Target's Diversity Efforts Are Rankling Conservatives Again
The company has been put on notice by one Republican senator that its efforts to diversify its workforce may violate the law. All retailers and their employees may suffer as a result.
Target is now the target.
Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Just a week after the Supreme Court ruling to ban affirmative action in college admissions, Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas urged Target Corp. to end its efforts to racially diversify its workforce and vendor network. He called the Minneapolis-based company’s programs “discriminatory” and threatened “significant and likely costly litigation” should Target fail to change its ways. The step from college admissions to corporate employment is not a big one. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Feldman wrote, the high court’s conservative justices have made it pretty clear that using race as a factor in hiring decisions isn’t a practice they’ll condone.
Whatever side you fall on with this issue, you can’t dispute that retail relies on workers of color, and attempts by lawmakers such as Cotton to end practices to attract those workers would leave stores even more desperate than they already are to find employees while further limiting one of the few career paths available to people of color. People of color make up a disproportionate number of retail workers compared with their overall size of the US population. Blacks alone accounted for more than 12% of the industry’s workforce in 2018, compared with 11% of the total population, while Latinos are almost 19% of retail workers but some 18% of the population, according to a Census Bureau report using the most recent figures from the American Community Survey.