A year after the murder of George Floyd, Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart had a warning for corporate America. The death of Floyd triggered a wave of protest over systemic racism and was “not an isolated event. We have a long history of racism, and we see unacceptable events continue.”
Walmart and other large US corporations made pledges to address inequities within their business, ones many feared would be dropped once the focus on Floyd’s killing and its aftermath faded. “We can’t let that be the case,” he wrote, outlining how the company was releasing its “diversity metrics twice a year” and calling on companies to “continue to address systemic racism and the structural inequities that are rooted in this nation’s history of slavery and that persist today”.
Times have changed. Last month Walmart became the latest corporation to cave to a rightwing campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, announcing it would stop using the term DEI altogether, drop DEI trainings, no longer consider race and gender as a means to improve diversity when making offers to suppliers and would not renew a racial equity center committed to addressing “the root causes of gaps in outcomes experienced by Black and African American people”.
For TaNeka Hightower the news was like a “slap in the face”.
A Walmart employee for about seven years in Memphis, Tennessee, Hightower said: “I identify with all of the groups pretty much covered up under the DEI. I question, do I still want to work at Walmart because they don’t acknowledge the safety concerns. They don’t acknowledge, the livable wage concerns, and then now I’m being slapped in the face because the groups that I identify with are being told you are no longer protected by us.”
Walmart’s decision was celebrated by the conservative activist Robby Starbuck who has campaigned against similar initiatives at Ford, Harley-Davidson, Lowe’s and others. However, it appears the company’s plans to roll back its DEI policies were in the works before Starbuck’s intervention.
Hightower said she found the reversal “very disturbing”. She said there was no communication provided to workers about the changes, rather she found out about the rollbacks via the news.
“This just further confirms that we’re no longer a part of the family. We never really were. We were invited to the table to assist, helping the table get prepared, but we weren’t actually supposed to eat from said table,” she said.
The union-backed Walmart workers group United for Respect has tried to introduce a shareholder proposal at Walmart’s past two annual shareholder meetings for a third-party independent racial equity audit of the corporation.
The racial equity shareholder proposal has come up short of the 20% support it would need for Walmart to discuss it, receiving 18% in 2023 and just over 15% in 2024. Hightower said she planned on reintroducing it at the 2025 annual shareholder meeting in Arkansas.
The multibillionaire Walton family hold about 46% of Walmart’s shares and about 35% of the company’s shares are held by investment groups, banks, and other institutions including BlackRock. The shareholder proposal received 42% support from shareholders not part of the Walton family in 2023.
Hightower said she had been pushing for the audit “to see the disparities of how people of color are selected for those upper roles, how there’s a difference in the pay, how there’s a difference in the workload expectations based on race, color and gender”.
Bianca Agustin, co-executive director at United for Respect said the DEI rollback policies came as a surprise to shareholders at Walmart and were concerning given Walmart is the largest private employer in the US overall and for Black Americans and women.
“Given Walmart’s sheer size as the largest employer in the world, and the demographics of both their domestic workforce and their suppliers it was just very disappointing,” Agustin said. “This is just a huge regression I think in response to the Trump administration.”
Agustin said in Walmart’s opposition to the racial equity shareholder proposal, they cited many of the DEI policies that the company has just rolled back, and claimed the company does internal racial equity audits but has never released the results of those audits.
“We’re expecting a number of co-filers on this. I think a lot of investors were surprised, shocked and disappointed to see Walmart walk this back,” Agustin said. “Walmart has a real responsibility, given its scale, to track this, disclose this, and live up to the mission that they intended when they started the racial equity center, which was to address the root causes of inequality. This is just such a slap in the face, I think to the employees and to stakeholders that care.”
Walmart did not comment on the shareholder proposal or criticisms on the DEI policy rollbacks. A spokesperson said in a statement: “Our purpose, to help people save money and live better, has been at our core since our founding 62 years ago and continues to guide us today. We can deliver on it because we are willing to change alongside our associates and customers who represent all of America. We’ve been on a journey and know we aren’t perfect, but every decision comes from a place of wanting to foster a sense of belonging, to open doors to opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers and to be a Walmart for everyone.”