Why? Isn't making people aware of laws how you abide by them? The risk of not educating people and being caught ignoring abuses is fairly serious. Broadly speaking, some of the laws we're talking about are laws that specifically require making employees aware of their existence.
I think they are talking about meetings at work which do not focus on the law or workplace etiquette, but serve to raise awareness of for diversity/minority/social justice issues outside the workplace.
Where is that happening? And are you sure we're not actually talking about people who misunderstand the purpose and legal requirements of diversity training programs?
As far as I can tell, this is the first comment in the thread to suggest we're talking about widespread mandatory "social justice" meetings that are political in nature and unrelated to the workplace's legal obligations. That's not what I got from @daok's comment or anything in between, and there are widespread mandatory diversity training programs in the U.S. that explain all the comments above, from my perspective.
I've never seen that (mandatory meetings unrelated to work) myself, across employment at 2 multinational corporations, several mid-sized companies, and a handful of startups. The mandatory diversity training programs in most companies are there to meet the legal obligations of discrimination law, whether they tell you that or not. Usually they tell you that.
I have had department meetings at my workplace in California in the wake of the BLM movement, which also happens to be a multinational with 10s of thousands of employees. Groups of 20 or so employees were put together and encouraged to share stories of how social and racial injustice has impacted their personal lives and ideas for what can be done.
I have a peer who had similar meetings at their firm and the VP of Diversity and Inclusion went as far as to say attendance at such meetings would be tracked on an individual and ongoing basis.
I feel that in general, my company has a very traditional and apolitical work culture, so my imagination runs rampant with what things must be like at FB, Google, & social service sector workplaces.
I think just the fact that companies are increasingly hiring executives that head diversity/inclusion departments (mine does as well) shows that they're aiming for a lot more than just compliance with anti-discrimination laws.
