Amazon recently said it will participate in an independent racial equity audit to determine whether its policies cause and perpetuate discrimination.
The e-commerce giant said in a recent securities filing that the audit will evaluate “any disparate racial impacts on our nearly one million U.S. hourly employees resulting from our policies, programs and practices.”
The review will be led by former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, a partner at law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. Amazon vowed to publicly release the results of the audit, thought it did not provide an expected completion date for the review.
Amazon, which is the world’s largest online retailer, had initially resisted the audit. The Seattle-based company argued it had given funding to black colleges and universities, run leadership programs for underrepresented minorities and channeled tens of millions of dollars to help close the racial wealth divide.
The New York State Common Retirement Fund filed a shareholder resolution with the company in 2021 requesting an audit, saying such a review was needed because of alleged discrimination of the company’s black and Latino workers, their low wages and exposure to dangerous working conditions, including exposure to Covid-19 and air pollution from distribution facilities in minority neighborhoods, according to Bloomberg.
The racial-audit proposal failed at the time, with 44.2 percent of votes. Amazon’s latest decision to undergo a racial-audit comes as the New York pension plan has filed a similar proposal for Amazon’s May 25 annual meeting.
“Amazon has taken some measures to address racial justice and equity, including committing financial resources and publishing workforce diversity data,” the latest shareholder proposal states. “However, Amazon faces controversies, some significant, that pose various risks and raise questions related to the company’s overall strategy and the company’s alignment with its public statements.”
Amazon has suggested that shareholders should vote against the resolution next month, as the company has already agreed to undergo an audit.
The company follows in the footsteps of several other major companies that have agreed to undergo similar audits, including Citigroup and Tyson Foods. Airbnb became the first company to perform a racial audit in 2016; Starbucks and Facebook soon followed, Bloomberg reported.