This article about a company forcing the Marxist woke ESG agenda on other companies in order to do business is slightly off-topic but shows the harmful effect DEI has on merit, such as in the military.
By Andrew Hale, Heritage Foundation
“The rapid promotion of unqualified people to their next level of incompetence on woke grounds is a habit I have repeatedly witnessed in organizations that embrace the B Lab agenda.
We are replacing meritocracy with DEI compliance as the main criterion for advancement and success in the corporate world.”
. . . DEI management is now the second-fastest growing job on LinkedIn, as companies are increasingly pressured to increase their ESG social credit scores.
Driving this movement is the American company B Lab. This company encourages other companies in the U.S. to become benefit corporations, focusing on ESG and DEI objectives rather than on generating returns for shareholders or valuable products or services for customers.
B Lab’s website states that it is “the non-profit network transforming the global economy to benefit all people, communities, and the planet…We won’t stop until business is a force for good.”
But business is already a force for good, in that it creates wealth, jobs and government tax revenues. No community is sustainable without business.
B Lab perversely suggests that business, and shareholder capitalism in general, is not a force for good, but exploitative, patriarchal and “transphobic.”
B Lab is now pressuring companies to change their purposes in their articles of association in order to receive its certification and become “B Corporations.”. . .
. . . . Social justice may sound harmless or even positive, but creating a new fiduciary duty for company directors to “reduce harms or costs the company imposes on wider society and the environment” would potentially leave directors disqualified and personally liable if they fail to sign up to critical race theory, transgender ideology, or the “net zero” plan.
My experience working in the U.K.—where these intersectional polices are fully and unquestioningly embraced—attests to the fact that woke distractions create an unproductive and divisive working environment.
At my previous job, I was hired to work on trade policy. But I was mandated to spend a ridiculous 20 percent of my working hours promoting woke social projects—and this was strictly assessed in my quarterly performance reviews, so there was no getting out of it to get actual work done.
My colleagues and I were supposed to focus on promoting exports, but instead we were bombarded with training, and events about critical race theory, Black Lives Matter, “lived experience” (that is, truth presented as infinite, personal and subjective), white privilege, unconscious bias, decolonization, witchcraft, intersectionality, biphobia, toxic masculinity, nonbinary genders, transgenderism, gay history and environmentalism.
We were also told that “Gay Pride Month” is now “Gay Pride Year.”
My former employer declared “tolerance” an offensive word because it means passive acceptance. We were instructed that, to be a social justice organization, we should instead use “inclusion,” interpreted as celebration of “marginalized” groups.
Through the dogma of intersectionality, everyone was encouraged to discover a personal victimhood to celebrate, setting off a race-to-the-bottom competition over who was the most oppressed. Colleagues were even encouraged to cross-dress, so as to explore the “lived experience” of “oppressed members of society.” . . . . (read more)
Woke, Ltd – The Chilling Effect of B Corps on Free Speech (The Daily Sceptic, UK)
The Free Speech Union has just published a briefing called Woke, Ltd. by Thomas Harris, the FSU’s Director of Data and Impact. It’s about the B Corps movement, which the FSU thinks is having a chilling effect on free speech in the workplace.
The movement originated with B Lab Global, an American non-profit that was set up in 2006. It now has branches called B Labs all over the world, including the UK. . . .
The B Corps framework assesses a company against B Lab’s principles of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion – or JEDI, for short. Among other things, that means making a commitment to ‘racial justice’ and Net Zero and that, in turn, can lead to employees or customers who don’t share those values being purged – a good example being Nigel Farage’s defenestration by Coutts, a B Corp-certified company.
The FSU is concerned that the B Corps phenomenon is accelerating the adoption by British companies of contentious political ideas that originated in ‘grievance studies’ departments in American universities (gender studies, queer studies, whiteness studies), e.g. critical race theory (including the idea that all white people are privileged and it’s not enough for them to be non-racist, they must be ‘anti-racist’) and gender identity ideology. This ideology is often enforced with authoritarian zeal. . . . (read more)
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