Loretta Lynch will lead an Amazon audit following pressure by shareholders. The audit will be conducted to “evaluate any disparate racial impacts” of its policies on its US hourly employees.”
“The focus of the audit will be to evaluate any disparate racial impacts on our nearly one million US hourly employees resulting from our policies, programs, and practices,” Amazon’s board said in the filing last week.
Amazon’s announcement that it will conduct a racial equity audit comes just weeks after workers at a Staten Island, New York, warehouse voted to form the e-commerce giant’s first-ever US labor union. Amazon has since filed an appeal, calling for a do-over of the entire vote. A separate Amazon union election in Bessemer, Alabama, also concluded recently with the results too close to call.
Molly Kinder, a fellow at Brookings Institution notes that, “almost a third of their more entry-level warehouse workers are Black, and that’s almost triple the representation of Black workers in the overall labor force.”
Amazon will release the results of the audit publicly.
