Johny C. Taylor Jr, President of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), has been short-listed for the position of US Secretary of Labor.
HEI is covering this story because Mr.
Taylor is also a board member of Guild, an edtech company we have been covering since 2021. Moving forward, we are also interested in following any decisions he could make affecting labor in higher education. American labor itself is under attack as Amazon and SpaceX are challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.
According to his bio at SHRM, Johny C. Taylor Jr. has held senior and chief executive roles at IAC/InteractiveCorp,
Viacom's Paramount Pictures, Blockbuster Entertainment Group, the McGuireWoods law firm, and Compass Group USA. Most recently,
Mr. Taylor was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. He previously served on the White House American Workforce Policy
Advisory Board and as chairman of the President's Advisory Board on
Historically Black Colleges and Universities during the Trump
Administration.
An African American man whose salary at SHRM is greater than $1.3 million a year, Taylor has been a proponent of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the workplace. But as the chief executive of SHRM, he would be an opponent of unions.
Guild, formerly known as Guild Education, works for Fortune 500 companies like Walmart, Disney, JP Morgan Chase, and Chipotle to train and retrain workers as the workforce is systematically reduced through technology. Guild has been in financial decline after being lauded by Forbes and other business media.
If he is selected for the Department of Labor or any other government post, we'll have to see if Mr. Taylor's work at SHRM, Guild, or his other board seats affects management decisions, especially if the organization he manages is forced to downsize.
