A battle of wills is brewing between anti-DE&I conservatives and private business leaders. After President Trump targeted DE&I via executive order earlier this week, some CEOs have publicly pushed back.
The latest. Rebuking DE&I detractors, including the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative nonprofit that aims to get companies to abandon their DE&I efforts, Jamie Dimon, CEO at JPMorgan Chase, said that he doesn’t really care about “monikers,” including “DE&I,” noting that “it makes it sound like it’s a binary thing.”
“We are going to continue to reach out to the Black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBT community, the veterans community,” Dimon told CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “We have a special program, a disabled second chance initiative. And wherever I go, red states, blue states, green states, mayors, governors and they said they like what we do.”
“Bring them on,” Dimon said of the anti-DE&I activists, while also noting that he’s open to listening if JPMorgan is doing something wrong.
Dimon’s long been an advocate for inclusive hiring practices, including second chance hiring programs for justice-impacted individuals, and has previously called DE&I a business imperative. JPMorgan has a $30 billion initiative to close the racial wealth gap, and 10 employee resource groups. It is also generally transparent about its employee makeup, from the gender of new hires (49% are women) to the race of mid-level managers (49% are non-white) and military service of employees (3% are veterans).
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“We know that building a stronger, more inclusive economy that benefits everyone is good for people, business and society,” the company’s website says.
Zoom out. Dimon’s statements came after several other companies, including Costco, Apple, and Amazon, recently reaffirmed their commitment to diversity and inclusion, and after Trump’s attacks on DE&I initiatives this week, HR Brew reported. He directed all federal agencies to end their DEIA programs within 60 days of the executive order and, since then, several agency executives have ordered employees to report any colleagues doing DEIA work, according to Axios.
The administration has also threatened to investigate private companies’ DE&I activities. But the order was vague and didn’t clarify what’s considered a DE&I initiative, leading some companies to reach out to their lawyers for counsel, Bloomberg reported. Some conservatives said that the chaos is part of Trump’s strategy, and that the administration hopes that employers will proactively retreat from DE&I before they’re investigated.
“I think the chilling effect is the point,” Dwayne Kwaysee Wright, assistant professor and director of DE&I at George Washington University, told Bloomberg.
For now, the world’s largest bank doesn’t appear to be phased by the Trump administration’s threats.