union,” one organizer told me. “But they can be helpful to identify folks who could be agitated.” Meaning that a particularly shrewd employee who is interested in organizing their workplace could attend ERG meetings and take note of who is dissatisfied, then follow up with a more productive conversation in private later on.
“My sister is using ERG meetings to surreptitiously work on unionizing,” another organizer echoed.
“Our LGBTQ affinity group got gender neutral bathrooms installed at the office, and some ‘cosmetic’ procedures covered by our health insurance,” shared another. “But these groups also demand more unpaid labor from already marginalized employees.”
“ERGs are made to mostly placate employees, centering awareness instead of rights,” one person told me.
This tracks with my own experience with ERGs as well. I have noticed that companies are eager to hear from LGBTQ, Black, brown, and disabled employees about what our struggles feel like, on a personal level — many ERGs encourage employees to “share their story” as a form of personal empowerment. But enjoying our ‘stories’ does nothing to change the fact that we make less money than our more powerful peers, or that we are working in environments largely hostile to us.
“My union works with ERGs, to hold the larger organization accountable to some ERG goals,” another organizer told me. “So I don’t see how they are useful without a union.”
This observation also makes complete sense to me. Even if a large collective of employees comes together in an ERG to demand the company stop using invasive key-logging software on their personal computers, for example, they have no means of extracting consequences should the company refuse. But with the back-up of a union, an ERG can hold meaningful conversations and identify specific concerns, and then threaten to strike (or take other measures) should management deny them.
“ERGs are a scam,” one union organizer told me. “It’s employer-driven at the end of the day. There is no meaningful transfer of power.”
“I think ERGs are ways for your employer to monitor (aka surveil) dissent,” another labor representative said.
I don’t think that in good conscience I can be an active participant in all this.
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I have decided that if I am ever going to speak to a company’s ERG again, some things will have to change.
First, moving forward, I’m always going to consult with the actual employees at these companies, to identify what their workplace’s common problems are — and I am not going to do this under the auspices of their employer. Instead, I’m going to crowdsource information from current and former employees online, and look over negative reviews the company has on sites like Glassdoor. Thankfully, I have a large enough online platform that I can usually reach aggrieved employees pretty easily to find out their actual concerns.
When I discuss the importance of worker solidarity and collective bargaining during my talks, I’m not going to be subtle, and I’m not going to put it off until near the end of the event. That way, if a freaked-out manager or HR representative tries to rush in and silence me, they’ll have to do it pretty obviously. I want to foment agitation and gloriously resistant resenteeism, not pacify it.
Prior to each workshop event, I will ask for questions and remarks from employees using a public-facing platform, so that event organizers can’t censor anyone or filter certain concerns out. I’ve done something similar to this in the past — prior to delivering a workshop at Planned Parenthood, I polled real-life patients about the frustrations and invalidations they’d faced at PP’s clinics. The results were illuminating, and I highlighted them at the very beginning of my talk.
Finally, in all future talks and workshops that I provide, I’m going to be very up front about the fact that I do not trust employee resource groups as a means of achieving either change or justice within an organization — and I don’t think employees should, either.
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Would you like to read more about labor organizing? One of my favorite books on the topic is Eric Blanc’s Red State Revolt. Sarah Jaffe’s Work Won’t Love You Back is a comprehensive tour of labor exploitation across a variety of sectors (from arts to engineering, from nonprofit work to competitive athletics) that I heartily recommend, too.
I've just created a neuro network at my university. Surprised at the obstacles placed in front of the network. This article is timely and helpful. Thank you Devon. If you ever come to Ireland, please let me know. We'll look after you very well, promise!