President Donald Trump claimed during his Feb. 24 State of the Union address that “we ended DEI in America,” but research indicates that’s not quite accurate. The majority of leaders and workers in the US still value DEI policies, according to a recent survey by the Conference Board.

Most (77%) US employees said it’s important to work with colleagues with diverse viewpoints and identities in 2025. However, just 50% believe DEI positively impacts their work experience, down 7% YoY.

“That doesn’t mean that they don’t appreciate DEI or value it, but they’re just not seeing it make a difference,” Allan Schweyer, principal researcher, human capital, at the Conference Board, told HR Brew. “What we saw last year was best explained by, ‘We’re still not seeing DEI efforts result in improvements in my personal work experience and benefits to the organization’ because…there are a lot of training that doesn’t translate into the day-to-day work.”

While some conservatives have promoted the false narrative that DEI has been dismantled in the workplace, a closer examination shows that DEI, no matter what it is called, is alive and well, HR Brew found.

For more on how US workers and leaders really feel about DEI, keep reading here.—KP

As enhanced time off protections for New York City workers took effect, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a new enforcement initiative to ensure businesses are granting workers benefits enshrined in the law.

Most employees in the city are already entitled to take up to 40 or 56 hours of paid time off a year for a variety of reasons, including caring for themselves or a family member who is sick, or taking safety measures in the case of incidents such as domestic or workplace violence.

On Feb. 22 amendments took effect expanding the reasons New York City workers can request paid time off under this law, including caring for a family or household member with a disability, as well as staying home when the government declares public emergencies like snowstorms (prescient, given the historic snowfall New York City recently experienced).

The recently enacted amendments also require employers to grant workers 32 additional hours of unpaid protected time off immediately when they’re hired, and then on an annual basis. Employers are required to offer the protected paid leave on an accrual basis, with workers earning one hour of time off for every 30 hours worked.

For more on NYC’s expanded time off law, keep reading here.—CV

Within 36 hours of one another, Anthropic and OpenAI both made major enterprise pushes. Just days before that, a viral memo imagined how those kinds of moves would hollow out white-collar work (and even be the end of enterprise). Now, investors and executives are caught between embracing AI and wondering if they're accelerating their own obsolescence.

Yesterday, OpenAI unveiled partnerships with four major consulting firms, including McKinsey and Accenture, to roll out its nascent Frontier enterprise system. The goal: help large organizations deploy AI agents inside existing operations.

Anthropic made a parallel move. The company announced it’s expanding plugins for Claude Cowork, adding custom skills—for everything from financial analysis to HR onboarding—to tools their employees already use. But perhaps the most telling detail: It revealed that Claude can now modernize COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still handles 95% of US ATM transactions and underpins IBM's consulting empire.

For more on the escalating enterprise race, keep reading on Tech Brew.—WK

More focus, less fluff. CollabWORK filters out the noise and delivers jobs that actually match what HR Brew readers are looking for. Click here to see the full board of curated roles.

• Business Intelligence Analyst, Incentive Planning and Finance Operations at Zillow
• Senior HR Business Partner at Stryker
• Director of Distribution & Operations at Uline, Inc.
• Utilization Review Assistant Director at Nexus
• Regional HR Business Partner - Americas at DHL Express, Inc.