McDonald's And Coke Never Announced That They'd Stop Hiring Whites
The Claim
McDonald’s and Coke announced that no whites will be hired to top positions.
News posted on
Emerging story
On February 18, 2021, McDonald’s put out a press release detailing their plans to make progress towards a more diverse and inclusive workplace. The same day, CEO Chris Kempczinski posted on LinkedIn about McDonald’s new policies to “provide a safe, respectful, and inclusive workplace.” Days later, a meme began to circulate that claimed, “McDonalds and Coke Both Announce That No Whites Will Be Hired in Top Positions.”
The Washington Examiner and other news platforms covered the story in articles with headlines such as, “Is McDonald’s New Hiring Policy Racist?” Social media users shared the articles, making the interpretation that McDonald’s new policies discriminated against people who are white.
Misbar’s Analysis
Misbar’s investigation began on the McDonald’s corporate website. In December 2020, McDonald’s performed an in depth analysis of their own workforce and reported that underrepresented groups make up 29% of leadership, and women make up 37%. This denotes that 71% of their leadership is white and 63% is male. McDonald’s explicitly states their intention is to increase representation of women to 45%, and underrepresented groups to 35% by 2025. This still leaves a large majority of roles able to be filled by white males.
McDonald’s CEO, Chris Kempczinski, states these same intentions in his LinkedIn post. McDonald's corporate website adds “the company has incorporated quantitative metrics related to human capital management into annual incentive compensation awards for its executive vice presidents.”
Social media users claimed that McDonald’s will not be hiring any white males to top positions in the company but McDonald’s plan never states that. Whether this is a case of failure to read the story or purposefully attempting to induce outrage is unclear. What is clear is that there is absolutely no proof behind claims that McDonald’s will not hire white males to high ranking positions.
Calls stating that executives bonuses will be penalized if they do not discriminate against white males are entirely subjective. McDonald’s attempt to change their policies and admission of a less-than-ideally diverse workplace point to privilege being given to white male candidates in the past. McDonald’s past employment practices point to discrimination of all other groups excepting white males.
Coca Cola’s involvement in the story stems from a February report on diversity training materials. Misbar completed an analysis of these claims, which can be viewed
here.
