John Deere Is Latest Company To Diminish DEI, Says It Won’t Join ‘Social Or Cultural Awareness Parades’

 Farm equipment manufacturer John Deere has become the latest company to cut back on its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

In a statement released earlier this week, the manufacturer said it prioritizes “internal policies that more closely align our business strategy to meet the needs of our customers.” To that end, the company announced a series of commitments that will reduce its involvement in political issues, including no longer participating in “social or cultural awareness parades, festivals, or events.”

Other commitments include auditing the company’s training materials to ensure they don’t contain “socially motivated messages” outside of federal, state, and local requirements and reaffirming that the company doesn’t have diversity quotas and does not require employees to identify their preferred pronouns.

Here’s the full list of commitments:

• We will no longer participate in or support external social or cultural awareness parades, festivals, or events.
• Business Resource Groups will exclusively be focused on professional development, networking, mentoring, and supporting talent recruitment efforts.
• Auditing all company-mandated training materials and policies to ensure the absence of socially motivated messages, while being in compliance with federal, state, and local laws.
• Reaffirming within the business that the existence of diversity quotas and pronoun identification have never been and are not company policy.
• We fundamentally believe that a diverse workforce enables us to best meet our customers’ needs and because of that we will continue to track and advance the diversity of our organization.

Earlier this week, reports circulated that tech giant Microsoft had laid offa DEI team, saying such initiatives were no longer needed.

In an email sent to thousands of employees, a team leader told employees: “True systems-change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020.”

Microsoft had been one of the many companies that pledged to spend millions of dollars to hire more people of color. In June 2020, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an email to employees saying the company had “committed to take action to help address racial injustice and inequity, and unequivocally believe that Black lives matter.”

But in recent years, some of these companies have cut back. Zoom laid off a DEI team earlier this year, saying it would instead work with external consultants moving forward, Bloomberg reported. Google and Meta (Facebook) also made cuts to DEI following their 2020 pledges.

CNBC reported last year that DEI-related job postings declined 44% in mid-2023 from the same time period in 2022. By November 2023, the job postings had dropped by 23% year over year. The outlet noted that between 2020 and 2021, DEI job postings increased by nearly 30%.

And John Deere isn’t the first farm-related company to cut back on DEI. In late June, Tractor Supply announced it would no longer submit data to the leftist Human Rights Campaign or adhere to DEI goals.