In the new company report on diversity, Boeing has mentioned that since June 2020, it has fired 65 employees and disciplined 53 for behaviours termed as discriminatory and hateful.
Following the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis in May 2020, the Company had introduced a ‘Zero Tolerance’ policy.
According to the diversity report, there are just 6.4 per cent of Blacks working in the aerospace firm, as compared to 69 per cent Whites. Apart from that, seven per cent of the workforce comprises Hispanics and 14.2 per cent Asians. Boeing is now working to increase the percentage of Blacks in its workforce to 20 per cent in the next five years.
The data shared by the Company also reveals that 22.9 per cent of the workforce comprises women, out of which 22.4 per cent are managers and 16.6 per cent are engineers.
Boeing has a history of discriminatory cases within the Company and it has, in the past, faced a lot of criticism for not acting against employees indulging in discriminatory or racist behaviour. One case in South Carolina involved an employee alleging that the Company’s managers regularly sent Black employees to unhygienic areas, whereas the White employees got to work on the better and more desirable assignments. The Company of course denied all such allegations.
In the US, several companies, such as McDonald’s are aligning bonuses of their executives with hiring from underrepresented groups. In companies such as Citigroup and Johnson & Johnson, investors have called for independent racial audits of their operations.
