Note: I wrote this piece in January of 2024, but was not able to successfully place it at a major publication. It is relevant to recent corporate rollbacks of DEI initiatives.
In the last few years, the corporate sector has seen an explosion of “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of Fortune 500 companies who released DEI reports doubled from 79 to 154.
This trend has generated a lot of public discourse, most of it quite predictable. Some prominent figures like Bill Ackman have declared DEI to be a form of “reverse racism” that is unfair to white people, Jews, and Asians, while others, like Elon Musk, have concluded that DEI is watering down hiring standards, leading to operational tragedies, including recent plane crashes. Similar anti-DEI sentiments can be found among the conservative intelligentsia more generally.
What exactly liberals and leftists should think of DEI remains less clear.
The ideas and leading propagators of DEI appear to mostly come out of the complex of nonprofits and academic institutions that set so much of the liberal agenda. In the political sphere, the rising DEI trend has been welcomed by some significant liberal political blocs, including the Congressional Black Caucus, which recently sent out a letter to the corporate leaders of America urging them to, among other things, reaffirm “their commitment to DEI efforts.”
It is easy to see how liberals could conclude that corporate DEI initiatives align with their own values and general goals for social reform. Creating equal employment opportunities and hospitable workplace environments for minority groups has been a mainstay of liberal political advocacy for more than half a century and DEI is, nominally at least, all about that.
But prior reforms aimed at tackling these issues have generally taken the form of passing legislation and using the countervailing power of the state to force employers to make necessary changes. By contrast, corporate DEI initiatives are a form of self-regulation, something liberals rarely take seriously in any other areas of social concern.
The idea that the corporate leaders of America have any sincere interest in anti-racism and queer representation is highly implausible. Some of those leaders may have some personal liberal sympathies, but in the context of running a large company that ultimately answers to investors, those sympathies will always take a back seat to the more important goals of profitability and labor discipline.
These contradictions were on display in a recent NLRB case decided against Big Green, a national nonprofit organization focused on establishing community gardens at schools.
According to the decision, in 2021, Big Green, like many other companies across the country, appointed selected workers to a DEI council that was charged with keeping the company accountable on issues of diversity and inclusion. The DEI council members then proceeded to draft a collective statement accusing the organization of “systemic and cultural racism and whiteness” as well as “systemic oppression and erasure.”
Unsurprisingly, despite all of the pretensions that went into establishing the DEI council, Big Green’s management did not take kindly to these critiques and began a campaign of retaliation and intimidation against the DEI council members.
This is just one case, but I think it illustrates the broader point that no DEI council, office, or initiative that is established by management and that can be eliminated at any time by management will actually be able to serve as any kind of meaningful check on management. Any corporate DEI council that steps too far out of line won’t survive long and any employee who pushes DEI-related concerns too hard will likely wake up one day and find that their job no longer exists.
The impossibility of a structure like this to actually act as a countervailing force against management should be obvious. Indeed, councils like the one Big Green established are practically, and perhaps legally, indistinguishable from the kinds of employer-dominated labor organizations that have been banned in this country since 1935. Just as company unions lack the operational independence necessary to impose their will on employers, so too do similarly-designed DEI initiatives.
Another reason some liberals might find corporate DEI initiatives attractive is that they appear to track other ways that liberals have been able to pursue social reform through leveraging their disproportionate control over certain institutions. For instance, the liberal domination of cultural sectors like media, entertainment, and academics has, at least to some extent, allowed for a greater proliferation of socially liberal values and understandings throughout the society.
But liberals do not really control the corporate sector to the same extent that they control cultural production and corporate decision-making is overwhelmingly dictated by the ownership, incentives, and rules of our particular capitalist system, not by the social and political inclinations of any given corporate leader.
Thus, if we actually want to alter the decisions that employers make regarding DEI-related issues, a more fruitful approach would be to eschew voluntary diversity initiatives in favor of legal reforms and increased unionization. The state and organized labor have external sources of power that enable them to actually force companies to change their behavior, something a DEI executive or council will never be able to do.
Once again, the case of Big Green illustrates this in a striking way. After the company began cracking down on the DEI council members for doing exactly what they were asked to do, the Communication Workers of America stepped in to file unfair labor practice charges on behalf of the targeted workers. Because the workers’ statement was concerted speech about their terms and conditions of employment, CWA was able to use the nation’s labor laws to halt Big Green’s campaign of retaliation.
Unions and labor law offer the kinds of protections necessary to give workers a genuine voice on DEI topics. Companies cannot.