98.7 Percent Of Deere Shareholders Reject Anti-DEI Resolution – CleanTechnica

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Last Updated on: 26th February 2025, 07:55 pm

Shareholders of Deere & Co. voted overwhelmingly today to reject a proposal seeking to curb the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plans. According to MarketWatch, this is the latest sign of investor resistance to conservative efforts to end diversity practices. At its annual shareholders meeting on February 26, 2025, the company said only 1.3 percent of votes cast were in favor of the proposal, which called on the company to generate a report on statistical differences in hiring across race and gender. The proposal came from the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative group. “If the Company discriminates, it will be obvious in its hiring numbers,” the group said in Deere’s proxy statement last month. “Deere should report on statistical differences in hiring across race and gender to prove it does not practice discrimination.” In its filing, the group expressed suspicions that corporations were discriminating against white job applicants.

White rage is everywhere in America today, because for those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like punishment. Apple said Tuesday that its shareholders voted by a wide margin against a proposal from a conservative group requesting an end to its DEI efforts. That didn’t stop the world’s most virulent racist from posting on his personal social media channel that Apple “SHOULD GET RID OF DEI RULES, NOT JUST MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO THEM.” He has called for government agencies to find potential ways to investigate corporate DEI initiatives, or otherwise persuade companies to end the practice. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this month said it planned to open an investigation into Comcast Corp.

Last summer, Deere said it would stop participating in “external social or cultural awareness” events and take steps to “ensure the absence of socially motivated messages” in training materials and policies. It also said it was reaffirming that diversity quotas and preferred pronouns “have never been and are not company policy.” In response to those changes, the National Legal and Policy Center said in the proxy that “the Company cannot make empty promises without following through.” Deere had recommended that shareholders vote against the group’s proposal. The company said it already “publicly reports substantial amounts of data about the composition of our workforce.”

Deere And As You Sow

As You Sow is a progressive organization whose mission is “Empowering Shareholders To Change Corporations For Good.” On its website, it says, “We harness shareholder power to create lasting change and align investments with values. Our programs address gender inequalities, workplace equity, environmental health, and more.” In an email to CleanTechnica following the vote at the Deere & Co annual meeting, it said the nearly unanimous shareholder votes against attacks on equal job opportunities for everyone are the latest public failures by anti-business groups attempting to inject political culture wars into standard business practices.

“Today, shareholders of Deere & Co sent a strong signal to the Board and management by voting nearly unanimously against a shareholder proposal from a conservative think tank looking to undermine the company’s diversity and inclusion programs. Over 98.7 percent of shares voted against the anti-diversity Proposal 4, according to Deere & Co during today’s annual general meeting,” As You Sow said. Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, said, “Shareholders understand that diversity and inclusion are material to profitable growth. Anyone who’s looking at the data, which the companies and shareholders are, comes to the conclusion that greater diversity leads to financial out-performance.”

The Deere vote was the third rebuke from shareholders of the anti-DEI crusade after a similar 98 percent vote at Costco on January 23, 2025, and the 97.7 percent vote against at Apple on February 25, 2025. All three proposals attempted to stop company management from continuing policies and practices to optimize their human capital by hiring and promoting employees based on merit without regard to their gender or the color of their skin. “This string of epic failures sends a powerful signal to all of those trying to use the shareholder proposal process to manipulate the free markets,” added Behar.

A recent As You Sow report analyzed 1,641 companies over five years and shows a statistically significant correlation linking diverse management teams to financial out-performance across key indicators, such as return on equity and return on investment. The data clearly indicates that building a productive and meritocratic workforce is essential to the long-term success of the company and all stakeholders. “We are not surprised by the vote tally,” said Meredith Benton, As You Sow program manager and founder of consultancy Whistle Stop Capital. “These resolutions have been filed for several years with negligible investor support because they lack a sound business rationale. Investors have been clear: we wish to see sound business practices that will help John Deere outperform.”

As Deere publicly stated, “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. We believe our employees’ unique perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences contribute to innovation and our ability to create value for our customers. We also believe that a diverse workforce that reflects the communities we serve is essential to our long-term success. Deere is committed to treating our employees, who propel us toward achieving our business ambitions, fairly and inclusively.” Andy Behar emphatically rejected these anti-DEI resolutions, which he said “are thinly veiled attempts to protect White males from having to compete on a level playing field with women and people of color. Shareholders are smart enough to look at the financial data and avoid politics that should not be part of profitably running a business.”

White Male Power

The shrillness of the “white males should rule every aspect of corporate and government policy” argument is embedded in the DNA of the MAGA party as presently constituted. But it is a lie, one that empowered the racists like Henry Ford, Charles Lindberg, and Father Coughlin in America and Adolf Hitler and his National Socialists in Germany. It is the locus of power for all right wing ideologies. This week, Michael Moore published a post on Substack that explodes many of the myths surrounding the MAGA movement. Here is an excerpt (Moore has a tendency to be somewhat loquacious):

70 years ago today in San Francisco, California, a son was born to Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian Muslim who had entered the United States and enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. I don’t have the evidence of his citizenship, or how or why he was allowed to enter our country. The records do show that he impregnated a young woman from Green Bay and, apparently, this baby (anchor baby?) is the result of that union. On the birth certificate, apparently, is the baby’s name, or his father’s, written in Arabic: عبدالفتاح جندلي. So one more unintended, unannounced, unapproved Arab-Muslim made his way into this great country and became a US citizen simply because on this day in 1955 he left his mother’s womb head first and landed in a birthing room at some random hospital in San Francisco — and, naturally, because of a reckless mistake our Founding Fathers made in granting automatic free-to-be-you-and-me unvetted but highly-valued American citizenship for doing… what? Just showing up after a few contractions and “Presto! Yes, you, too, are now an American — just like me!” Except my name on my birth certificate is written in American-English, not Arabic. You can see why Donald Trump and MAGA-nation are so rightfully upset at how randomly any baby can just become an American — even before they’ve had their first meal!

Do you know who Moore is writing about? “That ‘nothing-baby’ was soon adopted and given an American name — Steve Jobs. Yes, that Steve Jobs.” The moral of the story is that removing military leaders because they are Black or female does not make America great; it makes America weaker to the detriment of us all. Thanks to the efforts of As You So and other similar organizations, people and corporations are learning how to push back against the tidal wave of insanity sweeping across the nation fueled by rich white men who spit on anyone not born to their position of privilege.

There have been few reasons to smile in America since Inauguration Day, but the overwhelming defeat of anti-DEI initiatives recently is a ray of hope in the miasma of darkness created by MAGA misanthropes.