The Trump Administration had ordered French companies with U.S. contracts to comply with its orders banning DEI initiatives.

Summary

Denmark and the Netherlands criticized Trump’s demand that foreign companies with U.S. government contracts eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Denmark called for a coordinated EU response, labeling the move a potential trade barrier.

The Trump administration sent letters to European firms—including in France and Belgium—warning they must comply with a DEI ban or risk losing U.S. contracts.

European officials condemned the letters, defending DEI as essential to corporate responsibility. The EU Commission is reviewing the situation, while the U.S. State Department called the effort a compliance measure.

  • merc@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    It’s also useful to ask “if you don’t support DEI, is it diversity, equity or inclusion you have an issue with?”

    Should certain people or certain kinds of people be excluded? Is that why inclusion is bad?

    What’s bad about equity? Should things be inequitable? Should certain people get preferential treatment? If so, which people and why?

    Or, is it diversity that’s the problem? Is uniformness important? Is it so important that it’s reasonable to exclude people who don’t come from the right backgrounds or don’t look a certain way?

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      17 hours ago

      They’re starting to adapt. They often claim,

      • that DEI is an Orwellian term and is not really meaning what it means,
      • that since discrimination is already illegal, such programs are not needed, we just need to “push harder on meritocracy” (which is funny once you realize where the term “meritocracy” comes from),
      • or that these programs have “gone too far”, because they watched too much Brian Lunduke or some other people like him, who “overreport” the (supposed) overreaches of DEI programs.

      “Overreporting” means that you purposefully overinflate supposed problems by bringing up the same story over and over again, which makes the problems seem way bigger than what they actually are, and at worst the people reading or watching half attended might actually think the problem occured another time. I’m from Hungary, and not only this method made people believe that “Roma crimes” and “disability benefit cheats” were way more widespread than they actually were, ultimately handing over the first landside victory to Fidesz (ironically, many of the sites doing these kinds of tactics claimed Viktor Orbán was both too far-left and Roma - Hungary has its own birther movement that makes critique of Fidesz extremely hard), and making the life harder for those groups much harder once Fidesz enacted its programs. Also thanks to overreporting, some of my relatives thought the knife attacker of Blaha Lujza square made yearly attacks for MP3 players up until MP3 players fell out of fashion in favor of smartphones, with some still warning me against bringing an MP3 player to Budapest, because the far-right “news” site kuruc info likes to post the anniversaries of said tragedies caused by Roma criminals, which was even worse in the very first years after the attack (TL;DR: They brought it up on a yearly basis).