Paramount Employees Blast Paramount For Cutting DEI Policies Claiming The Company Is "Committing To The Erasure And Exclusion" Of "Diverse Communities"
A number of Paramount employees reportedly sent a letter to the company’s management blasting them for cutting DEI policies and accusing them of “committing to the erasure and exclusion” of “diverse communities.”
At the end of February, Deadline published an email from Paramount Global CEOs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy, and Brian Robbins that noted it would “no longer set or use aspirational numerical goals related to the race, ethnicity, sex or gender of hires.”
The trio also noted it “ended [its] policy of collecting race, ethnicity, sex or gender data for U.S. job applicants on our forms and careers page, except in those markets that legally require us to do so.”
Furthermore, they also announced they “eliminated the ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ qualitative metric in our Short-Term Incentive Plan (STIP) for qualified participants. This metric directly connected 5% of funding for our STIP program to the company’s success in progress on companywide DEI initiatives, including aspirational representation goals. We now base 10% of STIP funding on our Workforce Culture and Development qualitative metric, which is focused on building a high-performing and inclusive culture, including through developing leadership and engaging our workforce.”
However, at the end of the email, they did make it clear they were still committed to inclusivity as a value in order to be successful, “To be the best storytellers and to continue to drive success, we must have a highly talented, dedicated and creative workforce that reflects the perspectives and experiences of our many different audiences. Values like inclusivity and collaboration are a part of the Paramount culture and will continue to be.”
READ: To Save the West, Make Better Art
Following this email, New York Times reporter Benjamin Mullin reported on LinkedIn he received an email from Paramount employees blasting leadership for cutting back on these DEI policies.
The email stated, “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.”
Next, they asked, “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?
The employees then decried President Donald Trump’s executive orders which have declared DEI policies to be immoral and illegal as “unethical.” Furthermore, they referred to President Trump as a “mob boss.”
They wrote, “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,” they continued. “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,” they concluded.
What do you make of this email?
NEXT: Exclusive: An Interview With 'A Working Man' Creator Chuck Dixon
The leadership did say they are still committed to DEI, while removing the programs to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the NPC employees self-reported to the woke clowns who still demand their anti straight white male programs. If Paramount was truly against DEI, they would fire everybody who signed that email.