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Preaching
Diversity, Practicing Discrimination
A
day before jury selection was scheduled to begin in the racial
discrimination suit filed against Sodexho by black employees,
the global food giant agreed to shell out $80 million. The
pay out will go to a dozen lead plaintiffs and thousands of
other black employees. The employees claimed that they were
harassed, stacked into low-end management jobs, and frozen
out of top management spots.
The Sodexho settlement was no surprise. The company did what
a horde of corporations have been forced to do in recent years.
They have settled with black employees that have nailed them
for discrimination. The pattern is always the same. A group
of black, Latino, or women employees blitz top managers and
corporate heads with stacks of grievances and complaints alleging
that they have repeatedly been passed over for promotions,
stuck in dead-end lower-level management positions, often
in mostly minority-filled departments, been the targets of
physical threats and harassment. Corporate officials ignore,
or downplay the complaints or retaliate against the employees
for filing them. The employees sue the company and to avoid
an embarrassing trial, a guilty verdict, the payout of a huge
award, not to mention the black eye it will get from the bad
publicity, the company settles.
Sodexho was the latest to take that way out. But in the past
few years, some of America’s biggest and best-known corporations,
corporations that have been widely praised as having a good
track record on minority hiring and promotions, have also
settled discrimination lawsuits. Texaco, Coca-Cola, Boeing,
Lockheed Martin and Toyota have been dumped on the legal hot
seat and have made costly settlements, or signed consent decrees
with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Forty years
after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that forbade
workplace discrimination and Executive Order 11246, signed
by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that prodded firms to promote management
diversity, many companies still practice their own subtle
brand of workplace apartheid.
Despite the well-publicized shove to the top of black executives
at AOL Time Warner and American Express, black CEOs are still
a rarity at most of the Fortune 1,000 corporations. The overwhelming
majority of senior managers at these companies are white males,
and as evident from the rash of management discrimination
lawsuits, women and minority managers are paid less than their
white counterparts.
For a brief moment, a corporate discrimination case settlement
such as Sodexho puts corporate discrimination on the public
radarscope, but then it’s back to business as usual, and that
business more often than not is discrimination. It takes place
quietly, and far out of public view. Corporations employ a
variety of tactics to mask discrimination. They issue glowing
press releases, brochures, assorted handouts and annual stockholder
reports loaded with pictures of smiling women and minority
employees that tout their commitment to diversity. With much
public fanfare, they establish minority and women hiring and
training programs. They name a few high-profile blacks and
women to their corporate boards.
The refusal of many companies to make diversity the watchword
in middle and upper management is bad enough, but even worse
is the relentless hostile environment that many companies
create and maintain toward minorities. Since 1990, the number
of discrimination complaints has soared, and the number of
complaints of racial harassment toward employees that complain
of discrimination has also climbed. Black employees have been
poked with sticks, taunted with racial slurs, have had pictures
of burning crosses, and white sheets, placed near their lockers,
and have discovered the initials KKK carved on tables and
benches in the workplace.
In an 18-month period in 2001, the EEOC handled 25 hanging
noose cases. Since then other black employees have reported
hanging nooses at other worksites. In the past couple of years,
Toyota and Northwest Airlines settled hanging noose cases,
and black employees at Lockheed Martin in Marietta, Ga. complained
of finding them near their desks. Many CEOs are not hypocrites
when they say that they work hard to hire and promote more
blacks, minorities and women. But the mostly white, male managers
responsible for implementing company policy and directives
aren’t committed to diversity. They write the reports, make
the performance evaluations, organize training, are responsible
for mentoring, and make crucial job assignments. They demand
strict conformity to middle-class norms in the company. This
includes dress, language, mannerisms, style and demeanor.
They feel threatened by and adopt a them-vs.-us bunker mentality
toward anyone who doesn’t share those interests.
This attitude bolsters the belief of many non-whites that
they are held to a different standard of accountability than
whites and must constantly prove they can be team players
too.
The ink was barely dry on the Sodexho settlement when black
employees at BellSouth Corporation announced that they would
push ahead with their discrimination lawsuit. That could dwarf
the Sodexho suit. Until those corporations that discriminate
do more than preach diversity, expect more suits to come.
—Earl
Ofari Hutchinson
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social-issues
commentator, and the author of The Crisis in Black and
Black (Middle Passage Press)
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