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The nation’s largest coffee brand joined the ranks of companies pledging to increase diversity in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Starbucks set a goal of 30% people of color at all corporate jobs and 40% in every retail and manufacturing role by 2025.
Two years later, the company’s own workforce demographic reports show there is still much progress to be made: Less than half of all roles reported by the company had reached the goal by 2022.
Black representation was particularly low. From 2020 to 2022, Starbucks’ own numbers show no change among baristas and shift supervisors and less than 1 percentage point improvement among store managers. Starbucks reported only a 1-point gain for regional vice presidents, the top retail position.
Opportunities for Advancement Are Uneven Across Industry
Coffee has been entangled with issues of racism since the 18th century, when colonizers established coffee plantations in the Caribbean and elsewhere that depended on slave labor. And today, a majority of coffee is still grown and harvested internationally by low-income people of color.
The U.S. coffee business is disproportionately White. From the trade business to boardrooms and baristas behind the counter, people of color can be hard to find, said Phyllis Johnson, founder of the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity.
“When you look at a consuming country, oftentimes, what you see is such a small representation of what coffee is,” Johnson said. “A lot of the opportunities are gatekept.”
Customers walk into joint location for Caribou Coffee and Einstein Bros. Bagels in Lakewood, Colo. Credit: RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post via Getty Images
For every one Black Starbucks worker in 2021, there were six White employees, and the Minnesota-based chain Caribou Coffee reported the same 1-to-6 ratio in 2020. Despite being headquartered in the multicultural San Francisco Bay area, Peet’s Coffee was less diverse: employing eight White workers for every one Black employee in 2019, the latest numbers available for that company from the federal data.
About half of Peet’s Coffee’s workers identified as a racial minority as of June, said Mary O’Connell, head of communications at the company, higher than their 36% share among all U.S. jobs but far lower than the 71% non-White population of the East Bay’s Alameda County, where both the original Peet’s and its current corporate offices are located.
Starbucks is on track to reach its goal by 2025 and will continue to publish annual updates, said Danielle Winslow, social impact communications manager for the company. She said that its employees – Starbucks calls them “partners” – are at the center of the company and that it prioritizes creating opportunities for minority partners.
“At Starbucks, our goals around inclusion and diversity are not simply metrics – it’s a mindset,” she said.
Caribou Coffee did not respond to requests for comment.
Keith Hawkins, who is Black, founded the Color of Coffee Collective in 2021 to combat issues of diversity and equity in specialty coffee. Before that, the U.S. Army veteran spent years working at a local coffee shop and later almost two years at Starbucks, where he said he repeatedly watched as White co-workers with less experience were promoted ahead of him.
“Regardless of what I knew, regardless of how much I poured into the industry,” Hawkins said, “I came to the real realization that most of these companies only wanted certain people, specifically blond hair and blue-eyed White men, to represent them when it came to spaces of negotiating deals.”
A current Starbucks employee, who asked to be identified only by her first name, said she has not seen any improvement in recent years. Sunny has been a barista at multiple Starbucks locations in Texas for a decade. In that time, she said she abandoned her ambitions of being promoted to shift supervisor or store manager after repeatedly being passed over.
“At the beginning of me signing on, they told me … that we’re a company that is really big in promoting from within,” she said. “I am living proof that that’s not true.”
Representation in Leadership Tends to Be Low
What diversity exists in the coffee industry tends to congregate in lower-level, lower-wage positions. Typically, the disparities grow wider up the corporate ladder.
“The problem exists in decision-making roles and opportunities,” Johnson said.
The Starbucks C-Suite breaks some from this trend: There were 12 Starbucks executives of color out of 45 in 2021, six of them Black. Although women outnumber men almost 3 to 1 among service workers, like baristas, their representation is half that amid executives, and 21 of the 27 women in the C-Suite are White.
At Peet’s Coffee’s in 2019, 82 executives were White; just 13 were people of color, including three Black executives. Caribou Coffee reported one Black executive in 2020 and no women of color, out of 15 total.
And at Starbucks, a close-up look shows the improvements at corporate offices were mixed for Black employees: More were hired into employee roles and the number of vice presidents almost doubled to match the American workforce, but figures for managers, directors and senior VPs remained virtually unchanged between 2020 and 2022.
A Dig Insights survey of about 300 coffee workers across the country shows the fallout from a lack of promotion opportunities: Less than half of respondents who were Black, Indigenous or people of color said they would recommend working in the industry.
“It’s incredibly hard to make the leap from barista to a salaried position with a livable wage,” said one of the respondents. “These positions are sometimes gatekept by certification and training that is unaffordable by the common barista. I just hope for a better future with more opportunities.”
Smaller coffee shops don’t show up in the statistics, but Porttia Portis, who has worked in coffee for just over a decade in almost exclusively management roles at local cafes, said she has faced discrimination there from not just bosses, but customers.
“More often than not, people did not want to believe that I was the manager,” said Portis, who is Black. “Everyone in the room could tell a customer that I was the most knowledgeable person, that I was the manager, and they would look me dead in my face and be like, ‘I want to talk to someone else,’ ” Portis said.
Equal Employment Opportunity: Who Rises to the Top?
Type a company name, city or state in the search box above. Source: U.S. Department of Labor
Many baristas will migrate from retailers such as Starbucks or Peet’s Coffee to local cafes in hopes of finding a better environment, Portis said. What they often find instead, she said, are small operations whose ambitions to scale up leave them mirroring the mindsets of their larger competitors.
“A lot of the mentality stays the same throughout the industry, regardless of the shop size,” Portis said. “And I think on a smaller level, you find that there’s a lot more disparity because there’s a lot less checks and balances. Whereas on the larger levels, you’re going to have more DEI programs or diversity initiatives. Whether it’s to meet a quota or not, there’s at least something that exists there.”
Charles Umeano said he has even tried changing cities, moving from coffee shops in Atlanta to New York and Boston. Yet he said he kept running into the same issues as Portis and others.
“I’ve watched a lot of very talented baristas of color decide that they don’t want to deal with this anymore,” said Umeano, who is currently looking for a job in coffee outside of retail. “In fact, a lot of them are questioning why I’m still here.”
Promises for Change So Far Unfulfilled
Amid the unrest three years ago, many companies made similar promises in 2020 to increase diversity. But Hawkins said many of those vows to change proved to be more performative than productive.
When a shop near him posted an advertisement on social media calling for volunteers for an online conversation about minority representation in coffee, Hawkins, who has extensive industry experience, responded.
“And then they sent me a message back saying, ‘We’ll let you know,’ ” he said. “I waited for about six months. … I DM’d and said, ‘Hey, are you still having this conversation?’ And it was crickets.”
After calls for change peaked in 2020, Portis said she believed minorities working in coffee were left worse off.
“ ‘Performative’ isn’t even a strong enough word to some degree,” she said.
“As soon as the hype died down, then (there) was a lot of resistance,” Portis added. “Once people started getting hired again, it was just a lot of resentment of, ‘You got hired because you’re the diversity hire, and I really don’t believe that you’re qualified for this job.’
“Whereas before, you could at least expect if you did get hired, you knew you were getting hired because you were qualified.”
Johnson is more optimistic about the industry’s potential for improvement.
“I think the thing that will ensure that it continues and gets better is that their customers must demand it; their customers must hold them accountable,” Johnson said. “And sometimes, better can mean becoming more aware.”
Because the coffee industry is an intimate and relationship-driven space, Umeano said hiring tends to be based on who you know or other areas rife with implicit biases. But for their own success, he said, coffee shops stand to benefit from more diverse hiring practices.
“I think a lot of times, people look at diversity as you’re doing a solid to people of color, and I don’t really think that’s the mentality,” Umeano said. “In any situation, you want different heads in the room for creative solutions.”
This article was published in collaboration with USA TODAY.
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For four decades, Alaskans have opened their mailboxes to find checks waiting for them, their cut of the black gold beneath their feet. This is Alaska’s Permanent Fund, funded by the state’s oil revenues and paid to every Alaskan each year. We’re now in a different sort of resource rush, with companies peddling bits instead of oil: generative AI.
Everyone is talking about these new AI technologies — like ChatGPT — and AI companies are touting their awesome power. But they aren’t talking about how that power comes from all of us. Without all of our writings and photos that AI companies are using to train their models, they would have nothing to sell. Big Tech companies are currently taking the work of the American people, without our knowledge and consent, without licensing it, and are pocketing the proceeds.
You are owed profits for your data that powers today’s AI, and we have a way to make that happen. We call it the AI Dividend.
Our proposal is simple, and harkens back to the Alaskan plan. When Big Tech companies produce output from generative AI that was trained on public data, they would pay a tiny licensing fee, by the word or pixel or relevant unit of data. Those fees would go into the AI Dividend fund. Every few months, the Commerce Department would send out the entirety of the fund, split equally, to every resident nationwide. That’s it.
There’s no reason to complicate it further. Generative AI needs a wide variety of data, which means all of us are valuable — not just those of us who write professionally, or prolifically, or well. Figuring out who contributed to which words the AIs output would be both challenging and invasive, given that even the companies themselves don’t quite know how their models work. Paying the dividend to people in proportion to the words or images they create would just incentivize them to create endless drivel, or worse, use AI to create that drivel. The bottom line for Big Tech is that if their AI model was created using public data, they have to pay into the fund. If you’re an American, you get paid from the fund.
Under this plan, hobbyists and American small businesses would be exempt from fees. Only Big Tech companies — those with substantial revenue — would be required to pay into the fund. And they would pay at the point of generative AI output, such as from ChatGPT, Bing, Bard, or their embedded use in third-party services via Application Programming Interfaces.
Our proposal also includes a compulsory licensing plan. By agreeing to pay into this fund, AI companies will receive a license that allows them to use public data when training their AI. This won’t supersede normal copyright law, of course. If a model starts producing copyright material beyond fair use, that’s a separate issue.
Using today’s numbers, here’s what it would look like. The licensing fee could be small, starting at $0.001 per word generated by AI. A similar type of fee would be applied to other categories of generative AI outputs, such as images. That’s not a lot, but it adds up. Since most of Big Tech has started integrating generative AI into products, these fees would mean an annual dividend payment of a couple hundred dollars per person.
The idea of paying you for your data isn’t new, and some companies have tried to do it themselves for users who opted in. And the idea of the public being repaid for use of their resources goes back to well before Alaska’s oil fund. But generative AI is different: It uses data from all of us whether we like it or not, it’s ubiquitous, and it’s potentially immensely valuable. It would cost Big Tech companies a fortune to create a synthetic equivalent to our data from scratch, and synthetic data would almost certainly result in worse output. They can’t create good AI without us.
Our plan would apply to generative AI used in the U.S. It also only issues a dividend to Americans. Other countries can create their own versions, applying a similar fee to AI used within their borders. Just like an American company collects VAT for services sold in Europe, but not here, each country can independently manage their AI policy.
Don’t get us wrong; this isn’t an attempt to strangle this nascent technology. Generative AI has interesting, valuable and possibly transformative uses, and this policy is aligned with that future. Even with the fees of the AI Dividend, generative AI will be cheap and will only get cheaper as technology improves. There are also risks — both every day and esoteric — posed by AI, and the government may need to develop policies to remedy any harms that arise.
Our plan can’t make sure there are no downsides to the development of AI, but it would ensure that all Americans will share in the upsides — particularly since this new technology isn’t possible without our contribution.
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For a full year, Singkarn Ruenhom is working with 14 others to document the potential destruction that a huge dam could wreak on the residents and rural farmland along the Yuam River.
They are conducting a “people’s environmental impact assessment” to counter the findings of a 2021 study by Thailand’s Royal Irrigation Department and Naresuan University that reported only four houses in the river village of Mae Ngao, where 170 people live, will be affected by new infrastructure alone..
Local residents say the destruction from the dam – officially called the Yuam River Diversion Project – will be far greater, clearing a minimum of 600 hectares of land and affecting the livelihoods of an estimated 40,000 people in 46 villages.
“I think about life in the water, the plants and the animals. They will go extinct.” If the project goes through, Singkarn said after hooking a fish in the river, taking a photo and documenting his catch in Thai and Karen. “That’s something we can’t bring back.”
In the past, such grassroots research efforts have warranted some big wins for communities in both Thailand and Myanmar over major construction projects that were scratched. In those cases, too, environmental impact assessments were either bypassed altogether or not made public.
In 2019, villagers in northeast Thailand staged forums and protests alongside their environmental study, which successfully blocked the company from moving mining equipment to a new potash drilling site despite obstruction lawsuits hedged from the company.
A man stands at the confluence of the Yuam and Ngao rivers, March 13, 2023. Credit: RFA
The Hatgyi Dam, a project which was slated for construction in a conflict zone in Karen State, was delayed due to both ongoing conflict and grassroots impact reporting. After the coup in 2021, it also faced attempted revival under military administration.
Saw Tha Poe, who works at Karen Rivers Watch, says the cross-border community has needed to join forces to demonstrate the impact to areas downstream and track fish species.
“Many Karen people along the river in both the Thai and Burma side have a good relationship and collaborate together, doing the research, doing the surveys, for example, about the fish species,” he said, adding that the community has found some to be endangered.
Grassroots research
With a group of volunteers, Thai professors Malee Sitthikriengkrai and Chayan Vaddhanaphuti teach research methods they can use alongside their daily routines to document how the soon-to-be dammed river would affect not only livelihoods but the local environment overall.
Chayan has been fine-tuning this research since the 1990s, and it’s since become popular around Southeast Asia. For the Karen, Chayan says, this research is particularly useful in giving indigenous people a voice.
Roughly 80 percent of Mae Ngao residents are Karen, many of whose families have resided in Thailand for over 60 years. A few have more recently come across the border from Myanmar, where their ethnic group has been engaged in a war with the military for decades.
Despite residing in Thailand for decades, Singkarn says as many as half of the Karen residents in the village are still applying for Thai identification card – a process that can take as much as 20 years.
And non-Thai citizens are not legally entitled to full compensation for their land or livelihood. Additionally, any land designated part of the newly finished Mae Ngao National Park under the National Park Act could mean a long legal battle, or no compensation at all.
“People who have the color card, they can’t travel out of the district. If their houses have been flooded, where are they going to live?” Singkarn asked. Color cards referr to pink or white cards that allow migrants to work in Thailand or show they’re in the process of proving their citizenship.
Villagers march from Mae Ngao Bridge to a point where the Yuam and Ngao rivers converge for the International Day of Action Against Dams and for Rivers, Water and Life, March 13, 2023. Credit: RFA
“Where are they going to work to make money, because they have been locked in this district? They [will] have no other place to go because of the water.”
But when inspectors came to measure the impact of the dam on the surrounding area, they minimized the damage, said Jor Da, one of Mae Ngao’s Thai-Karen residents.
“If it happens, it will be challenging for the families here,” he said. “During the meeting (with residents) they only showed as little damage as possible. We live here inter-depending with trees and forests.”
Villagers present findings from their preliminary research on the Yuam River, March 13, 2023. Credit: RFA
Upon the publication of the 2021 environmental impact study, Malee said the original report’s thousands of pages about impacted areas were almost entirely inaccessible to villagers.
After being charged over 20,500 Thai baht (US$600) for printing the report, they received a copy that was heavily redacted and grossly underestimated the harmful effects of the project.
Neither Naresuan University nor the Royal Irrigation Department responded to RFA’s request for comment.
“It’s very difficult for the community to raise their voice,” said Sor Rattanamanee, whose Community Resource Centre Foundation is providing legal counsel to Mae Ngao and helped them obtain the original impact assessment.
“Some of them may not have the identity card, that’s why it’s very difficult for them to complain because the officers will use this opportunity to put pressure on them and [put] them at risk.”
Layers of impact
While Mae Ngao’s full report won’t be published until later this year, graduate student Manapee Khongrakchang says findings already point to major disruptions for the border community.
The fishermen found that nearly all 53 species of fish documented in the river so far would be impacted by the project by changes in food chain and typology of the river. The village is also documenting their relationship to the river and history through art and storytelling, calculating total revenue from cash crops year-round, and documenting unique species found in the area.
Children in the area present stories about their communities and the wildlife there with the help of graduate student Manapee Khongrakchang, March 13, 2023. Credit: RFA
“We have one species that’s going to be extinct for the Yuam and the Ngao River that’s called pla sa nge [short-finned eel],” Manapee said. Villagers also raise concerns about a species of clam, which lives in the rocky bottom of the river and would be impacted when other types of sediment flood the region. Both are sources of food for the community.
“It’s questionable to me – is that fair for one species, that they can’t get back to the river that they live?” she said.
On a nearby hill, Daw Po lives in one of the only houses in Mae Ngao documented in the original environmental impact assessment.
Despite being one of the few certain of compensation and legally living in Thailand, she has little faith in this outcome. Her house sits next to the spot designated to be the site of six water-pumping stations to pump into an eight-meter pipe carrying water 600 meters below ground.
Daw Po sits with a relative in her home. It was one of only four houses counted in Mae Ngao village. “I will not brood over the house if I need to run,” she told RFA. Credit: RFA
“[Here], I will not brood over the house if I need to run. If I own something, I will be sorry to lose it. I am not sure whether I should go or stay,” Daw Po told RFA. While she and her elderly parents cannot attend meetings in the village anymore due to health issues, she’s concerned about maintaining access to natural foods from in and around the river.
Despite past successes, Malee says it will take more than just research to stop the mega-projects from developing remote communities with little chance of fighting back. After the research is finished, they plan to hold meetings to share their findings with the public.
“The government is like a superpower compared with us. We are like ants and they are like elephants,” she said. “The government and the irrigation department thought, ‘Oh, for this village, no one will pay attention,’ or they can build up this project easily. But it won’t be that way.”
Edited by Malcolm Foster
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Special for RFA.
The New York Times‘ Nate Cohn (6/1/23) demonstrates how to select two data points that match your preconceived hypothesis.
New York Times polling analyst Nate Cohn (6/1/23) claimed, “Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right.”
His piece was a rebuttal to an article last December by John Burn-Murdoch (Financial Times, 12/30/22), who argued that “Millennials are Shattering the Oldest Rule in Politics.” How? “Generations of voters…are no longer moving to the right as they age.”
That “oldest rule in politics,” as Burn-Murdoch writes, or what Cohn refers to as “political folklore,” is the notion that as people age, they naturally tend to become more conservative.
There are many ways to frame that notion, which has been attributed to several different leaders over the centuries, such as John Adams, Edmund Burke, Victor Hugo, King Oscar II of Sweden, George Bernard Shaw, Benjamin Disraeli and Winston Churchill. Here is one phrasing: “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at 35, you have no brain.”
‘Not necessarily stunning’
Cohn’s initial piece (6/1/23) left out the strong shift toward the Democrats of voters born before 1960—which would have undermined his claim that “voters become more conservative as they get older.”
Cohn referenced the truism as an explanation for his finding that three groups of millennials (those born in 1980–84, 1985–89 and 1990–94) all voted more Republican in 2020 than they did in 2012. In addition, he wrote, not only those groups, but three older cohorts of voters—those born in 1965–69, 1970–74, and 1975–79—also shifted toward the Republican Party in 2020.
Just after presenting these figures, Cohn wrote: “It’s not necessarily a stunning finding. Political folklore has long held that voters become more conservative as they get older.”
Well, yeah. The folklore has been around a long time. But cherry-picking data to support this preconceived notion does not a persuasive case make.
Cohn’s analysis relied on just two data points: pre-election polls archived at the Roper Center for the 2012 and 2020 presidential elections. Cohn tried to make it seem more elaborate by noting that his analysis relied on “thousands of survey interviews.” That could mean just two polls, or an average of several polls from 2012 and 2020, which would indeed include thousands of respondents. But the limiting factor is that it’s still just two data points. Cohn excluded the 2016 presidential election, and ignored altogether any voting contests other than the two presidential elections. To call it superficial is to be kind.
Had he compared instead, say, the 2016 election with 2020, it’s likely his conclusions would have been reversed. Biden’s popular vote margin was more than twice as large as Clinton’s, which suggests that in the interim, most age groups had either moved toward the Democratic Party or remained static.
Clarifying the analysis
Asked in a follow-up column (6/14/23) if it’s just about Obama being more popular among young people than Biden, Cohn says, “With this data, it’s hard to know.” Yes, that’s the problem of only comparing two points! He does acknowledge that John Kerry in 2004 did slightly worse than Obama and slightly better than Biden with older Millennials.
Two weeks after his millennial article, Cohn (New York Times,6/14/23) implicitly acknowledged that the folklore he cited earlier didn’t apply to older voters. Some of his readers had asked the obvious question: How did Biden do better in 2020 than Obama in 2012 if all those cohorts of voters under 50 shifted toward the Republican Party in 2020? After all, Biden received 51.3% of the vote to Trump’s 46.8%, a 4.5 point margin. Obama won by 51.1% to 47.2%, a difference of 3.9 points.
Lo and behold, it turns out that one factor explaining Biden’s better performance was antithetical to the conventional wisdom. Cohn explained:
Mr. Biden fared much better than Mr. Obama among voters born before 1960—those who were at least 60 years old in 2020 or 52 in 2012. These cohorts lurched to the left between 2012 and 2016, and yet again between 2016 and 2020.
Lurching to the left is not what that “oldest rule in politics,” or “folklore,” predicts older voters would do. Older people aren’t supposed to lose their brains as they age, and revert to having only a heart.
How is it that Cohn did not alert the reader to that inconsistency in his original article? “Because of the scope of the article,” he wrote, “we didn’t show every age cohort.” Essentially, the left-lurching oldsters did not fit the preconceived theme like the right-sliding youngsters. So…leave them out of the analysis.
What Cohn’s findings revealed was not some perennial pattern in American politics, but rather an unusual change over one time period—when younger voters tended to switch toward the Republican presidential candidate, and older voters were more likely to switch to the Democratic candidate. By itself, without any context, this observation hardly provides us any useful information.
A 50-year study
The notion that liberal young people become conservative old people is at best a vague prediction. What, after all, does it mean to be liberal or conservative?
The underlying assumption in Cohn’s (and Burn-Murdoch’s) pieces is that the Democratic and Republican parties provide the liberal-to-conservative spectrum that undergirds the folk saying. But there are many other measures that seem more relevant to what it means to be liberal and conservative than voting choices between two dominant political parties.
In most political issues polled over 50 years, opinion has trended in a progressive direction for all age cohorts (Public Opinion Quarterly, Winter/21).
Two years ago, Michael Hout, a New York University sociologist, published a report in Public Opinion Quarterly (Winter/21) that examined US attitudes and behavior on a wide variety of measures, including questions on race, gender, sexuality and personal liberty. Data came from the General Social Survey (GSS), which has been conducting national surveys of Americans since 1972. As the news release from NYU (12/9/21) noted:
Americans’ attitudes and behaviors have become more liberal overall in the past 50 years, and have taken a decidedly liberal tilt since the 1990s….
Hout considered [283] variables—attitudes, beliefs and behaviors—from 1972 to 2018 and the age of the respondents by dividing them into 32 cohorts, each spaced two to three years apart. The analysis included Americans born as early as 1882 and as late as 2000.
Overall, the data showed that each cohort is more liberal, on balance, than the one that came before it. Specifically, 62% of variables analyzed were more liberal in the more recent birth cohorts than they were in the oldest ones, relative to when a particular attitude or belief was measured by the survey; by contrast, only 5% were more conservative.
Moreover, each cohort itself became more liberal during the studied period. Within cohorts, recent measurements—those within the last decade—were more liberal than in last three decades of the 20th century in 48% of the variables, and more conservative in only 11% (Note: The rest of the variables either had no political lean [e.g., the importance of getting along with co-workers] or did not change [e.g., views on abortion and gun control]).
More liberal with age
Looking at survey results over time debunks the notion that the views of each generation shifts to the right over time. (CC photo: lacitadelle)
Perhaps the most interesting finding relating to the political folklore that people become more conservative as they age is in the observation that within cohorts—each age group of two to three years—people became more liberal over time with 48% of the questions asked, and more conservative with just 11%.
But if Americans are becoming more liberal, why are Republicans continually competitive with Democrats? The short answer is that, as Hout notes, “many of the liberal trends in the GSS are not factors in elections.”
Parties choose the issues they run on, avoiding those where a widespread consensus exists. Republicans no longer run (at least directly) on opposition to gay marriage, for example, given the progressive trend on this issue. Nor are most Republicans explicitly proposing racial segregation in housing or schools, or demanding that women remain in the home—all of which are issues where public opinion has moved sharply to the left.
Along with suggesting a more expansive definition of political labels, the main value of Hout’s study is to debunk the notion that there is some inherent tendency for people to become more conservative as they age. If anything, the data suggest that over the previous half century, most Americans have become more liberal with age—at least as measured by the many attitudes, beliefs and behaviors surveyed by the GSS.
No one knows if that trend might change over the next 50 years. But one thing is for certain: It’s time to put that old folklore to rest.
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On 14 June 2023 FORUM-ASIA announced the upcoming 2023 Human Rights Data Release by affiliate member, the Human Rights Measurement Initiatives (HRMI) based in New Zealand. HRMI will this June unveil the latest findings on civil and political rights, economic and social rights (ESR), and human rights in East Asia. On June 22nd, HRMI will present the civil and political rights data, including the measurement of Freedom of Religion and Belief in nine countries, as well as scores for Bangladesh, Thailand, and the Maldives. On June 29th, they will reveal the economic and social rights data, highlighting the crucial role of ESR data in increasing investment in low-income countries and its correlation with wealth improvement. Furthermore, on June 28th, HRMI will delve into the human rights situation in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, exploring topics such as the evolving freedom of opinion and expression and the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law. Esteemed guest panelists will share their valuable insights and provide context to the scores.
2023 civil and political rights data, including measuring Freedom of Religion and Belief in 9 countries, producing scores for Bangladesh, Thailand, and the Maldives, producing people at risk data about sex workers, and much more.
You can register for the zoom webinar here, it will also be livestreamed on Youtube here.
2023 economic and social rights (ESR) data, including the role of ESR data in increasing investment in low income countries, how improving ESRs increases wealth, and much more.
You can register for our zoom webinar here, it will also be livestreamed on Youtube here.
China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan’s 2023 human rights data, including how freedom of opinion and expression are evolving in these countries, the impact of Hong Kong’s National Security Law on human rights, and much more.
You can join the zoom webinar here (no registration required), it will also be livestreamed on Youtube here.
Russia has resumed supplying oil to North Korea after a 27-month hiatus due to international sanctions, data from the United Nations showed.
Experts told Radio Free Asia that the resumption likely coincided with Pyongyang supplying Moscow with weapons for use in its war against Ukraine.
The UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea on June 9 published data on Russian oil shipments to North Korea, which indicated that in December 2022, Moscow supplied 3,225 barrels of refined oil to Pyongyang.
In January, the total number of barrels sharply increased to 44,655, then sharply decreased over the next few months, with only 3,612 barrels sent in April.
It was the first time that Russia sent oil to North Korea since August 2020, when Pyongyang suspended international trade to counter the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.
Oil tankers are stationed at the Okeanskaya railway station ahead of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s arrival for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the border at Russia’s far East, April 23, 2019. Credit: Alexander Khitrov/AP
In September 2022, Georgiy Zinoviev, head of the Russian foreign ministry’s First Asia Department, said that Russia would be willing to resume trading oil products with North Korea if Pyongyang would lift the ban.
North Korea’s opening gives Russia a much needed market for oil at a time when its main markets in the European Union enacted a partial embargo on Russian oil due to the war in Ukraine.
Through April, Russia has sent nearly 99,473 barrels of oil to North Korea, which is around 19% of the amount permitted by U.N. sanctions meant to deprive Pyongyang of resources that could be funneled into its nuclear and missile programs.
Oil for weapons
Two U.S.-based experts said that it was likely that the refined oil exports to North Korea resumed in return for supplying weapons to Russia, which is at war with Ukraine.
In June, a State Department spokesperson told Reuters news service that the U.S. was able to confirm that North Korea had sent arms, including infantry rockets and missiles to a Russian-backed mercenary group in November 2022, despite denials from Pyongyang.
“I would guess that [the oil shipments] may be Russia fulfilling its end of the deal in exchange for North Korea providing weapons and lethal aid to the Russian troops in the ongoing war with Ukraine,” Soo Kim, policy practice area lead at Virginia-based LMI Consulting and a former CIA analyst, told RFA’s Korean Service.
“At this stage, Russia is in need of military support to offset its deficiencies in its battle against Ukraine,” said Kim. “North Korea is willing to provide lethal aid probably because [North Korean leader] Kim [Jong Un] can receive energy and food assistance in exchange.”
She also said that Pyongyang and Moscow working closely together could undermine U.S. interests.
North Korean soldiers participate in a military parade to mark the 65th anniversary of the country’s founding in Pyongyang, North Korea. Credit: Image grab/KRT via AP
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution also told RFA that refined oil may be a payment for weapons aided by North Korea.
In addition to oil, Russia is exporting more than 1,000 tons of wheat flour to North Korea, according to a recent press release from Moscow’s Federal Veterinary Customs Agency.
North Korea’s state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper reported Monday that Kim Jong Un sent a congratulatory message to Russian President Vladimir Putin, affirming his willingness to increase close strategic cooperation between the two countries.
Translated by Leejin J. Chung. Edited by Eugene Whong.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Cho Jinwoo for RFA Korean.
At a campus on the outskirts of London, about 500 trainee nurses each year are being taught to use the cutting edge technology that industry thinks can put the UK’s public health system on a more sustainable footing. Internet of Things, augmented reality and artificial intelligence are now in the hands of the students, who…
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Meta, to put it rather inelegantly, has a data non-compliance problem. That problem began in the original conception of Facebook, a social network conceived by that most anti-social of types, Mark Zuckerberg. (Who claims that these troubled sorts lack irony?) On May 22, the European Union deemed it appropriate to slap a $1.3 billion fine More
As the only woman on a 10-person sales team at Dell Inc., Marsha Cipollone said she was pushed down and pushed out while less-experienced men were handed the plum accounts.
Cipollone said she was denied the training and support her male colleagues received and was set up to fail. She was fired in 2017 and sued, alleging discrimination, according to court records. She said she settled with the company in 2018.
That same year, the U.S. Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office also documented systemic inequality at the company, finding that women and Black employees earned less than men and White workers in similar positions.
“Dell has very much typically been a White guy company,” Cipollone said.
But exactly how diverse Dell is – how many women and people of color it employs at all levels of the organization and how that stacks up against other companies – remains obscured.
When the federal government released a historic data set last month detailing employee diversity at more than 19,000 of its contractors, Dell was one of more than 4,000 companies missing because they objected to the release. And the Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office – the same one that found inequality at Dell – has so far allowed the objectors to keep their diversity data secret.
USA TODAY and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting compared the new diversity data with federal contractors receiving at least a billion dollars in contracts in 2020, according to federal spending records. A majority of those companies were left out of the data release, indicating they objected, despite accounting for more than $180 billion in federal spending in 2020. That includes at least a dozen companies – collectively reaping more than $100 billion – that paid to settle Labor Department findings of job discrimination over the last decade.
Companies that receive taxpayer-funded contracts are supposed to be held to a higher standard, and they’re subject to audits by the Labor Department office charged with making sure contractors provide equal employment opportunities.
Dell agreed to pay nearly $10 million in back wages after repeated government findings of discrimination. The company called itself a “leader in pay equity and inclusion” and retained its status as a major federal contractor, with at least $2 billion in federal contracts to Dell or its subsidiaries in 2020 alone.
Dell didn’t respond directly to questions about why it objected to releasing its diversity numbers. The company pointed instead to its own curated diversity report, which says its “people leaders” are 72% male and 71% White and doesn’t include the standardized data that would allow it to be compared to similar companies, such as Apple, HP, IBM or Intel, which didn’t object. “We believe in fair treatment in the workplace, regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation or religion,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Secret Reports Stymie Comparison Across Industries
Unlike subjective reports that can be manipulated to present a rosier picture of diversity, the data that federal contractors are required to submit to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows the actual numbers of employees broken down by race and gender, for broad job categories like executives, professionals and service workers. The numbers allow for standardized comparison. They also show, for example, how many women of color are employed at different levels of a company, which many companies leave out of their customized reports.
Until recently, most companies didn’t share standardized numbers with the public. Some companies say the job categories on the reports are too broad or misleading, and their annual diversity reports better reflect their workforce. Others are reluctant to be cast in a negative light or invite litigation.
In 2019, when Reveal sued the government for diversity data submitted by a group of tech companies, some argued they’d be vulnerable to rivals learning sensitive information or luring away their diverse talent. A federal judge disagreed, ruling that the diversity reports known as EEO-1s are not confidential business information. The Labor Department released those tech company records but has chosen not to apply that ruling to requests for more data. Several of those companies, including fitness company Fitbit and software company DocuSign, no longer object to the data’s release. Others, such as PayPal, initially fought the data release but now share the annual reports publicly.
Last month, in response to more requests and a lawsuit from Reveal, the department released five years of diversity data from companies that didn’t object. An analysis of the data by USA TODAY found that federal contractors are failing to live up to the promise of equal opportunity, with White men dominating their executive ranks. Companies that did not fight public disclosure include defense contractors Raytheon and Boeing, which ranked among the highest recipients of federal contract dollars in 2020, as well as familiar names like Moderna, Pfizer, A&E Television Network and Sherwin-Williams.
Equal Employment Opportunity: Who Rises to the Top?
Type a company name, city or state in the search box above. Source: U.S. Department of Labor
Labor Department spokesperson Edwin Nieves said the agency hasn’t allowed any companies to opt out of providing their EEO-1 numbers. Instead, Nieves said the department is required to give all contractors a chance to object and is withholding their data while evaluating those objections. Reveal is still pushing in court for the release of all contractors’ data.
While the government gave contractors repeated opportunities to object over several months, lawyers warned companies to object or face the potentially brand-damaging consequences of transparency.
Lawyers advising contractors on meeting government anti-discrimination requirements are often focused on minimum compliance, not transforming company culture, said Mary-Frances Winters, CEO of The Winters Group, which provides diversity consulting to companies.
And company lawyers often don’t want to reveal anything that could put the company at risk. That can pit the diversity team against the legal team, Winters said.
“We fight with lawyers all the time,” Winters said. “The DEI office is saying, ‘Let’s be transparent,’ because for them, it’s about, where are the opportunities to be better? The legal people, while they’re not necessarily against that, they’re saying, ‘Let’s not share our weaknesses.’ ”
After Discrimination, Promises About Equity and Inclusion, But No Data
As they gobble government money, big federal contractors are at different points on their diversity and transparency journey. Some, such as engineering and construction company Bechtel and health care company McKesson, didn’t respond to any questions. Government services contractor Amentum said it would disclose EEO-1 data at some point: “Target date is unknown,” a spokesperson said. And the pharmaceutical company Merck objected because the company considers those numbers confidential and not representative of the firm’s diversity efforts, said spokesperson Bob Josephson. But when asked about its objection, the company provided Reveal all five years of data anyway.
Lockheed Martin’s data would have shown how many people of color the company employed at different levels back in 2017 and 2018, when the Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office found the defense contractor had discriminated against Asian, Black and Latino or Hispanic job seekers. But Lockheed objected to the Labor Department’s release.
In 2020, Lockheed denied wrongdoing and expressed its commitment to diversity, but agreed to pay $700,000 and hire 34 of the rejected applicants.
In an emailed statement, the company noted that it posted its 2021 EEO-1 report online and that “our commitment to diversity and inclusion is a business imperative, helping to drive our innovation and global leadership.” Lockheed was awarded more than $51 billion in federal contracts in 2020, the biggest dollar figure to any single company.
A Lockheed spokesperson didn’t explain why the company objected.
Washington D.C.- based consulting firm called Chemonics International blocked releasing its own diversity data because it considers that confidential commercial information, said Chemonics spokesperson Martha James.
“Furthermore, we don’t frame our diversity, equity and inclusion strategy or measure our progress through the lens of EEO-1 data, which lacks the additional variables and context that allow us to fully analyze our workforce data,” James said in an email.
The company launched a diversity effort in 2017 after a Labor Department audit flagged a time when the firm rejected every single one of 124 Black applicants for entry-level professional jobs. Chemonics agreed to pay $482,000 to the rejected job seekers and to hire eight of them. James said the company has been in compliance with anti-discrimination regulations ever since.
Chemonics claims some progress: Its first diversity report says its ranks of people of color increased from 36% in 2017 to 40% in 2021, without a detailed breakdown. How many Black people does Chemonics employ and at what level in the company? The proof would be in EEO-1 numbers Chemonics wouldn’t disclose.
Cipollone, the former Dell employee who sued for discrimination, said she didn’t see a lot of diversity there, so she’s not surprised Dell objected to releasing its numbers. But she thinks all companies should come clean and face the consequences.
“It’s not 2000 anymore. It’s 2023,” she said. “You’re just going to have to take the hit for it and you’re going to have to get on board with everybody else.”
This article was produced in collaboration with USA TODAY. Jessica Guynn contributed reporting.
This story was edited by Kate Howard and Doug Caruso and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
This is the third episode in our three-part series taking listeners inside the failed federal response to COVID-19. Series host Jessica Malaty Rivera and reporters Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler bring us the conclusion of The COVID Tracking Project story and an interview with the current CDC director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
We look at the myth that COVID-19 was “the great equalizer,” an idea touted by celebrities and politicians from Madonna to then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Ibram X. Kendi and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research worked with The COVID Tracking Project to compile national numbers on how COVID-19 affected people of color in the U.S. Their effort, The COVID Racial Data Tracker, showed that people of color died from the disease at around twice the rate of White people.
The COVID Tracking Project’s volunteer data collection team waited months for the CDC to release COVID-19 testing data. But when the CDC finally started publishing the data, it was different from what states were publishing – in some instances, it was off by hundreds of thousands of tests. With no clear answers about why, The COVID Tracking Project’s quest to keep national data flowing every day continued until March 2021.
Lastly, Rivera talks with the director of the CDC, Walensky, to try to understand what went wrong in the agency’s response to the pandemic and ask whether it’s prepared for the next one.
This is the second episode in our three-part series taking listeners inside the failed federal response to COVID-19. In episode two, series host Jessica Malaty Rivera, along with reporters Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler, asks a profound question: Why was there no good U.S. data about COVID-19?
In March 2020, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx had a daunting task for healthcare technologist Amy Gleason, a new member of her data team. Her job was to figure out where people were testing positive for COVID-19 across the country, how many were in hospitals and how many had died from the disease. Accounting for national numbers about the disease was extremely difficult, because when COVID-19 hit, the federal government had no system set up to get data from each state.
Gleason was shocked to find that data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wasn’t reflecting the immediate impact of the coronavirus. At the same time, the country was suffering from another huge shortfall: a lack of COVID-19 tests. As a congressional hearing in March 2020 clearly exposed, the CDC had created only 75,000 tests and had no plans to create the millions needed to make testing available nationwide. Dr. Birx and the Task Force also faced national shortages of medical supplies like masks and ventilators and lacked basic information about COVID-19 hospitalizations that would help them know where to send supplies.
Realizing that the federal government was failing to collect national data, reporters at The Atlantic formed The COVID Tracking Project. Across all 50 states, hundreds of volunteers began gathering crucial information on the number of cases, deaths and hospitalizations. Each day, they compiled the state COVID-19 data in a massive spreadsheet, creating the nation’s most reliable picture of the spread of the deadly disease.
The United States has 4% of the world’s population but 16% of COVID-19 deaths. This series investigates the failures by federal agencies that led to over 1 million Americans dying from COVID-19 and what that tells us about the nation’s ability to fight the next pandemic. Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera is the host for this three-part series.
The first episode takes us back to February 2020, when reporters Rob Meyer and Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic were trying to find solid data about the rising pandemic. They published a story that revealed a scary truth: The U.S. didn’t know where COVID-19 was spreading because few tests were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also didn’t have public data to tell citizens or federal agencies how many people were infected or where the outbreaks were happening.
Their reporting led to a massive volunteer effort by hundreds of people across the country who gathered the data themselves. The COVID Tracking Project became a de facto source of data amid the chaos of COVID-19. With case counts rising quickly, volunteers scrambled to document tests, hospitalizations and deaths in an effort to show where the virus was and who was dying.
