Quarter Pounders and Big Macs won’t be going away anytime soon after fast food giant McDonald’s flipped sides on its corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
The burger behemoth on Monday announced it had opened its eyes and seen the light on what critics complained were ‘woke’ policies that included diversity training for senior management and suppliers along with quotas for hiring racial and sexual minorities.
In addition, they will no longer participate in the Human Rights Council’s Corporate Equity Index and other third-party surveys that rank companies for hiring gay and transgender employees.
Instead, chairman and CEO Chris Kempszinski said the company would continue to make a commitment to acting “lawfully and being responsive to the business environment.”
The company said it remains committed to "inclusiveness" but within the context of growing its business and returns to shareholders.
It comes just four years after the Chicago-based company faced a series of sexual harassment lawsuits and charges of discrimination from former Black franchise owners.
In 2021, former CEO Steve Easterbrook was fired and forced to repay more than USD$105 million in cash and bonuses for an ‘inappropriate’ sexual relationship with an employee. On Tuesday, its UK subsidiary announced it had fired 29 managers after more than 700 complaints of sexual harassment and abuse from employees as young as 19 years of age.
The company claimed it made the move to ditch its DEI policies in response to a US Supreme Court ruling that outlawed affirmative action in college admissions.
But self-proclaimed corporate activist Robby Starbuck took credit for the move, by saying he told McDonald’s executives last week that he would be exposing their DEI policies — similar to how he forced others like Harley Davidson, John Deere, Jack Daniel’s, Boeing, Coors, and even Walmart to recant.
As a result of those efforts, companies worth more than USD$2.3 trillion have all reversed what he described as discriminatory policies that penalize mostly White job applicants.
“We’re a force to be reckoned with, and we won’t stop until wokeness is extinct,” he said. “The era of wokeness is dying right in front of our eyes. The landscape of corporate America is quickly shifting to sanity and neutrality. We are the trend, not the anomaly anymore.”