(NewsNation) — Major companies added more than 320,000 jobs to their U.S. workforces in 2021, and 94% of those went to people of color, according to Bloomberg.
That finding comes from a new analysis of 88 workforce demographic reports submitted to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by S&P 100 companies like Apple, Walmart and Amazon.
Hispanic individuals comprised 40% of the added workers, the most of any group. Black and Asian people accounted for 23% and 22% of the net change from 2020, Bloomberg found.
White workers accounted for just 6% of the headcount increase or about 20,500 jobs.
Bloomberg noted that the most significant shift happened in lower-paying job categories, like sales workers and admins, but there were some notable gains further up the ladder.
“The share of executive, managerial and professional roles held by people of color increased by about 2 percentage points compared with 2020 — more than double the average annual gains at big and mid-sized US companies in previous years,” the article said.
The numbers suggest major companies are following through on promises they made to address racial imbalances in the workplace after widespread protests in 2020.
White people still hold a disproportionate share of high-paying jobs at S&P 100 companies, the analysis pointed out.
At major companies where employment shrank, white workers made up 68.5% of the losses, another 16.5% were Black, 9.7% were Hispanic, and 2.3% were Asian.
The report highlighted Nike as one of the “more clear-cut examples of the overall trend,” which added Black, Hispanic and Asian workers “at almost every rank up and down the pipeline.” The company had 1,000 fewer white workers from 2020 to 2021.
As for what’s behind the overall shift, the article highlights a number of factors, including the “corporate reckoning” following George Floyd’s murder as well as broader demographic changes in the labor force. Retirements also increased that year, and older workers were more likely to be white.
It was also a year when companies were rehiring workers they’d laid off at the start of the pandemic, many of whom were people of color. Bloomberg said remote work also helped companies recruit in more diverse parts of the country.
