After Dimon's DEI comments, JP Morgan employees should unionize
“I am a full-throated, red-blooded, patriotic, unwoke, capitalist, CEO,” said Jamie Dimon at the posh Davos conference Equality Lounge. Jamie makes 393 times the median worker at JP Morgan according to the last SEC filing to include the CEO ratio. So his statement on being unwoke and deeply capitalist appears to be 100% true (wink, wink).
Dimon gave a series of anecdotes throughout the conference. One of my personal favorites is when he turned to the Black woman, he picked as head of DEI and moderator of the panel, Thelma Ferguson, and said,
“I plucked her [Thelma] out. I went to Louisville and she was showing me around and I plucked her out and moved this young Louisville woman to run middle market in New York City. Like, and she did a great job.”
Thelma embarrassingly responded, “He did pluck me out.”
After watching Dimon’s strange tokenizing anecdotes and even stranger stories we wondered if Dimon was “…a full-throated, red-blooded, patriotic, unwoke, capitalist, CEO” and acting as an, imperialist, white-supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist (per bell hooks).
JP Morgan’s Approach to DEI is Suspect At Best
Dimon then went onto say that some organizations in the financial industry only pay lip service to DEI but JP Morgan puts colorblind DEI into action. He rambled about how HR used to lump diversity into one big bucket, but HE disaggregated them into social groups (Black, Hispanic, disabled, etc) to better count each group. While this is an important step, it is how you action sensitive data like this that counts most.
Dimon did not use this data to create systemic change at JP Morgan. Instead, through this counting process he found out that one of the Black managing directors (MDs) had been passed over for promotion and was leaving the company. He asked why and his team responded,
“’He didn’t have the platform.’ I said what the hell does that mean? I’ve never heard the word platform used except for when we’re promoting a black person.”
In that moment Dimon defined systemic racism without realizing it. Instead of addressing the issue by building equitable systems (ie asking what the barriers are for Black MDs), Dimon said let’s roll out the platform system as a formal performance measure for all MDs essentially embedding a bias into the JP Morgan MD evaluation.
Dimon then said he recruited at HBCUs Spelman, Howard, and Clark for 35 years before he knew that other HBCUs even existed.
After all the talk about counting different minority groups and plucking human beings out of southern states, Dimon seemingly contradicts his own commitment to data and transparency when discussing the fund established in the wake of the Black Lives Matter Protest in 2020. He  says, “The $30 billion was a five-year effort. We’ve reported. Although these ridiculous DEI ESG groups come at us, they want outside audits, which I think is a complete waste of time and a complete waste of money.”
Continuing on his rant about Detroit, “What did it spawn. Well, you know our call centers in Arizona. You know there is not a lot of Black people in Arizona. We had this idea, lets do a virtual call center in Detroit, and I think we have 100 people now and they are hardworking, they care.” Well call centers are the least upwardly mobile, worse paid parts of most companies. This exacerbates the wealth and wage gap which we talked about in our newsletter last week. Black labor is not charity and views like Dimon’s are dangerous to the earning ability of Black people in the United States.
JP Morgan Doesn’t Have a Community Driven Touch
JP Morgan’s stakeholder engagement outside the company mirrors its practices of tokenization and exploitation inside the company. In 2023, at the same conference, Dimon stated he was essentially uninterested in investments in Detroit before they elected Mayor Mike Duggan who Dimon called a, “White guy in an 85% black town with a write-in vote.” It is well documented that Black leadership is rarely considered competent by majority White institutions and this undermines Black leaders. JP Morgan again shows bias giving the white Detroit mayor the benefit of the doubt they did not give to previous mayors.
Dimon’s insensitive and ahistorical approach overlooks the subprime mortgage scandal that brought about the recession of 2008 – 2009 of which JP Morgan was an active participant in draining the wealth of mostly Black homeowners. This obviously had a disproportionate impact on Detroit seeing as it is in fact and 85% Black city. Now JP Morgan has returned to Detroit and though the verdict is still out, concerns about gentrification, rent hikes, and price gouging are sky rocketing.
Dimon continued, “It’s always done when you can work with local leadership, governors, and mayors. If they’re sticking their fingers in your eye and don’t want you, we just pass it by now. It’s not worth the effort. We’ll go to them when they elect someone rational.”
JP Morgan even takes this tested Detroit model abroad, Dimon again, “At least the president in Paris [France] isn’t afraid to be seen with a bank president.”
JP Morgan Workers Should Unionize
Thelma Furgeson, Host: “Here is my last question, I want to save some time for Q&A. From both of your perspectives, as you think about business leaders and how they support women and gender equity if they should. How can they do it better. What is, what advice would you give to anyone that’s out there listening?
Jamie Dimon: “Yeah, I’m not quite sure what gender equity means as opposed to treating everyone fairly, decently and honestly.”
After a performance like that, does anyone think Jamie Dimon should make 393  times the median worker at JP Morgan? Dimon’s DEI initiatives are naïve at best and exploitative at worse and we won’t find out since he won’t get them audited. He doesn’t know what gender equity means. And he doesn’t know how many HBCUs there are. What does he know?
Workers at JP Morgan should organize a labor union and take ownership stakes in their company and their future. Recent labor wins across the country from Hollywood to Detroit gives me hope that intersectional organizing works at work and a fairer JP Morgan is possible. Clearly the board alone cannot pick a CEO so maybe a union could help them see the way to a different kind of future.
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