White people were seemingly passed over for jobs following the civil unrest of 2020 as major corporations gave more than nine out of 10 available positions to non-white applicants, according to a new report.
After the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day 2020, many of the nation’s cities were consumed by rioting and protests. Soon, major corporations and sports leagues got behind the Black Lives Matter movement.
But according to Bloomberg, corporate America responded to the unrest with more than donations and statements in support of the neo-Marxist group.
Major companies hired hundreds of thousands of new employees, and the lion’s share of them were minorities.
In a story headlined “Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color. It Actually Did,” Bloomberg reported that S&P 100 companies hired minorities almost to the exclusion of white people.
According to the report, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stipulates that companies that employ more than 100 people must report their hiring demographics.
The results from 2021 showed that 88 S&P 100 companies hired 323,094 new employees.
Only 20,524 of those jobs went to white workers. “People of color” received the other 302,570 jobs — or 94 percent of them.
The new hires were 40 percent Hispanic, 23 percent black and 22 percent Asian. Eight percent were of “other races,” and 6 percent were white.
Most of the jobs were low-level, Bloomberg found. The share of “executive, managerial and professional roles” held by minorities increased by about 2 percent in 2021 compared to the year before.
The companies evaluated by Bloomberg included Amazon, Apple, CVS, Nike, Walmart and Wells Fargo.
So what caused the incredible disparity between the share of jobs received by white people and their overall share of the population?
While Bloomberg noted that many low-level minority workers were rehired in 2021 after being laid off in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also pointed to what it called the “corporate reckoning on institutionalized racism.”
Many companies vowed to hire fewer white people despite U.S. law banning discrimination in hiring based on race.
However, since 2021, many companies have resorted to layoffs and have placed less emphasis on “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives following criticism of identity politics being injected into hiring practices.
Stephanie LaJoie-Lubin, who previously worked in the DEI department at the online vehicle dealer CarGurus, told Bloomberg that over the last two years, the DEI push in corporate America has been on the decline.
“We’ve seen three years later how quickly DEI is becoming deprioritized,” LaJoie-Lubin said.
