Inadvisable Adverts: TriNet Sticks it to Working Moms
Do you hate the person you hired to run HR? Do you think that women are suspicious characters who only have babies to score family leave? Do you have recurring nightmares that trans men will litigate you into dust? Do I have an advertisement for you!
This ad has already gotten a lot of flack from women in the workplace. It was pulled from the rotation a few months ago, and each of the angry comments on its YouTube page is dutifully answered by a social media coordinator with the same apologetic canned lines. For those who haven’t watched it, the plot of the ad goes like this:
A pregnant employee goes up to Sam in HR and asks about the maternity leave policy. Established in previous TriNet ads, the HR girl is a bit of a ditz, and she says “Oh, one year, probably three.”
The modern, Buzzfeed-y open floor office comes to life. No cubicles means that sound travels—TriNet, being software, sadly can’t solve this—and now everyone announces to HR that they are pregnant. Even, oh how humorous—a man! Who immediately buttresses his clearly fabrication with the retort: “and don’t dare question it, or I will go straight to legal.”
The founder of this company sweeps in and sets Sam straight. Luckily, they have TriNet. The founder tells Sam to look up what the best leave plans are. The tagline? Incredibly human HR solutions.
There’s a lot going on here. Woman in the workplace decried it, fairly, since the main joke is the suggestion that employees want to steal company time with maternity leave. That’s pretty condescending. The founder tells Sam to find the best family leave plans, but Sam has already stated it: a year. Norway offers 47 weeks at 94% pay. Greece’s maternity leave is 43 weeks minimum. The minimum required paid maternity leave in the U.S. is zero weeks. We know, of course, from previous ads that Sam is an utter ditz, so we know that these global policies are dangerous invitations to bilk the company dry.
But there are other artistic choices that betray the skeeviness of this ad.
All of the pretend-pregnant people are fat. The Founder is a skinny Jack Dorsey figure, Sam petite, and our legitimately pregnant employee is not showing. She is a polite, Hollywood pregnant. These physical casting decisions allow the ad to lean on society’s hardwired connection between fat and laziness. That these fat people would abuse a family leave policy is just obvious, the casting says. TriNet understands your suspicions of your huskier employees, and it can help you defend yourself against them!
Our alleged pregnant employee isn’t even sure that she is pregnant. She tells Sam she “thinks she’s pregnant,” giving the conversation an air of gossip. I suppose it gives an explanation for why she isn’t showing, allowing the ad to cast a thin and pretty actress and thusly craft its fatphobic foils. But, I can’t think of a single woman who would go to HR on a mere supposition of pregnancy. This throw away line just makes her request seem frivolous at best, a waste of Sam’s time, and suspicious at worst.
Sam, our girl in HR, is such a sexist crack. I have never met an incompetent HR person. They are too circumspect to make bold claims about family leave policy. This belittles HR workers, a field culturally coded as female, as incompetent. But, small directorial and casting decisions also contribute to this condescension. Sam has big doe eyes which stare in a somewhat dumb way. Vocal fry, which Sam employs thickly in all of her TriNet ads, is often unfairly deemed unprofessional, weak, and overly feminine. I have never seen a software with such disdain for the people who will use it: HR personnel. Without TriNet, the ad says, what will keep all the stupid women in HR from lemming-leaping off the nearest cliff?
A cis man making a joke about being pregnant, while perhaps innocent, may come off a tad ignorant or disrespectful given that trans men often cannot find proper obstetric care should they become pregnant. A cis man making a joke about being pregnant in order to score unearned vacation deepens said distastefulness. And that the cis man would then immediately turn to legal recourse reminds me of a transphobic meme surrounding trans women in restrooms. Some transphobes who wish to maintain the air of innocence state that they have no issue with trans women using women’s restrooms, but rather have a problem with cis men pretending to be trans women in order to enter women’s restrooms and predate on women. This meme recently surfaced in JK Rowling’s infamous screed against trans women, and Sarah Z and ContraPoints have done a better job detailing why this meme is transphobic.
Our TriNet ad does something similar. Here, TriNet would swat away any allegations that they hate trans men. They simply think that men may pretend to have a uterus and thereby steal parental leave.
In a way, I think this odd remix of the “predatory pretend trans woman” theme that we see in the TriNet ad enlightens. It lets us glance at the real logic behind this thought. It is not that trans people don’t deserve rights, says this line of reasoning, but because cis people may masquerade as a trans person and abuse these rights, such niceties sadly must be withheld from trans people. TriNet leans into this further by having our pretend uterus-haver be litigious, threatening to call legal, leaning on anti-discrimination laws as a shield for malfeasance.
Of course, the original argument, which has crossdressing men spying on little girls, adrenalizes, rattles, seems like a legitimate cause for concern. But, in this much less alarmist context of a cis person pretending to be trans to gain a little extra vacation, it suddenly seems awfully silly. It this context, we remember that there is not a single cis person who has pretended to be trans in order to abuse the system. It’s comical to think that this masquerade would happen in maternity leave policy, and just as comical to think it would happen with bathroom policies.
So then, is there a good faith interpretation of this joke? This joke that, mind you, is not a throwaway line, but the punchline of the entire bit, which crowns a rule of three where one fat woman says she’s pregnant, one says she has twins, and then finally a litigious fat bearded man says he will run to legal? Sure, but that good faith interpretation is ignorance. Even a cursory knowledge of these issues would preclude the sound-minded from making this joke.
Our Jack Dorsey founder tells Sam that TriNet offers the best family leave plans, but the question is, for whom?
The above should show that TriNet has no commitment to the ugly, ugly employees whose information will be stored in its HR software, nor does it have any respect for HR professionals who use its product. Because that’s not why a start-up buys TriNet. They buy TriNet not to give the best to their employees, but so that they can get the best out of their employees (read, exploit their labor more effectively).
I would say “read the room,” but given that this advertisement is courting those dictating these less than generous family leave policies, I suspect TriNet has memorized all relevant passages.