White House targets diversity hiring
American companies promising to hire more Black employees in leadership roles and teach their workforce about racism are getting amessage frompresident Donald Trump’s administration: Watch your step if you want to keep doing businesswith the federal government.
Trump’s Labor Department is using a 55-year-old presidential order spurred by the Civil Rights Movement to scrutinize companies likemicrosoft andwells Fargo over their public commitments to diversity. Government letters sent last week warned both companies against using “discriminatory practices” to meet their goals.
Microsoft has brushed off the warnings, publicly disclosing the government inquiry and defending its plan to boost Black leadership.
But advocates for corporate diversity initiatives worry that more cautious executives will halt or scale back efforts to make their
workplaces more inclusive out of fear that a wrong step could jeopardize lucrative public contracts. The agency has oversight over
the hiring practices of thousands of federal contractors that employ roughly a quarter of all American workers.
“For tech companies that don’t careabout these issues, the pronouncements are a dog whistle that they can carry on discriminating the way they already have,” said Laszlo Bock, an executive who ran Google’s human resources division for more than a decade and nowleads software startup Humu.
Bock said those who do care, however, will see Trump’s actions as political “sound and fury” thatwill be hard to enforce.
“It’s not at all illegal to strive to have a workforce that reflects the makeup of your nation,” Bock said.
Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 order was designed to “adjust the imbalances of hiring that are a legacy of our racist past,” said employment attorney and public contractingexpertdaniel Abrahams.
“Trump is turning it around into an instrument of white grievances,” he added.
The president has also ordered the Labor Department to set up a newhotline to investigate complaints about anti-racism training sessions that Trump has called “anti-american” and “blame-focused.” The order signed last month calls attention to discussions of deep- seated racism and privilege that could make white workers feel “discomfort” or guilt.
Trade groups representing the tech and pharmaceutical industries are protesting Trump’s new order, saying it would restrict free speech and interfere with private sector efforts to combat systemic racism.
Trump’s executive order is a twist on Johnson’s 1965 directive and amendments that followed that set rules banning discriminatory practices at companies that contract with the federal government. It requires contractors to take “affirmative action” to open the doors to hiring minorities and women.