So by all means suggest an alternative and lobby for it, if its a good idea I will be there lobbying it too. But dont withdrawn protection from a group of people without another option in place. I've worked in companies without HR departments, some tiny companies are fine, but a lot are absolutely awful
The alternative is to have a general-purpose HR department that is aware of equalities law, unions prepared to support staff with disputes, and legal aid.
Much as that's not perfect - is anything - I am absolutely unconvinced that a "DEI" department will be any more helpful to any individual than that. Indeed, I would expect a DEI department to be more of a threat to an individual. I've always regarded HR departments as being somewhat capricious, and potentially containing people you don't want to cross, but the DEI department? Absolutely terrifying.
And then the "DEI" people in the union will probably take their side rather than yours! See all the people having problems with the UCU...
You don't need a specific department staffed with people with DEI as their function. That's where the corruption happens.
An HR department at least has a general purpose - a utility to the company. It can't go totally rogue.
A DEI department's only purpose is to be a DEI department. All it wants is more DEI. It's a cancer, and will go totally rogue. What it's called doesn't really matter - the problem is it's a department for an abstract concept without a function.
I saw this the other day, and was amused. A small very-white town in Vermont with their own "DEI" group, tried getting some diversity on it. Story doesn't tell whether the extremely unco-operative black guy was the only black person they had - would make it funnier.
But it does illustrate the problem of - how do you stop or check this juggernaut? The committee has to exist, so you have to find people who agree with it existing. Saying it shouldn't exist isn't an option. Nor, I imagine, is saying it shouldn't grow. Don't you want Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, you bigot?
Councilors voted 4-2 to remove Keith Longmore, a local business manager, from the Belonging, Equity and Inclusion committee, which he called “a fraud and an affront to the families of this city” at a meeting last month. [...]
Longmore told VTDigger last month that he thought it was important he have a seat on the committee because its other members all “think alike,” adding he represented “the families of the city of St. Albans that don’t buy into the woke game.” [...]
The city manager and mayor wrote that Longmore has “repeatedly derided the mission and the need for the committee,” including by calling it “unnecessary” and “a hoax.” [...]
“I'm really concerned that this committee won't be able to function with somebody who has expressed a complete lack of faith in the machine,” McCarthy said.
In a letter to the editor that appeared in the Saint Albans Messenger last summer, Longmore contended that St. Albans was in the arms of a “wokeness brigade” and deemed the committee “unnecessary” a month before it was created.
He also said that as an African American, he had not experienced discrimination or felt unwelcome in the community.
At the committee’s May 10 meeting, Longmore questioned member Reier Erickson’s decision to read a statement saying that St. Albans is located on Indigenous peoples’ land. He also questioned why the committee members did not say the Pledge of Allegiance.
When asked to share his name and pronouns, he said, “Keith Longmore. American. MAGA. Make America great again. America first.”
Longmore later said at the May meeting that he disagreed with what he saw as an effort by some committee members to try and paint St. Albans residents as “blanket bigots and racists,” because the city’s population is largely white.
“They’re white people. They do white people things. I’m OK with that,” he said.
What if it's mainly white people want this stuff, and the people it's nominally for are against it, cos they think it's basically a job-making scam? (Polls in the US are shifting hard against the Democrats in every demographic apart from white university-educated, I hear).
I saw another piece here, which I don't find totally convincing but probably has something in it - suggesting that this has taken hold far more in the US than other countries as a form of job creation for a massive surplus of humanities graduates. It argues that somewhere like Sweden has far more bureaucratic places to put them that are less harmful, so they have less scope to set up enclosed belief systems like DEI.
Wokeness, the Highest Stage of Managerialism