A group of woke employees of entertainment giant Paramount have organized to sign a letter attacking the company for announcing that it intends to roll back its Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies.
The employees brazenly announced that they are “disappointed” that the company is pulling back from its former commitment to the far-left policy ideas.
“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,” the letter reads, according to Fox Business Network.
“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,” the employees continued.
The screed was first published on LinkedIn by New York Times reporter Benjamin Mullin.
The company announced in February that it was set to pull back on its DEI commitment, and in a memo said that the move was made with “business objectives firmly in mind.”
“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,” Paramount said.
This move that runs very contrary to its former claims in 2023 that it intended to die on its DEI hill and that its commitment was unshakable.
But now, in the wake of President Trump’s moves to end the federal government’s DEI policies, the employees contend that Paramount is bending to the pressures from the federal government, who they characterized as “mob bosses.”
“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,” the employees said.
“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,” the employees exclaimed.
The letter goes on to accuse top Paramount bosses of putting the interests of shareholders ahead of the “humanity” of the employees.
“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,” they claimed.
The employees ended the letter “imploring” the company, which owns CBS, BET, Comedy Central, and MTV, to “look past quarterly dividends and election cycles.”
“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,” the letter concludes.
Paramount has not issued a statement on the letter.
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