Most Americans want the company they work for to support efforts to eradicate racism, a new study by the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual trust and credibility survey says.

Six in 10 employees say they won't work for organizations that fail to speak out against racial injustice, the researchers found, according to Axios. About 62 percent of them said the company they work for is, at best, doing a mediocre job of following through on their commitment to address racism internally and in their communities.

"I think the takeaway for business is, if you thought you were doing well, you're not," Lisa Osborne Ross, Edelman's U.S. CEO and senior sponsor of the study, told Axios.

Ross warns companies that ignoring demands for diversity will ultimately make them “extinct and irrelevant,” adding, "Companies should respond by realizing that when you do not have a representative workforce, your work suffers."

A failure to fund diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives topped the list of reasons employees said their companies aren’t doing enough to address racism.

But when it comes to support for DEI in the workplace, Americans are largely divided along political lines, according to a Pew Research Center survey released on Wednesday (May 17). Most Democratic and Democratic-leaning workers (78 percent) approve of focusing on DEI at work, compared to just 30 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning employees.

“Democrats are also far more likely than Republicans to value different aspects of diversity. And by wide margins, higher shares of Democrats than Republicans say the policies and resources related to DEI available at their workplace have had a positive impact,” the Pew researchers said.

Meanwhile, state institutions of higher learning have emerged as the battleground over diversity hiring decisions, training and student admissions, the Associated Press reported. Republican lawmakers in at least a dozen states have proposed more than 30 bills this year targeting DEI at colleges and universities.

On Monday (May 15), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in his so-called war on the “woke” (a term he uses in opposition to socially progressive ideas), signed into law a bill banning colleges and universities in Florida from funding DEI programs. He’s also spearheading a national conservative movement to wipe out diversity training programs in corporate America.