By Joséphine Li
As the Black Lives Matter movement swept across America a few months ago, corporate America promised to help advance racial justice and equality. But many questioned what specific initiatives business leaders would take in order to do so.
On October 15, the Business Roundtable — a top business lobbying group of executives that run the largest corporations in America — released a report recommending specific ways to combat systemic racism in health, finance, education, employment, housing and the justice system.
Doug McMillon, Business Roundtable Chairman, president and CEO of Walmart, believes that these long-standing systemic challenges have too often prevented access to the benefits of economic growth and mobility for too many and it is time to take action.
The commitments and recommendations from the group are far-ranging — in terms of legislative and government efforts, the report calls for an increase in the federal minimum wage, police reforms and better access to affordable education and childcare.
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The Business Roundtable is committing to several initiatives aimed at ensuring greater access to better jobs for African Americans, including support for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), help to alleviate student debt and public disclosure of diversity metrics. These initiatives will be focusing more on skills in hiring rather than college degrees and doing more to establish pay equity in their ranks.
The group also pledged to provide $1 billion to community lending institutions by 2025 to support black-owned small businesses and entrepreneurs and to establish a mentoring system for 50,000 black and Latino small business owners over the next five years.
The Business Roundtable members pledged to help people of color by helping unbanked and underbanked Latinos and Blacks build credit and aiming to invest $30 billion to build 200,000 low-cost rental units by 2025.
The group issued a statement of corporate purpose in 2019, which stressed that public companies are accountable not only to shareholders but to all stakeholders, including employees, customers and the communities. It has been met with skepticism by critics of corporate America, who are tracking the ideals that members of Business Roundtable publicly espouse with their actions.
McMillon seems to acknowledge that the report, released on October 15, might be met with the same skepticism in an opinion piece he wrote for USA Today prior to the release of the report.
McMillon told all critics and skeptics that the members of the Business Roundtable will act, and they will act now. He also mentioned that any power the initiatives have will come from the energy, resources and sustained commitment Business Roundtable put behind them — it will take the full weight of business, in cooperation with other leaders, to drive change.
