Walmart Workers Are Pressuring CEO Doug McMillon to Stand Up to Trump’s DEI Rollback

Worker advocates on calling on Walmart shareholders to push for a racial equity audit.

By Joe Maniscalco

Walmart, the largest employer of women and people of color in the nation didn’t exactly have a stellar track record on racial equity before the family-controlled operation decided to roll back its Diversity, Equity, Inclusion programs in the wake of the Trump administration’s DEI vendetta.

So, if there ever was a time for an independent third party audit to accurately gauge the impact Walmart’s workplace policies and practices are having on those who do the bulk of the work at the retail giant—it’s now.

“I have been in a managerial role for 15 years of my life, and I can't get promoted at Walmart even though I'm college educated and have the experience and expertise,” outspoken Memphis, Tennessee Walmart optician TaNeka Hightower recently told Work-Bites.

Hightower is a member of United for Respect—a worker advocacy group that has twice before called on Walmart shareholders directly to push for a racial equity audit, but to no avail. United for Respect renewed its call once again earlier this month at Walmart’s 2025 General Meeting.

In 2022, a Walmart worker in Arkansas named Janikka Perry was found dead on the bathroom floor while working the late shift. According to Perry’s sister Nicoshe James, her sister “suffered for almost two hours on that bathroom floor, coughing up blood and trying to call 911 multiple times before anyone tried to help her.”

That experienced had a profound impact on Hightower.

“It really triggered me because she was a Black woman—like so many of us—afraid to face any kind of disciplinary action, like getting points for not coming to work or leaving early.”

Walmart had invested hundreds of millions of dollars into racial equity programs prior to Trump’s return to the White House this year. That earlier effort was sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota five years ago.

According to United for Respect, Walmart failed to share any information about the DEI rollback, the sort of the programs that were actually being cut, or what might replace them.

“As the largest employer in our country [Walmart] can really lead and they can push back,” United for Respect Education Fund Co-Director Bianca Agustin Bianca Agustin told Work-Bites recently. “I think that right now, they're just operating on fear.”

According to Agustin, however, that fear is totally unfounded.

"If Walmart [CEO] Doug McMillon can go to the White House and try to negotiate the tariffs, they have some leverage economically and politically in which they could help push this back. If you look at companies like Apple or Costco, who have just refused to acquiesce on this issue, you're not seeing them getting taken to court or getting hauled into Congress for hearings.”

Walmart employs some 1.6 million people across the United States, and according to Agustin, it’s predominantly female—even more so at the cashier level where women are the lowest-paid people at Walmart.

Warehouse workers at Walmart skew more male and may fare a little better with their paychecks, but like warehouse workers at Amazon, they are subjected to harsh productivity quotas and constant surveillance.

“There's a sort of a long-standing practice in the shareholder space that if your proposal gets 20-percent the company is encouraged to dialog with you,” Agustin adds. “Walmart has never done that with us, even when our proposal has gotten 20 percent. We think we need to push the company here. We think they overreacted [rolling back DEI programs] and really just acted out of fear.”

A large part of the problem, remains the iron-fisted control the Walmart family exerts over the corporation through its own shareholdings.

“I come out of the labor movement and we know you’re not going to win the kind of structural change or corporate policy change we need to see at a company like Walmart just by filing shareholder resolutions. That is insufficient,” Agustin said. “You could get 50 percent [of shareholder support] and the board of directors could still take absolutely no action on your proposal—and there's no legal recourse. And so, what you need is a group of stakeholders, workers, elected officials, religious leaders, really pressuring the company and shaming them for not taking action on an issue that is critical.”

Hightower describes herself as a “whistleblower” who was forced into a cashier’s role after speaking out about some of the racial inequities she was experiencing in her department. She ultimately transferred out of the state, and is currently on a leave of absence from Walmart.

“Walmart pulling back just made it okay for them to be bigots without any penalty,” Hightower said. “What I've seen [since the DEI rollback] is pretty much more of the same—less and less people of color in positions of power or real change.”

Despite the stressful environment, Hightower says she still loves being a Walmart associate and is committed to achieving real changes for the better. 

“I just don't love the treatment of being a Walmart associate,” she said. “I feel like we could get great strides this year. We have more people opening their eyes to things that maybe they took a blind eye to before. So, I'm very hopeful that shareholders will be invested in making sure that we are being treated fairly—and give us a fair shot.”