Dive Brief:
- Paramount is both eliminating diversity-related staffing goals and ending its collection of demographic data from existing employees going forward, per its co-CEOs in a Feb. 26 internal memo obtained by HR Dive.
- Still, Paramount CEOs George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins said, “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.”
- In response, Paramount employees penned an open letter to their co-CEOs registering their disagreement.
Dive Insight:
In the letter, the co-CEOs cited President Donald Trump’s executive orders demanding agencies target private employers with “illegal” DEI programs. Cheeks, McCarthy and Robbins emphasized that “as a result, some of our policies must change to comply with these new mandates.”
Additionally, Paramount’s qualitative DEI metric in its short-term incentive plan “for qualified participants” will be going away. Whereas 5% of funding was directly connected to DEI goals, that funding will now be redirected to Paramount’s Workforce Culture and Development metric, which is focused on “building a high-performing and inclusive culture.”
Employees fired back at Paramount’s co-CEOs shortly after, as first reported by Ben Mullin of The New York Times. Workers said they were “extremely disappointed” with the decision.
Moreover, they said, Paramount’s “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.”
Beyond that cognitive dissonance, employees touched on how the changing compliance landscape at the federal level is, in their opinion, unnecessarily affecting how private companies do business.
“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,” the employee letter continued.
DEI rollbacks predated the second Trump administration, but Trump’s executive orders have likely exacerbated a corporate climate of anxiety.
Still, Trump’s executive order regarding DEI has no bearing on the private sector so far, according to one federal judge. Late last month, Judge Adam Abelson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland agreed with the plaintiff’s claims that Trump’s executive order would likely violate the U.S. Constitution’s First and Fifth Amendments, as well as its separation of powers clause.
Likewise, 16 state attorneys general condemned Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, and issued their own multi-state guidance on DEI and accessibility at work.
DEI “best practices are not illegal, and the federal government does not have the legal authority to issue an executive order that prohibits otherwise lawful activities in the private sector or mandates the wholesale removal of these policies and practices within private organizations,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell and Illinois AG Kwame Raoul said in the letter.
Trump’s executive order “states what is already the law — that discrimination is illegal — but then conflates unlawful preferences in hiring and promotion with sound and lawful best practices” for promoting DEI at work, the AGs wrote.
Beyond concerns about DEI, Paramount employees have been vocal in their complaints regarding their workplace. Previously, 38 employees of the Motion Pictures Editors Guild at Paramount were fired unceremoniously at the end of 2024, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
In the letter publicized this March, Paramount workers addressed the layoffs at the company and claimed that they affected marginalized talent disproportionately.
“We are ashamed to be employees of a company that will bulldoze our ‘company culture’ for a shortsighted pursuit of profit,” the letter said. “Scrubbing words from company literature does not erase the people they represent.”
