For the first time, some Apple shareholders are proposing a call for a civil rights audit on the Cupertino company after controversies with employees over this past year as well as its “slow progress” in diversifying its workforce.
As exclusively reported by MarketWatch, this proposal comes just after Apple is being investigated by the US Labor Department over employee complaints.
The shareholder groups that filed the proposal say the company reportedly shut down employee-run surveys on pay equity, and also mentioned the hiring (and subsequent firing after employee protests) of a manager who had “a history of misogynistic and racist commentary.” In addition, the alliance of three shareholders says that for all of Apple’s publicly stated commitments to racial justice and equity — including $100 million for a racial justice initiative after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 — the company’s progress in diversifying its own ranks has been negligible.
“It is unclear how Apple plans to address racial inequality in its workforce,” the proposal, shared exclusively with MarketWatch, says. “Apple currently has no Hispanics and only one Black member on its executive team.”
According to Apple’s diversity report, little has been done from 2014 to 2020 as the company’s leadership was 3% Black and 6% Hispanic, and now it’s 4% Black and 8% Hispanic.
SOC Investment Group teamed up with the Service Employees International Union and Trillium Asset Management on the proposal; the group filed their proposal in the fall but only recently found out it will actually be on the proxy. The SEIU’s pension fund’s holdings include Apple, while SOC owns 21.9 million shares of the company and Trillium said it owned more than 1 million shares of Apple as of the end of the third quarter.
“They’re spending money on racial and mostly philanthropic initiatives and don’t really address the company’s own policies,” Dieter Waizenegger, executive director of SOC, told MarketWatch. “The chief diversity officer is not in the C-suite, and there’s a really low percentage of Black officers in the company. Whatever the company’s doing, it seems like there’s a gap.”
Although Apple refused to comment on MarketWatch’s story, Reuters reported today that the US Securities and Exchange Commission has denied Apple’s “bid to exclude a shareholder proposal that would require the company to inform investors about its use of non-disclosure agreements and other concealment clauses.” You can learn more about it here.
Background
Although this controversy with Apple’s former employees started a few months ago, things got even more serious when the US Labor Department decided to take action. It started when Ashley Gjøvik, a senior engineering program manager, implied that Apple had responded to her allegations of sexism by placing her on administrative leave.
Gjøvik filed charges on August 26, followed by Apple engineer Cher Scarlett, who carried out an internal survey to determine whether there was a pay equity problem within the company. Then, on September 1 Scarlett also filled a charge saying Apple “engaged in coercive and suppressive activity that has enabled abuse and harassment of organizers of protected concerted activity.”
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