Lee Fang has an excellent new feature piece in the Intercept that contributes to the discourse surrounding “woke capital.” Fang writes:
Across the country, particularly in highly educated workplaces, employee activism has centered on demands that go beyond the bread and butter of higher salaries and better retirement benefits. YouTube and Facebook employees have demanded that management take a greater role in censoring content viewed as sexist or racist. Amazon corporate headquarters workers this month staged a protest to demand that the company restrict the sales of books that are perceived by some activist groups as anti-trans. The union that represents workers at NPR has demanded that the media outlet develop demographic tools to track the race and gender of every source that appears in stories. . . . In the new environment, businesses facing worker uprisings are attempting to co-opt the language of social justice movements and embrace trends around self-growth and positive lifestyles to counter demands for unionization — a far cry from the old days of union prevention, a history that featured employers routinely threatening workers with private guards and violent clashes on the picket lines.
Fang goes on to catalog numerous examples of so-called “union avoidance” consultants adopting the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion to discourage workers from unionizing. This set of paragraphs, in particular, is jaw-dropping:
When workers at vegan food company No Evil Foods, which makes imitation meat products sold at Whole Foods and other upscale groceries, held captive audience anti-union seminars, the company warned workers about the “old white guys” in union leadership and compared union dues to taxpayers funding President Donald Trump’s golf junkets.
In other records leaked out of the No Evil Foods seminars, workers were warned that unions were hotbeds of sexism and sexual harassment, and did not share the vegan food manufacturer’s progressive values. The union drive at the firm ultimately failed.
I think the entire “capital uses wokeness as a way to divide the working class” line of analysis is often overly simplistic, at best. There are plenty of woke workers too, particularly at progressive companies such as Starbucks. But this really is a textbook example of that phenomenon. It’s also probably a place where conservatives and intellectually honest leftists would agree that corporate America’s embrace of DEI rhetoric and ideology is shallow and hypocritical.