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Apple investors call for civil-rights audit

Wednesday December 22, 2021. 05:24 AM , from Mac Daily News
Apple has declared its commitment to racial and gender equity, seemingly ad infinitum in the Tim Cook era of empty sanctimony, but it is now facing a shareholder call for a civil-rights audit amid employee controversies and slow progress in diversifying its workforce.

Levi Sumagaysay for MarketWatch:

The shareholder groups that filed the proposal say the company reportedly shut down employee-run surveys on pay equity, and also mentioned the hiring (and subsequent firing after employee protests) of a manager who had “a history of misogynistic and racist commentary.” In addition, the alliance of three shareholders says that for all of Apple’s publicly stated commitments to racial justice and equity — including $100 million for a racial justice initiative after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 — the company’s progress in diversifying its own ranks has been negligible.
“It is unclear how Apple plans to address racial inequality in its workforce,” the proposal, shared exclusively with MarketWatch, says. “Apple currently has no Hispanics and only one Black member on its executive team.”
SOC Investment Group teamed up with the Service Employees International Union and Trillium Asset Management on the proposal; the group filed their proposal in the fall but only recently found out it will actually be on the proxy. The SEIU’s pension fund’s holdings include Apple, while SOC owns 21.9 million shares of the company and Trillium said it owned more than 1 million shares of Apple as of the end of the third quarter.
Trillium’s chief advocacy officer, Jonas Kron, said Apple and other companies generally emphasize their diversity initiatives, employee resource groups and financial commitments.
“That’s all great and commendable,” Kron said. “But it doesn’t mean they don’t have blind spots, or that they have some sort of process for ensuring accountability.”
He likens a civil-rights audit to the financial audits that are required of all companies. “Given the importance of gender and racial equality, having this level of review is not only appropriate but highly beneficial,” Kron said.

MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote on December 31, 2015:
Getting the absolute best people should remain Apple’s ultimate goal. Forced diversity carries its own set of problems. Would the group be comprised of the best-qualifed people possible or would it be designed to hit pre-defined quotas? Would some employees, consciously or unconsciously, consider certain employees, or even themselves, to be tokens meant to fill a quota? That would be a suboptimal result for Apple and everyone involved.
The best and desired outcome is for the quest for diversity to work in Apple’s favor. Truly looking at qualified people from a larger pool would likely result in delivering different viewpoints and new ways of looking at things and tackling problems than a more homogenized workforce would likely be capable of delivering.
Regardless and of course, someday it sure would be nice for everyone to just be able to evaluate a person’s potential, not measuring and tabulating superficial, meaningless things like skin color and gender.
How do we ever get to the point where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” when we insist on judging people by the color of their skin?
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The post Apple investors call for civil-rights audit appeared first on MacDailyNews.
https://macdailynews.com/2021/12/21/apple-investors-call-for-civil-rights-audit/
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