The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

B4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES BUSINESSTHURSDAY, JUNE 25, 2020

WORKPLACE | MEDIA

condition that is poverty,” she
said.
Ms. Williams and more employ-
ees and contractors are arguing
that Amazon, one of the nation’s
largest employers, needs to do
much more to address racial in-
equality within its own walls. The
calls for change — including di-
versifying its top ranks and ad-
dressing racism in its warehouses
— have generated an unusual de-
gree of turmoil inside the tech gi-
ant.
Many other large businesses
also face calls for change from
within. But Amazon stands out be-
cause it has a large percentage of
black employees — more than a
quarter of its 500,000-person do-
mestic work force, most of them in
hourly jobs at its sprawling logis-
tics operations, where they earn
far less than their corporate coun-
terparts. That percentage is
slightly higher than among Wal-
mart’s employees in the United
States, and far higher than at
other big tech companies. At
Facebook, for example, less than 4
percent of its work force is black.
And few executives have been
as blunt in their public support of
the Black Lives Matter movement
as Mr. Bezos, the world’s richest
person. On Instagram, Mr. Bezos
posted disturbing messages he
had received in response to his
support of racial equality, includ-
ing an email from a person named
Dave, who used racist slurs and
said that he would no longer do

business with Amazon. “Dave,” Mr. Bezos wrote, “you’re the kind of customer I’m happy to lose.” Johnnie Corina III, who last week filed a discrimination complaint accusing Amazon of foster- ing a hostile work environment for black warehouse employees, said it was hard to consider those statements as more than lip serv- ice. “The ‘in’ thing right now is Black Lives Matter and equal justice,” Mr. Corina said. “You can tell when something is genuine and something is not.” An Amazon spokeswoman, Jaci Anderson, said that the company stood in solidarity with the black community, and that it was “com- mitted to helping build a country and a world where everyone can live with dignity and free from fear.” She said employees had been free to take vacation or ac- crued unpaid time off to attend Juneteenth events. “We respect and encourage their choice to do so,” she said. This month, the company said it would temporarily stop selling its facial recognition software, which researchers have found to misidentify people of color, to police departments. The one-year moratorium was striking because Amazon had long denied prob- lems and resisted calls to slow its deployment. But Amazon’s critics, including some employees, say even that

was a half-step — pointing out that the company did not directly acknowledge concerns about the technology nor did it stop selling the tools to federal law enforce- ment offices. The pause is a “great start,” one employee wrote on an internal website. But the goal, the person wrote, should be broader, to en- sure the products Amazon builds “are not directly at odds with pro- moting inclusion and diversity and perpetuating biases and in- justices to black and brown com- munities.” Employees and some share- holders have long groused about the lack of diversity on Mr. Bezos’s senior leadership team, a group known as the “S-Team” that has 22 executives, none of whom are black. At a town hall in 2017, after Mi- chael Brown, Philando Castile and Sandra Bland had already become household names, an employee asked Mr. Bezos about the lack of diversity on his team. Mr. Bezos said his top deputies had been by his side for years, and he saw the low turnover as an asset. Any transition on the team, he said, would “happen very incremen- tally over a long period of time.” In April, before George Floyd was killed in police custody in Minneapolis, a group of midlevel employees wrote to Mr. Bezos and his senior team, saying there was “a systemic pattern of racial bias that permeates Amazon,” according to emails viewed by The New York Times. They said they were prompted to write after a leak of meeting notes showed that David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general coun- sel, had called a black warehouse employee in Staten Island “not smart or articulate.”

Mr. Zapolsky had said his com- ments were “personal and emo- tional” and that he did not know the employee was black. But in their email, the corporate employees said it “was not an isolated in- cident, but rather a symptom of a bigger problem.” They said Amazon adopted the entrenched racism that plagued America, evidenced by the “homogeneity” of the its leadership compared with “the rich racial and ethic diversity amongst our hourly worker population.” The group proposed almost a dozen specific changes, including conducting a third-party audit of bias, releasing detailed figures on

race and promotions, establishing goals for representation in man- agement and leadership roles, and having the head of diversity be a member of Mr. Bezos’s S- Team. Amazon said that senior lead- ers offered resources to help the group develop their suggestions into a formal proposal. On Tuesday, Microsoft, one of Amazon’s top competitors for tech talent, said it would spend $150 million on diversity efforts and planned to double the number of black managers and senior employees by 2025.

Mr. Bezos’ leadership team in recent weeks has been holding “listening circles” with black employees, and many Amazon executives have written personal emails to their departments. Some teams have moved away from biased technical terms, ditching phrases like “black lists” and “white lists” to connote net- work access, according to an email shared among some employees. But many employees want more to be done. They have been collaborating on a document to propose that Amazon make diversity a new “leadership principle,” the guiding list of attributes Ama- zon uses to hire, review and pro- mote workers. In the document, dozens of employees anonymously cited expe- riences of discrimination in daily work interactions. When a black employee “said something hon- est, he was told, ‘You’re not earn- ing trust,’ ” one wrote. “But when a White Stanford M.B.A. said the exact same thing, he got an acco- lade.” Others wrote about being passed over for promotions, or not being mentored. The document was earlier reported by Business Insider. Ms. Anderson said that the an- ecdotes “do not reflect our val- ues.” The company does not toler- ate workplace discrimination, she said, and it investigates all claims reported through official chan- nels. She added that the current leadership principles encouraged diversity because they “remind team members to seek diverse perspectives, learn and be curi- ous, and constantly earn others’ trust.” In the warehouses where Ms. Williams and the bulk of Amazon’s

black employees work, the concerns of some workers can be even more explicit. Mr. Corina, in his discrimination complaint filed in California, said Amazon repeatedly failed to adequately respond to racist graffiti in bathrooms of the warehouse where he works east of Los Angeles. Mr. Corina, who is involved with the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said that since November he had repeatedly reported racist graffiti and that the language worsened after Mr. Floyd’s death. Some used racial epithets to express hatred toward black people and said that they should “go back to Africa.” He said Amazon had not ad- dressed the warehouses’ employees to say such behavior was unacceptable, nor had he seen any evidence that Amazon has investi- gated who wrote the racist graffiti, even though he had asked. The result, he said, left him scared to go to work. “To not do any interventions is really not a safe environment for a black person,” he said. In another complaint filed last week with California’s fair em- ployment agency, a black janitori- al contractor at the same warehouse said he was fired in early June because Amazon thought he had taken a photo of new racist graffiti that a colleague posted on Twitter. The contractor, Donald Archie II, said that Amazon had not tried to uncover who wrote the racist words. “They are firing a black guy because of their perception that he was responsible for calling out racism in their facility,” said Den- nis Moss of Moss Bollinger, the lawyer representing Mr. Corina and Mr. Archie. Amazon said it told warehouse employees about “unacceptable graffiti” in December, and then discussed it again in February. The company said it started to in- vestigate the markings in June. Mr. Archie was removed from Am- azon buildings for not escalating concerns about the graffiti and vi- olating the company’s cellphone use policy, the company said. On June 16, a colleague sent Mr. Archie a photo from the bathroom, with racist phrases once again scrawled on the wall. Below it was an internal newsletter that quoted Amazon’s public statement from May 31, reading, “The inequitable and brutal treatment of Black people in our country must stop.”

More than a quarter of Amazon’s employees in the U.S. are black, most of whom work in its fulfillment centers, like those in Eastvale, Calif., above, and Staten Island.

PHILIP CHEUNG FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Jeff Bezos has been urged to diversify Amazon’s leadership team.

MANDEL NGAN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

HIROKO MASUIKE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Adrienne Williams, a contract driver for Amazon in the Bay Area, is among
those urging the company to do much more to address racial inequality.

JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Amazon Workers Want

Bezos’ Words on Race

Matched With Actions

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

‘What does a black

shirt do for anybody

in terms of social

justice?’ Adrienne Williams, a contract driver, on the sartorial recognition of Juneteenth at Amazon warehouses.

writer of “Shattered Glass,” “Cap- tain Phillips” and “Richard Jew- ell.” It stars Jeff Daniels as Mr. Comey, who served as the F.B.I. di- rector from 2013 until President Trump abruptly fired him in May

Mr. Trump is played by Bren-
dan Gleeson, the actor perhaps
best known for his portrayal of
Alastor (Mad-Eye) Moody in the
Harry Potter movies.
Showtime said in a statement
on Wednesday that the mini-se-
ries would air on Sept. 27 and Sept.

“A Higher Loyalty” was an in-
stant blockbuster when it was
published in April 2018, selling
600,000 copies in all formats its
first week. In its pages Mr. Comey
likens Mr. Trump to a crime boss
and calls him “unethical, and un-
tethered to truth.” Mr. Trump at-

tacked the book and its author, calling him an “untruthful slime ball” in a tweet. At the time of his firing three years ago, Mr. Comey was the top official leading a criminal investi- gation into whether Mr. Trump’s advisers had colluded with the Russian government to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. CBS was among the hundreds of organizations and people that have been the target of attacks by Mr. Trump during his term in of- fice. In a 2018 tweet, the president included CBS reporters among the “fakers” who have “done so much dishonest reporting that they should only be allowed to get awards for fiction!” Previous attempts by Holly- wood to build shows around politi- cal figures have not gone according to plan. In 2013, NBC scrapped

a mini-series that would have starred Diane Lane as Hillary Clinton before it was filmed. More recently, the third season of Ryan Murphy’s FX series “American Crime Story: Im- peachment” — with a focus on for- mer President Bill Clinton, and with Monica Lewinsky as a producer — was scheduled to make its debut on Sept. 27. FX ended up postponing the release until well after the election, citing Mr. Murphy’s busy schedule. Mr. Comey was a critic of Via- comCBS’s now-scrapped plan to show “The Comey Rule” after the election, saying in a statement to The Times on Tuesday, “I don’t un- derstand why CBS would sit on a movie about important current events, and I hope the American people get the chance to see it soon.”

In Reversal, Trump-Comey Mini-Series to Air Before Election Day

Showtime will air an adaptation of James B. Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty.”

DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES)

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

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The New York Times - USA (2020-06-25)

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