Nearly 2,000 Paramount Employees Were Laid Off, Including Some Under CBS, But This Producer Questions If They Were ‘Race-Based Layoffs’ On His Team
Former CBS producer Trey Sherman is accusing his employer of only laying off people of color on his team.
The Wall Street Journal reported that nearly 2,000 Paramount employees were being laid off, including those under CBS. The company’s chief executive, David Ellison, said the layoffs were to address “redundancies that have emerged across the organization,” while also removing roles that don’t align with the company’s “new structure” that will prioritize growth.
Sherman, who is Black and served as an associate producer for canceled “CBS Evening News+”, per New York Post, took to TikTok to reveal that the show had been canceled and every producer on his team who was laid off was a person of color, while those who found new roles within the company were white. He claimed that he had personally asked each white person on his team if they had been laid off, and they each said no.
“Every person who gets to stay and will be relocated within the company is a white person,” Sherman explained in the video. “Now, in my meeting with the executive who told me I was getting laid off, I specifically asked him if it was a consideration for us to be relocated somewhere else within the company. And he said that ‘We advocated to keep the show. We advocated to try to get you relocated somewhere. And we couldn’t.’ Because I asked him, ‘Why are you the person who is making this decision or delivering the news that we’re being laid off?’”
Sherman clarified that the executive did not decide to eliminate the show, but he had the authority over who from the team could stay at the company. The executive allegedly said that the white workers keeping jobs was a coincidence and that he had made the decision based on who he had worked with in the past.
“Mind you, not only is it not based on merit, it is in its result racist,” Sherman said. “I don’t care if you decided to keep people who had purple-colored hair, you deciding to keep people who you had worked with before, which I don’t even know if that’s true, if the outcome of that decision is racist, the action was racist, that sh-t is f-cked. I just got laid off.”
According to The Post, CBS News declined to comment.
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