The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received a complaint on Wednesday from America First Legal, which expressed concerns over unlawful hiring and training practices.
https://aflegal.org/america-first-legal-files-federal-civil-rights-complaint-against-kelloggs-warns-management-that-its-violating-fiduciary-duties/
AFL gave some evidence found on Kellogg’s website regarding race-based quotas in employment practices.
“For example, Kellogg’s ‘Better Days’ Promise specifies that by the end of 2025, it will achieve ’25 percent racially underrepresented talent at the management level in the United States.’”
“Kellogg’s promises that by the end of 2025, it will achieve an ‘aspirational gender parity goal of 50/50 at the management level’ in its global operations. To that end, Kellogg’s has initiated a Leadership Development program only for women called ‘ASPIRE,’” AFL wrote.
This is happening even though Kellogg’s has difficulty in finding talent, amid a competitive environment, AFL notes.
“Between 2020 and 2022, the percentage of racially underrepresented talent increased by almost exactly 2 percent across all position levels. Given Kellogg’s commitment to ‘diversifying’ leadership, advancing people based on skin color at the expense of others because of their skin color merits investigation.”
AFL says that for higher managerial positions, the percentage of non-white people is exactly 7 percent, something strange.
It also mentions a postgraduate program at Kellogg’s called “Chef in Residence” that accepts only Black students.
AFL says that all these race-based programs and apparent quotas are illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which states:
Irresponsible Toward Shareholders
Kellogg did not warn its shareholders of the risks that woke policies entail. These policies were shown in the cases of Disney and Budlight to bring great financial loss to the companies, yet Kellogg decided to just go along that same path of risking a wide boycott.“Despite the immense trust that hard-working American mothers and fathers have placed in Kellogg’s, management has discarded the Company’s long-held family-friendly marketing approach to politicize and sexualize its products. For example, to target children:
“Management ran the 2021 ‘Together with Pride’ cereal promotion. This was a partnership with ‘GLAAD—which describes itself as ‘the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization,’ opposes parental rights to know about transgender ‘transitions’ in public schools, and promotes censorship and cancel culture–and depicts beloved and iconic characters such as Tony the Tiger®, Toucan Sam®, and Snap™, Crackle™, and Pop™ cheering around a bowl of rainbow heart-shaped cereal and Mini™, the Frosted Mini Wheats® mascot, holding an LGBTQ flag. The top and left panels of the box provided a fill-in-the-blank space for consumers to fill in their own pronouns.
“In October 2022, management released a limited-edition cereal called ‘Rise and Kind’ Froot Loops® in partnership with GLAAD, again using iconic Kellogg’s cereal characters to advance an extreme social agenda,” AFL says.
As if these were not enough, in September 2022 Kellogg produced cracker boxes featuring high quality, close-up photos of two drag queens.
Also in 2022, another Kellogg product had a rainbow flag illustrated on it.
The biggest loss for Kellogg might have happened when transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney was photographed posing and linking arms with the brand’s iconic “Tony the Tiger” mascot at an awards ceremony.
Mulvaney, a male who identifies as female, shared a video on Instagram of him interacting with and posing for photos with the Frosted Flakes mascot during the Tony Awards on June 11.
“Watch tonight for a wildly camp moment,” Mulvaney wrote in the caption, noting that his trip to the Tony Awards involved some type of partnership with Facebook parent Meta.
The post, which showed Tony the Tiger and gala dress-wearing Mulvaney clinging to the mascot’s arm, garnered considerable attention online.
AFL said that Kellogg was irresponsible for associating with Mulvaney, given the boycott on Budlight that hired Mulvaney for one of its advertisements.
As AFL warned, Kellogg became the latest company to face conservative boycott.
“Like Disney, Budweiser, and Target, Kellogg’s management has shown nothing but contempt and disdain for American families and American workers,” AFL says, to serve the “twisted woke ideology” of its directors.
Responding to a question about the boycott calls, a Kellogg spokesperson suggested it was happenstance that Mulvaney and Tony the Tiger were photographed together and that many people with whom Tony the Tiger took photographs were “lifelong Frosted Flakes fans.”
Reed Rubinstein, director of investigations with AFL, said: “For over a century, Kellogg’s was a trusted partner of moms and dads. That partnership, apparently, is over. Kellogg’s officers and directors are, of course, free to spend their own money on whatever social or political cause they deem fit. But this freedom does not extend to breaking the law or to spending the Company’s funds and eviscerating Kellogg’s brand equity and consumer goodwill to serve their extreme woke activism. Management has a fiduciary duty to promote and protect Kellogg’s business, not hijack it for leftist political ends.”
Concluding, AFL’s letter to the EEOC says that,
“Kellogg’s discriminatory hiring, training programs, and promotion practices are illegal and deeply harmful. Discrimination based on immutable characteristics such as race, color, national origin, or sex ‘generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’ The Company’s employment practices foment contention and resentment–they are ‘odious and destructive.’ It truly ‘is a sordid business, this divvying us up’ by race or sex. Therefore, a Commissioner’s charge is particularly appropriate here because of ample evidence that Kellogg’s has knowingly and intentionally violated federal law and will continue to do so.”
After an investigation, the EEOC’s five individual commissioners can file their own charges, according to the Washington Examiner. The paper reported that last year commissioners filed 29 charges and often came to stalemates.
