Corporations Now Love 'Black Lives'--But What About Their Own Black Workers?

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LABORNOTES June 12, 2020 / Toni Gilpin

Never underestimate the American business community's capacity for hypocrisy.

That’s one of the lessons to be drawn from the explosive reaction to George Floyd’s murder. As demonstrators began flooding streets, corporate PR departments flew into rapid response mode, issuing a flurry of agonized, apologetic pledges to do more to combat racism and inequality.

But such contributions, publicized with much fanfare, in fact are chump change to these immensely powerful corporations. For Walmart, $100 million over the next five years represents less than 1/250 of one percent of the nearly $3 trillion in income it expects to rake in during that period. Put another way, its gift would translate to a mere $13 extra a year, for the next five years, to each Walmart employee in the United States.

If these companies really want to address inequality and improve opportunities for African Americans, there’s a fix readily at hand: they could simply give more money to their own employees, a substantial percentage of whom are Black and largely concentrated in low-wage occupations. African Americans, in general, earn less than white workers in this country do, and the jobs they hold are more unstable and less likely to offer benefits, all crucial factors that contribute to our persistent racial wealth gap.

Walmart, with a U.S. workforce of one and a half million, is both the nation’s largest employer overall and the largest employer of African Americans; nearly half of Walmart workers are people of color. Yet Walmart, Amazon, and McDonald’s don’t pay livable wages. Benefits, when offered at all, are paltry (the lack of paid sick leave has become especially visible in COVID times). Schedules are unpredictable and job security tenuous. Working conditions are onerous.

For people of color, unions are especially valuable, literally. While unions are financially advantageous for all workers, “the gains from union membership in terms of pay, benefits, and stability are more pronounced among nonwhite families than among white families,” one recent study notes. African Americans who are unionized make more money and are more likely to have benefits like health care and employer-supported retirement plans, translating to greater savings and home ownership levels. Union membership, in other words, is critical to narrowing the racial wealth gap.

So unions clearly empower African Americans—yet Walmart, Amazon, and McDonald’s are unabashed union-busters. In order to crush organizing efforts (very often led by people of color), these companies invest far more in lawyers, consulting firms, and employee surveillance than they'll ever dish out to promote "diversity."

For Bezos, Erlinger, and McMillon, and the other CEOs who follow their lead, genuine “justice and equity” for their workers would come at too high a cost: allowing unions in would require them to relinquish the total control that they now exert over their enterprises.