A legal nonprofit filed a federal civil rights complaint against Mars Inc. on Wednesday, alleging that the chocolate company blatantly discriminates against race, sex, and national origin in its hiring, promotion, and training practices.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal for employers to impose hiring quotas that favor applicants based on an ‘individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.’ Yet Mars does just that, openly touting its discriminatory quota ‘to increase racial minority representation among management in its U.S.-based consumer-packaged goods businesses by forty percent,’” the AFL stated.
The Civil Rights Act also prohibits discrimination because of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in admission to, or employment in, any program established to provide apprenticeship or other training.”
“Mars admits to acting to ‘achieve gender balance [sic] across one hundred percent of its leadership teams’ and ensuring that its ‘leadership teams and Associate representation … reflect the race and ethnicities of the labor force in the markets in which it operates,’” The AFL claims. “In other words, the company is employing numeric quotas to ‘balance’ the immutable characteristics of its workers and thus facially violating Title VII [of the Civil Rights Act].”
The complaint also mentions that Mars is using race, color, national origin, or sex to structure interview panels and candidate lists.
“To meet its hiring and promotion quotas, the company claims that it is ‘launch[ing] technologies’ to achieve a ‘larger and more diverse talent pool,'” according to AFL.
Although Mars claims these technologies eliminate bias, the AFL complaint states that “the massive shifts in Mars’s self-reported hiring demographics strongly suggest algorithmic discrimination based on race, color, national origin, or sex.”
The complaint mentions training courses provided by Mars solely to women and members of certain ethnicities or races.
“There is ample evidence suggesting that the company has knowingly and intentionally violated federal law and will continue to do so,” the complaint concludes.
Attached to it are parts of what it says are Mars’s statements regarding gender equity and hiring and training practices.
James Rogers, the AFL legal counsel who filed the complaint, said: “Mars’s brands—M&Ms, 3 Musketeers, Wrigley’s, Lifesavers, and so many others—have been a part of Americans’ lives for generations. It is sad that, like so many other woke corporations, Mars has degenerated into a sad parody of the great company it once was.
“Mars needs to stop trying to socially engineer the country. It must abandon its illegal and sordid bigotry, which only contributes further to the growing division and hatred in our country.
“We hope that the EEOC acts quickly on our complaint to investigate Mars to end its dangerous and destructive discrimination and go back to focusing on making chocolate.”
This complaint follows others filed by America First Legal against Anheuser-Busch, Hershey, Amazon, and Starbucks.
The Epoch Times reached out to Mars Inc. for comment.
