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98%?? I love costco

The backlash against DEI is at the individual level imo. How people feel is the reality, see the economy (which is also an attribute of using the wrong metrics to measure performance as it relates to the consumer but that is a different topic).

Let’s see if I can explain it: So let’s say you’re an average white guy, and you know your company has a DEI program. You feel like you work very hard, or at least as hard as everyone else in your workplace, but you see that your minority coworkers get promotions or that the new hire for a better paid position than yours is a minority you start to feel as though you’re getting passed over because of your identity. This could be because it is a diverse workplace and so the best people for the promotion may just happen to be of other races or women. It could also be actual racism which I’m sure happens but it’s probably very very rare. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is that you see people who are different from you getting promoted, and you don’t particularly feel they are better than you.

Then you maybe look a little bit into what the theory behind DEI is and you learn that it’s proponents argue that there is systemic favoritism towards white straight males which is why if you have two equally capable candidates but one is white and the other is a minority, you should choose the minority. As a straight white male you won’t feel (and frankly should not, I’m sorry) that you are responsible for your advantage in society, so what you’ll feel is that now you’re the disadvantage one and that DEI is just racism against white straight males. It isn’t but that doesn’t change how the individual feels.

My personal opinion is that DEI is more of a bandaid than a solution and some of the backlash is warranted. The real solution is for people to have equal opportunity at the lowest level, meaning education. There’s no reason for some schools to be better than others, and less for that difference to arise from the value of the houses in the schools district. Of course Trump and co will not fix it either because they campaigned on destroying the education system because they seemingly want a slave caste or something. But if everyone had equal access to good schools and colleges, I don’t think DEI as it is implemented in most orgs would be needed.

Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to @[email protected]

I commented this earlier but quite a few corps that tend to beat the market in returns have not abandoned DEI initiatives. These are corporations that will not bat an eye to plunge thousands into poverty or worse to save .007 cents on manufacturing costs. This tells you that they believe that DEI has some tangible value on their performance whether it’s through marketing opportunity or because their workforce is actually better.

But I think abandoning DEI for many companies is the right choice, as bad DEI is magnitudes worse than no DEI.

Once again, Costco surprises me with basic human decency that is largely missing in the corporate world. I know it's not a high bar, not as if they're on the forefront of progressivism, or anything. But it's well beyond the average in the profit-driven and labor grinding society, and that sort of corporate action, among their other positives as an employer, should be recognized and supported. Good on you, Costco.

...called DEI programs "illegal, immoral and detrimental to shareholder value,"

Wrong, wrong, and only if they implemented DEI as a blind performance metric... Which is also wrong. You get half a point out of three, or 16.6%.
And with a grade that low, I'm completely justified in giving that person...
A Super F!

FYI: for normal corporations (i.e. not ones with individual majority stockholders like Musk) shareholder votes are almost always dominated by votes from the big mutual funds, and the managers of those funds always vote for whatever the board recommends as a matter of policy. The actual mom & pop investors who own the shares through those mutual funds in their 401(k)s etc. are entirely disenfranchised.

In other words, the actual owners of Costco had mostly fuck-all to do with this. We're just lucky that Costco's board of directors isn't terrible, for once.

The whole dei firing thing doesn’t make any sense. It’s not like unqualified people were hired.

Shareholders, if you keep that up, maybe I'll grudgingly, once in a while, "think of the shareholders".

A corporation not being absolute trash. Let's hope they deal fairly with their unionized employees.