As its own future comes under threat by the Trump administration, a juxtaposition on National Public Radio's homepage Tuesday (see photo) unwittingly showed just what kind of job losses NPR has sympathy for -- DEI woke-work, not the manufacturing jobs that actually involve making things, and which happen to employ many Trump voters.
“Corporate America's retreat from DEI has eliminated thousands of jobs” is an expanded “digital feature” version of a story by Maria Aspan for Tuesday’s Morning Edition. Over the airwaves, Aspan lamented “the numbers are pretty bleak. More than 2,600 jobs in diversity or DEI have been eliminated in the last couple of years.” She decried the “now very politicized job market” of DEI (which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion).
Wasn’t it the left-wing DEI movement that politicized the job market?!
Aspan’s digital version expanded on a brief, soppy interview she conducted with a now-jobless victim of DEI’s downfall [Click "Expand."]
Candace Byrdsong Williams has filled the front room of her sunlit North Carolina home with sources of inspiration. Overflowing plants and photos of her three daughters share space with a brightly-painted sign of a favorite Bible verse: "God is within her, she will not fall."
Then there are the books: stacks of memoirs, business advice, and professional guides to the field now known as "diversity, equity, and inclusion," or DEI. That's where Byrdsong Williams, who generally radiates a calming optimism, spent the last 18 years of her career.
But her voice breaks as she picks up one textbook called, simply, The Chief Diversity Officer. The title represents the pinnacle of her once-hot profession, and the promotion she was working toward before she was laid off in August -- and found the DEI job market had turned into a toxic wasteland.
"I was hoping that was going to be the next role," she says, "prior to the current political climate."
Now, it seems “like a promotion that will never happen -- for her, and for thousands of U.S. workers.” Only laid-off DEI and federal workers get this kind of abject, ideologically attuned sympathy from NPR. Layoffs due to environmental restrictions like cancelled pipelines or protected forests? Not so much.
NPR traced the rise of the (now-fading) bout of corporate racial reckoning to George Floyd’s death in police custody in May 2020, blaming in part a backlash from "conservative influencers" arguing DEI is itself discriminatory against whites.
After crying over the “crushing professional impact on people like Byrdsong Williams” caused by the DEI retreat, Aspan made a bold claim that DEI “mentoring programs” and the like were the “kind of work benefits most employers because it makes it easier to hire and retain good employees. Even some of the companies who are ending their DEI policies acknowledge this.”
A subhead made the story’s gist clear: “The DEI retreat disproportionately hurts women and people of color.”
In contrast, NPR showed no sensitivity when it came to the loss of manufacturing sector jobs in a May 27 newsletter from Greg Rosalsky of NPR’s Planet Money podcast, under the headline “Are manufacturing jobs actually special?” Not nearly as special as DEI work, apparently.
The full headline over the story itself softened the blow, but the text made it clear manufacturing jobs are on the way out and the best that can be done is to “replicate” in other sectors what made those jobs special (“What makes manufacturing jobs special? The answer could help rebuild the middle class.”)
Politicians in both big political parties have been trying to reengineer the U.S. economy to boost manufacturing. What makes manufacturing so special? Besides, you know, politics.
Some writers and economists say that romanticizing this one particular sector of the economy is more about nostalgia or political pandering than rational thinking about what will best serve workers and the economy.
….we at Planet Money were curious, on a deeper level, about what makes manufacturing special enough to warrant all this ruckus in the first place?
Factory work just isn’t woke enough to concern NPR.
