Levi’s Support For DEI Has Gone Out of Style

Washington, D.C. — At today’s annual shareholder meeting of Levi Strauss & Co., a representative of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) will present a proposal calling on Levi’s to consider abolishing its Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) program, policies, department and goals.

FEP’s Proposal #5 notes that despite the obvious legal, reputational and cultural risks of dividing people on the basis of race and sex, “Levi Strauss still has a DEI program, which includes: considering and valuing race and sex in hiring and promotion decisions and in picking suppliers; Employee Resource Groups for some groups (only those arbitrarily deemed ‘diverse’), but not for others; and contributing shareholder money to organizations that advance DEI.”

In his verbal statement supporting the proposal, Free Enterprise Project Executive Director Stefan Padfield will quote from a recent piece published by the National Center’s Project 21, a network of black leaders whose views are often marginalized by mainstream media and DEI activists. In the piece, “Rolling Back DEI Rewards Black Americans Instead of Crippling Them,” Project 21 ambassadors explain why DEI is so damaging to black Americans. Stefan will summarize their conclusions by saying:

Brandon Brice, former head of a statewide DEI program, notes that DEI “reduces the value of merit, hard work and qualifications. It also goes directly against Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision for a world where people are judged based on the content of their character.”

April Chapman, host of the Unshakable With April podcast, notes that DEI and related programs “have convinced an entire generation that black Americans don’t have the ability to compete based on merit. President Trump [in seeking to end DEI] is countering this liberal narrative, and his view parallels that of Booker T. Washington, who taught that free markets, hard work and the belief in one’s own ability to be the best will dictate success and will result in a more favorable economic outcome.”

Perhaps most importantly, Priscilla Rahn, former Vice Chair of the Colorado Republican Committee, notes that “affirmative action… initiatives… haven’t fundamentally changed economic outcomes for black families over generations,” and concludes that “Focusing on skills, education and economic policies that benefit all Americans will do more to lift black families than race-based programs.”

Padfield will then conclude:

On this last point, imagine what corporations could accomplish if they stopped dividing us on the basis of race and sex, and instead focused on raising the floor for all Americans in areas such as education, which are at the root of the pipeline problems driving our demographic inequalities.

Levi’s commitment to the neo-racist and neo-Marxist DEI agenda reflects a lack of viewpoint diversity that FEP has been criticizing for years. Recall that this is the company that essentially ran its former Chief Marketing Officer Jennifer Sey out of town for daring to challenge the COVID pro-lockdown narrative. And if that’s not enough to make clear what sort of echo chamber we’re dealing with, the 1792 Exchange provided data to the National Center indicating that 91.7% of political donations from the Levi’s C-suite executive team and board of directors went to Democrats for the period covering 2010 to now.

Padfield will also note in today’s supporting statement that stakeholders should remain very skeptical of pronouncements that shareholders support DEI. He explained why such claims should be doubted in a recent RealClearMarkets commentary.

The National Center for Public Policy Research, founded in 1982, is a non-partisan, free-market, independent conservative think-tank. Ninety-four percent of its support comes from individuals, less than four percent from foundations and less than two percent from corporations. It receives over 350,000 individual contributions a year from over 60,000 active recent contributors.

FEP, the original and premier opponent of the woke takeover of American corporate life, aims to push corporations to respect their fiduciary obligations and to stay out of political and social engineering. More information about this proposal can be found in FEP’s mobile and web app, ProxyNavigator.

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