Best companies for workers in DEI crisis moment for corporate America

The DEI debate may have reached its most divisive moment, on its biggest stage, when President Trump pointed to diversity, equity and inclusion policies as a potential contributing factor in last week’s aviation disaster and signed an executive order targeting DEI programs. True to Trump form, allies of the president didn’t back down, from Vice President JD Vance to new White House cabinet secretaries and powerful figures in the world of the markets who now overlap with the power brokers in the nation’s capital.

“DEI kills people, literally,” wrote Shaun Maguire, a partner at the prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Sequoia and a Trump donor, in an X.com post. “Absolutely,” responded Elon Musk.

A week after the plane disaster and the ongoing, uncomfortable national debate over DEI, a big question still looms over a corporate America that was already in DEI retreat, with major firms from Target to Meta, Walmart and McDonald’s scaling back efforts in the area: How do companies move forward and act “right” in ways that don’t ignite a political backlash?  

Hedge fund billionaire and Just Capital co-founder Paul Tudor Jones appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday morning to discuss the latest annual list of America’s “most just” companies, the JUST 100, on which Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the top spot for the second-consecutive year. But given the broader societal and political issues, it was no surprise that Tudor Jones was asked to chime in on everything from the markets to tariffs to the DEI backlash.

For Tudor Jones, the JUST 100 list and another acronym which may seem diametrically opposed to it, MAGA, have more in common than many people may initially think. For years, even before ESG and DEI backlash hit peak crisis levels, Just Capital stressed that its research is based on polling of the public, and Americans have made clear what they want to see from companies on the issues that matter the most to them: fair wages, career training and advancement opportunities, work-life balanced benefits, and transparent, ethical leadership. Tudor Jones says none of these top issues in the JUST 100 weightings are incompatible with where the U.S. is in 2025.  

“The election result we saw, and President Trump taking office again are completely congruent with the polling we saw this year,” Tudor Jones said. “The No. 1 issue year after year is paying a fair and living wage and Trump was elected because in this country, in middle America, those that work for these companies weren’t getting a fair shake,” he said, citing data that 50% of the Russell 1000 universe companies don’t pay what is defined as a fair, living wage. “It’s exactly synchronous with what we see in our polling,” he said.

“Year after year, there is nothing more important than the economic issue [of wages].  … And hopefully, that’s what our rankings do: highlight the companies, where they are in their sectors, and against the rest of the world. Certainly, for the top 1,000 companies, where they are in taking care of their workers and where they need to improve … That’s the bottom line in all of this, and I think that’s the bottom line of the last election, too,” Tudor Jones said. 

“If anything, if you’re a MAGA person … all we are doing is asking the American public what they think,” Tudor Jones added. “It’s as MAGA as anything.” 

Ultimately, that flows through to the bottom line, according to Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri, who has been CEO at HPE for seven years and rose from being an intern at the company, and is the son of Italian immigrants who moved to Argentina — a real “Horatio Alger” story, as Tudor Jones put it. He appeared on CNBC along with Tudor Jones on Monday morning and said doing right by employees remains a guiding principle of his leadership tenure.  

“Culture is everything in my mind, and in addition to customers and innovation, at center of culture, it’s employees. … We see it in our results,” Neri said, citing the lowest employee attrition rates the company has ever had. “The two are correlated. You can’t perform unless you have the best talent, and you can’t deliver value to shareholders unless you have the best human capital strategy, and the core of that strategy is employees. … you can’t take that link as an afterthought.”  

HPE shares have done well in the past year, though over the past five years it has trailed the S&P 500 Index. Just Capital points to indexes it filtered from the best in the broader large-cap universe which it says have outperformed, to varying degrees, the broader equal-weighted Russell 1,000 universe of stocks and S&P 500.

Across the Russell 1,000, companies are improving on disclosure of many worker-related metrics, according to a data analysis shared with CNBC by Just Capital, creating “a potential baseline,” its analysts say, of what workers and firms competing for talent should expect when it comes to workforce spend among some of the largest U.S. employers.

In this year’s rankings, while wage disclosures were only offered by 15% of firms, up slightly, 84.5% of ranked Russell 1000 companies disclosed wealth building opportunity policies for employees (e.g. ESOPs, ESPPs, stock awards and options, or a 401k match); 73.2% disclosed a tuition reimbursement program; and 53.6% disclosed working hours policies aimed at offering scheduling flexibility for salaried employees or stability for hourly workers. 

The JUST 100 List for 2025 also includes many names associated with blue-collar work near the top of the rankings, such as freight rail Union-Pacific, utility Eversource, and industrial equipment company Trane Technologies — two of the three (UP and Eversource) appearing in the top 10 for the first time.

A list that has been more heavily weighted towards the top to banks, big tech, and chip firms has seen utilities and chemicals companies move up, not only within the top 100 but across the entire universe of Russell 1,000 stocks. Exxon Mobil moved up 200 spots this year to nearly crack the top 100, and improved on key issues for the public: pay disclosure, job creation and workforce development. Meanwhile, some notable tech companies have dropped, including Apple. Just Capital stresses that moves down the list are often the result of other firms doing more in terms of disclosure to move up, rather than any firm being penalized for doing something wrong. Apple, in fact, recently defended its diversity initiatives when it faced a shareholder measure challenging the approach.

CEOs across the market have been talking about the need to defend diversity, but in the least, update DEI programs — not just for legal reasons, but to reflect this moment in the country.

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins said in comments to CNBC at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos that “what happened is there’s a subset of initiatives under the DEI brand that were particularly disliked. And I think the whole thing got blown up because of that.” 

“If I’m sitting in a room to try to solve a complex problem or to chase a big opportunity, I want a lot of diverse brains in that room, and I don’t care if it’s gender or if it’s nationality or if it’s just diversity of experience,” Robbins said. “Diversity in general is good for business. But I think the pendulum swung and I think it was a handful of issues that really triggered it all.”

Several other CEOs made the case for diversity-focused efforts from Davos, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who cited investments in cities, schools, states, hospitals, countries, companies, and said “we’re gonna do more of the same.”

But even for those backing a broader definition of corporate mission and philosophy amid the storm, there are clear adjustments being made. “I don’t like monikers,” Dimon told CNBC at Davos. “It may sound like it’s a binary thing. … We are not trying to pander to any which side or any which thing. Now, if you pointed out something we are doing that’s wrong, I’d change it at that point, and we will make modifications going forward.” 

How DEI “gets implemented and executed, I think is where there’s dialogue and debate,” Vista Equity Partners CEO Robert Smith told CNBC from Davos. 

If the “D” is on the decline or going through a reset in corporate America, the “I” is becoming more prevalent as a catch-all category. McDonald’s recently referred to its brand as one that considers “inclusion one of our core values” in announcing the end of some diversity initiatives.

If companies tilted too far in one direction during a particular political moment in 2020, there is a risk of tilting too far back the other way in 2025. The best risk management advice for most corporate executives is to not shift with the political winds or expect to be burned eventually. Or, as two University of Chicago professors bluntly put it in a recent Op-ed: Top executives might fare best if they would “keep their mouths shut” — they also employed a politer term, institutional neutrality.

Martin Whittaker, founding CEO of Just Capital, says the research firm could see this shift in the way Americans talked about DEI less during recent polling. “We want a workplace where everyone feels welcome and engaged and trusts employers to do the right thing, and invest in them, and on equal basis, and so it’s plainspoken framing,” Whittaker said. “I think companies over-indexed on DEI. … that’s where we are now, and the ESG/DEI shakeout is probably going to require companies who really believe in being inclusive to do the hard work.” 

“Most people in the middle agree on fair pay, on investing in human capital, and protecting customer safety and privacy,” Whittaker said. “Maybe in this crazy time now, that message is reassuring. Maybe it doesn’t suit political purposes, but we don’t do this for political purposes anyway.”

—CNBC’s Brandon Gomez contributed reporting.

The full list and details on how the companies are ranked are available from Just Capital.