WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, as part of its initiative under the Center for Legal Equality, America First Legal (AFL) filed a federal civil rights complaint against Mars, Inc. (Mars). The complaint asks the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to investigate Mars’s systemic and discriminatory hiring, promotion, and job-training employment practices.
This latest complaint follows a long line of others filed by AFL’s Center for Legal Equality against woke corporations like Anheuser-Busch, Hershey, Amazon, Starbucks, and others. Under the cloak of “equity,” woke companies like Mars have been shamelessly discriminating in their employment 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.”
And even though Mars’s 41% rate of female leadership meets the corporation’s own standard for “gender balance,” it continues to impose quotas favoring female hiring and promotion.
Mars has even been open about some of its methods for implementing its illegal quotas. For example, it manipulates the composition of “interview panels and candidate slates” to make them more “diverse,” apparently using race, ethnicity, and sex to choose who will make hiring decisions and even who will be considered for a job.
Mars has also mentioned that it’s “launched technologies” to achieve its hiring objectives, strongly suggesting that it is using some kind of algorithmic discrimination in hiring and promotion.
Mars even goes as far as imposing discriminatory gender and racial preferences on its suppliers. For example, it has “commit[ed] to spend $1 billion with diverse suppliers by 2025, including a $500 million focus on women-led suppliers.”
With $45 billion in sales in 2022, Mars is a world-bestriding corporate behemoth and one of the largest food companies in the world. No one should be above the law, and Mars should be held to account for its unlawful discrimination. America First Legal will keep fighting to preserve our Constitution and to protect equal opportunity for all Americans.
Statement from James Rogers, America First Legal Senior Counsel:
“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,” said James Rogers
Read the EEOC complaint here.
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