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Big US companies form group to boost hiring of minorities in New York
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Luis Mora stands in front of the closed offices of the New York State Department of Labor on May 7, 2020 in the Brooklyn borough in New York City. 3.2 million Americans have filed for unemployment insurance this week bringing the total number of workers who have applied for aid to 33 million in the past two months. (Getty Images/AFP/Stephanie Keith)
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eaders from major US companies, including banks and tech giants, have formed a group aimed at increasing the hiring of individuals from minority communities in New York.
The New York Jobs CEO Council, which counts chief executives from 27 firms among its members, aims to hire 100,000 people from low-income Black, Latino and Asian communities by 2030.
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase & Co, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and Accenture CEO Julie Sweet will co-chair the group.
Other companies in the group include Amazon.com Inc, Google, Microsoft Corp and Goldman Sachs, according to a press statement.
US companies have been under increasing pressure to do more to provide minority groups with access to opportunities in the wake of anti-racism protests sparked by the death of a 46-year-old African-American man, George Floyd. Floyd died in May after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
The protests also came as minorities were disproportionately represented in coronavirus deaths, and lower-income communities in the United States were hit hard economically.
“Today’s economic crisis is exacerbating economic and racial divides and exposing systemic barriers to opportunity”, Dimon said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, adding that often high-achieving people across New York were not given opportunities at the city’s top employers.
“Young people in low-income and minority communities feel this failure the most. Unless we actively work to close the gap, COVID-19 will make matters worse,” said the opinion piece which was co-authored with Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, the chancellor of the City University of New York.
