A few days after President Trump issued an order urging the private sector to end “Illegal D.E.I. Discrimination and Preferences,” the Rev. Al Sharpton led about 100 people into a Costco in East Harlem for a so-called buy-cott. The idea was to shop and support the company for maintaining its diversity, equity and inclusion policies amid pressure from the new administration.
But the gesture by the civil rights activist did not win universal acclaim on the political left. In interviews, self-identified socialists and other leftists worried that Mr. Sharpton’s action helped bolster the company at a moment when it faced pressure from unionized workers, who had threatened to strike beginning Feb. 1.
“Al Sharpton making Costco into a titan of progress that needs mass support days before a potential strike,” Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of the progressive magazine The Nation, grumbled on the platform X.
The episode at Costco, which did not respond to a request for comment, illustrates an underappreciated tension on the left at a time when Mr. Trump has targeted diversity initiatives: Some on the left have expressed skepticism of such programs, portraying them as a diversion from attacking economic inequality — and even an obstacle to doing so.
“I am definitely happy this stuff is buried for now,” Mr. Sunkara said in an interview. “I hope it doesn’t come back.”
Corporate-backed initiatives promoting diversity can take various forms. Starbucks, for instance, pledges to “work hard to ensure our hiring practices are competitive, fair and inclusive” and says it is “committed to consistently achieving 100 percent gender and race pay equity.” It also offers anti-bias training.
But socialists like Mr. Sunkara and others who share his critique say they prefer activism that focuses on class rather than racial or gender and sexual identity. They tend to see labor unions and worker-led organizing as a more effective solution to inequality.
Though deeply suspicious of Mr. Trump, whom they see as attacking D.E.I. policies for political gain and as a pretext for slashing government, these leftists see the turn against D.E.I. programs as an opportunity to reorient Democrats in a direction that will deliver more gains for workers and be more palatable to a majority of voters.
Mr. Sharpton said in a subsequent phone interview that he favored building a coalition of civil rights groups and unions to fight inequality, and that he had scheduled his Costco action far enough ahead of the strike deadline that it wouldn’t interfere. He said he would have suspended a second buy-cott had there been a strike involving Costco workers, who announced a tentative deal to avert a work stoppage on Feb. 1.
The debate over diversity initiatives even surfaced during the recent race to lead the Democratic Party. At a candidate forum before the party selected a new chairman last weekend, candidates were asked if they would commit to appointing more transgender people to at-large Democratic National Committee seats, and to making sure the holders of the seats were ethnically diverse.
One of the candidates, Faiz Shakir, refused, saying he disagreed with constituting the committee based on people’s identities.
In an interview, Mr. Shakir, a former manager of Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, said D.E.I. programs often served to divide the working class and “soften the actual confrontation with corporate power we need in society.” Workplace D.E.I. policies essentially buy off workers on the cheap, he said, adding: “You get a penny for your efforts. A little trinket here or there, that should mollify you.”
Those on the left who have studied diversity initiatives like antiracism and implicit-bias trainings point out that such programs may not work as advertised. A study of hundreds of employers over three decades suggests that the beneficial effects of such training tend to fade within days and that mandatory training can even increase racial resentments.
While some on the left nonetheless support D.E.I., leftist critics argue that these programs tend to advance the interests of companies rather than workers. “D.E.I. is fundamentally a tool of management,” said Jennifer C. Pan, author of “Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism,” a book to be released in May by the publishing house Verso, which characterizes itself as radical.
In her book, Ms. Pan cites examples of how employers and anti-union consultants deploy D.E.I. programs as a way to undermine union campaigns by defusing pressure from workers.
Those who share her view often cite evidence suggesting that unions are more effective than D.E.I. programs in closing wage gaps between employees of different genders and races by raising wage floors and improving benefits like paid sick leave. Unlike a labor contract, they note, D.E.I. goals typically don’t impose a direct legal obligation on companies.
Other studies have found that union membership also reduces racial bias, perhaps because unions enlist workers of different races to work together to achieve shared goals.
“My perspective is that the only thing that actually enforces D.E.I. is a union contract,” said Kevin Gallagher, a former worker at an Apple retail store in Towson, Md., who helped lead a successful union campaign there and now works as an organizer for the International Association of Machinists.
Lindsay King, who worked at the same store for almost 15 years before quitting last month, said that while Apple’s diversity and inclusion initiatives had some positive effects — like making stores accessible to employees and customers with disabilities — the union had made more concrete progress in its recent contract negotiation.
More politically moderate defenders of D.E.I. initiatives concede that the programs can fall short of their stated goals, and say this is sometimes partly by design. Alvin B. Tillery Jr., co-founder and chief executive of the 2040 Strategy Group, which advises employers on diversity programs, argued that policies like eliminating college-degree requirements for certain jobs were likely to be more effective in creating opportunities for Black and Latino workers than anti-bias training, but that they often lie outside the comfort zone of corporate executives.
“These things don’t happen because they probably diminish the amount of control that older white men have over the corporate space,” said Mr. Tillery, who considers himself a progressive Democrat.
Still, he argued, even more modest programs can improve diversity and reduce prejudice — and in most cases the alternative is not that workers will demand and win more sweeping improvements to working conditions, but that they will achieve no changes at all.
“Most workers are pretty docile in the face of management,” he said. “Most people go away quietly, they don’t organize.”
And some on the left, while skeptical that diversity programs make workplaces more fair, and distrustful of the corporations that start them, still find the focus on D.E.I. to be tactically useful. When companies that showcase D.E.I. policies, like Starbucks and REI, resist employees’ attempts to unionize, organizers can sometimes gain leverage by accusing them of hypocrisy and tarnishing their progressive reputations.
“I don’t think companies were ever particularly sincere about this to begin with,” said Jaz Brisack, who helped start the union organizing campaign at Starbucks and now helps run a training program for organizers called the Inside Organizer School.
“But if we’re going to be able to somehow persuade them to do the right thing, the best leverage we have is customer opinion.”
(Starbucks and REI have both denied accusations of illegally suppressing union organizing.)
Mx. Brisack, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, said they worried that the rollback of D.E.I. policies could also make it easier for companies to retaliate against members of minority groups who speak up about mistreatment at work. “Even if it was hollow, at least companies weren’t able to just explicitly do that,” Mx. Brisack said, alluding to retaliation.
Mr. Sunkara of The Nation acknowledged that retreating from D.E.I. programs could pose risks and said he believed that many corporate D.E.I. initiatives were well-intentioned efforts by liberal human resources officials and managers “looking for the next civil rights frontier.”
But he said the emphasis on diversity was nonetheless harmful because it pushed workers to dwell on their differences and trained politicians to court racial and ethnic groups rather than appealing to interests that were more universal.
“What comes next might be worse,” Mr. Sunkara said. “But it has a chance to be better.”