Paramount’s “woke” staffers posted a melodramatic open letter to their bosses last week, blasting the company’s decision to scale back its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies. The group of disgruntled staffers apparently believes that corporate America should prioritize virtue signaling over business objectives.
The letter accuses Paramount of “profound hypocrisy” for benefiting from diverse communities while supposedly “erasing” them internally. They even had the audacity to compare the company’s leadership to “mob bosses,” claiming Paramount is kowtowing to federal pressure after President Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI initiatives. Talk about hyperbole.
It was first published on LinkedIn by New York Times reporter Benjamin Mullin.
“As employees of Paramount Global, we are extremely disappointed — but not surprised — by the senior leadership team’s decision to roll back our commitments to DEI. This capitulation reflects the profound hypocrisy in extracting labor from diverse communities, creating content from and for diverse communities, targeting the dollars of diverse communities… while committing to the erasure and exclusion of those very same diverse communities.
How, in good conscience, can we continue to market to our global audiences and profit from their cultural contributions, while erasing our own internal commitments to equity for and inclusion of those audiences? How can we continue to attract talent with promises that are walked back the moment they become inconvenient?
As a private corporate entity that sits and operates outside the federal government structure, we cannot continue to yield preemptively to unethical policies that do not apply to us in order to curry political favor. Continuing to kiss the ring and pay off mob bosses so they don’t interfere in business leads us down a path we cannot come back from. We are tired of being passed around from billionaire to billionaire, never seeing the fruits of our labor, and instead watching profits distributed to the wealthy. Meanwhile, we’re forced to say goodbye to countless talented and brilliant colleagues through rounds after rounds of layoffs — colleagues that are overwhelmingly from underrepresented and underestimated demographics.
Chris, Brian, and George — your responsibilities to the shareholders and the board of directors cannot come at the cost of our humanity, and the human value of your teams. We are ashamed to be employees of a company that will bulldoze our “company culture” for a shortsighted pursuit of profit. Our company pillars cannot be written in sand, wiped away with the tide. Scrubbing words from company literature does not erase the people they represent. Our staff, our talent, our audiences are comprised of the very people this action devalues and disregards.
We implore the incoming leadership team to look past quarterly dividends and election cycles, and understand the true legacy that lies ahead if they continue on this path. We trust them to consider the role they play in shaping and repairing our society — a society that is as diverse and varied as the staff employed by this company.”
Insufferable.
Paramount’s C-suite contents that the decision was made with business objectives firmly in mind, according to a February memo from its co-CEOs. The company announced it would end aspirational hiring goals based on race, gender, and sexuality, stop factoring DEI metrics into employee compensation, and cease collecting diversity data from U.S. job applicants. In other words, they’re focusing on merit and profitability—radical concepts in today’s corporate climate.
Paramount had informed employees that the company would be backtracking on its DEI policies in a February memo. Paramount is ending their aspirational hiring goals with respect to race, gender and sexuality, per the memo. The memo also stated that the company would end DEI factors in its employee compensation plan and stop collecting diversity data on its U.S. job applicants.
“With our business objectives firmly in mind, we will continue to evaluate our programs and approach to ensure that we are widening our aperture to attract talent from all geographies, backgrounds and perspectives. That may mean expanding existing programs while ending others,” the memo said.
Paramount has yet to respond publicly to this latest outburst, but one can only hope they stick to their guns. After all, catering to every grievance from perpetually offended staffers is no way to run a successful company.
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English (US) · 