The Trump administration warned companies through letters about diversity hiring.
What We Know:
- Companies like Microsoft and Wells Fargo are showing their support for Black Lives Matter by promising to bring more diversity into their companies by hiring more Black employees and educating their workforce about racism. But they’re not just including Blacks, it’s other minorities as well, including women.
- But, Trump’s administration sent letters that warned those companies to be careful if they want to continue business with the government since a lot of the businesses are under contract with the government and Trump’s Labor Department oversees the hiring practices. Trump also created an order last month that called for the department to investigate any complaints on the company holding anti-racism training sessions that would make white workers feel guilty and uncomfortable. This order is the reverse of former president Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 order that touched on the inequalities of hiring based on race.
- “For tech companies that don’t care about these issues, the pronouncements are a dog whistle that they can carry on discriminating the way they already have,” Laszlo Bock, who leads the software startup Humu, said. He also said that companies wanting their businesses to “reflect” the makeup of their nation is not illegal.
“Trump is turning it around into an instrument of white grievances.”
- Not only did Microsoft ignore the warnings and disclosed to the public the government’s investigation, but other trade groups in the tech and pharmaceutical industry are protesting saying Trump’s new order interferes with citizen’s rights to free speech.
- The CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management Johnn Taylor said that companies who use numbers are vulnerable to discrimination complaints because it shows that their application pool is narrowed for a specific type of people and not opened to all. For example, some employers in New York like Amazon and J.P. Morgan announced that by 2030 they will recruit 100,000 people from Black, Hispanic, and Asian Communities.
Last week, the Justice Department sued Yale University after it was found that the school was discriminating against applicants who were Asian Americans and white.
