Mostly White, Mostly Male Amazon Publishes Diversity Report

E-commerce giant Amazon has revealed that the company is a lot like its tech industry peers: mostly male and predominantly white.

On Friday, Amazon published a long-awaited report on diversity showing that the company's global workforce is 63 percent male and 37 percent female, while 75 percent of managers are male.

Domestically, 60 percent of Amazon employees are white, 15 percent are black, 13 percent are Asian and 9 percent are Hispanic, according to the report. Again, 75 percent of Amazon managers are white.

The company has been under pressure from civil rights leaders and organizations. Jessie Jackson of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, one of the networks advocating for diversity disclosures, told The Seattle Times last week that Amazon's all-white senior leadership and board are "skewed toward white-male supremacy.”

“Their general work force data released by Amazon seems intentionally deceptive, as the company did not include the race or gender breakout of their technical work force,” Rainbow PUSH wrote in a statement to The New York Times published Friday. “The broad assumption is that a high percentage of their black and Latino employees work in their warehouses.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to The Huffington Post's request for comment.

The company's report is the latest in a series of recent tech-industry diversity disclosures, including ones from Twitter and Apple, both of which also reported an abundance of men and white people.

However, Amazon has come under particular fire because unlike those other companies, it is not revealing the racial and gender breakdown of its technical employees, instead offering only the numbers for its general workforce.

Amazon's report details some of the ways the company is trying to increase diversity among its 150,000 workers, including professional development groups for minorities, investments in STEM education and a program to help employees pay for college.

"We are working to develop leaders and shape future talent pools to help us meet the needs of our customers around the world," the report says.

Fed Ends Stimulus Program With Economy Still On Shaky Ground

Janet Yellen and the Federal Reserve just declared the U.S. economy well enough to leave intensive care, though it is not yet the picture of health.

The Fed announced on Wednesday that it was ending a two-year stimulus program designed to keep interest rates low and boost the economy. The program -- known as "quantitative easing," or "QE3," for the fact that it was the third round of such stimulus since the financial crisis -- involved buying billions of dollars of bonds each month. The central bank has been cutting back on these purchases with every Fed meeting since December 2013. On Wednesday it said it was making its last such purchase this month.

In pulling away support for the economy, the Fed is taking a chance that recent signs of economic strength are more reliable than recent signs of weakness. On the one hand, unemployment has tumbled to 5.9 percent, the lowest in six years, and employers have added more than 200,000 jobs per month so far this year. GDP growth jumped at a 4.6 percent annualized rate in the second quarter. Gasoline prices are at their lowest in four years.

On the other hand, wages have stayed stubbornly flat, and much of the drop in unemployment has been due to workers checking out of the labor market, meaning they're no longer counted as unemployed. Financial markets have been turbulent lately, and economies around the world seem to be teetering on the edge of recession.

One of the Fed's policy makers, Minnesota Fed President Narayana Kocherlakota, dissented from the Fed's decision, arguing the economy was still too weak for the Fed to end QE3. He also argued that the Fed should have shown more alarm about the prospect of low inflation.

Still, in announcing its decision, the Fed sounded fairly optimistic about the economy, noting the job market's recent good news and saying that consumers and businesses have been slowly increasing their spending.

The Fed also chose to look on the bright side of one ominous development in the economy: Inflation is still lower than the Fed would like it. Low inflation might sound great to people dealing with rising food prices, but if prices generally stay too low for too long, that risks "deflation," or falling prices. When deflation happens, people stop spending while they wait for prices to fall further, and the economy suffers. See Japan in the 1990s or the U.S. during the Great Depression.

The Fed kept pumping stimulus into the economy in one way: It kept its target for a key short-term interest rate near zero and promised to keep it there for "a considerable time." This interest rate, the federal funds rate, which influences other borrowing costs throughout the economy, is the Fed's traditional policy tool for slowing down and speeding up the economy.

When zero-percent interest rates weren't enough to help an economy gutted by the financial crisis and Great Recession, the Fed turned to the extraordinary measure of buying up bonds to drive interest rates even lower. That bond-buying has left the Fed with a balance sheet worth $4.48 trillion, up from less than $1 trillion before the crisis.

The Fed's balance sheet has quadrupled in size.

What remains to be seen is the effect of the program's end on the economy and financial markets. The Fed has been warning of the end of QE3 for several months, giving markets time to adjust, and stock prices have recently soared to record highs despite the looming end of QE3.

As for the economy, interest rates have stayed relatively low even as the Fed has cut back on bond purchases. The rate on a 30-year mortgage was recently just a little more than 4 percent, up from a record low of about 3.35 percent, set just as the Fed was beginning QE3, according to monthly data from Freddie Mac.

Interest rates are still relatively low.

Fed officials have long maintained -- or hoped, anyway -- that the central bank's enormous holdings of bonds will keep helping the economy even when it stops buying more.

Interest rates rise as bond prices fall, and as long as the Fed is sitting on a mountain of relatively low-risk bonds, then bond prices should stay high, and investors will still be forced to go buy riskier stuff like corporate bonds and stocks.

The stock market, in fact, has been one of the most obvious winners of the Fed's bond-buying program. Stock prices fell on Wednesday after the Fed's announcement, but not by much. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down about 50 points, or about 0.3 percent, about 20 minutes after the Fed's announcement. The S&P 500 was down about half a percentage point.

Some Fed officials have fretted publicly about the unwanted side effects of their easy-money programs, including pumping up market bubbles and filling the coffers of the 1 percent while not doing much for the other 99 percent. Some Fed officials and economists have also been skeptical that QE was worth such risks. Many on the Fed now seem more inclined to try to use other tools to help the economy.

Oregon's Cheap Legal Weed Could Starve Washington's Market

Could Oregon’s legal marijuana market starve Washington’s?

Voters in Oregon decide on Tuesday whether or not to legalize recreational marijuana. If the measure passes, Oregon and Washington will boast the first shared border in the world of legal retail pot.

Yet the two states will have very different legal frameworks, with prices in Oregon expected to be far lower than prices in Washington, where a combination of supply shortages and taxes have kept pot prices sky high. The potential discrepancy is causing some to speculate that Oregon’s cheap dispensaries could end up stealing business from those in Washington.

The predicament underscores the growing pains legalization advocates and policymakers face in figuring out the best ways to tax and regulate the drug from state to state.

Ever since legal pot went on sale in Washington in July, consumers have been shocked at how expensive it is. At Cannabis City in Seattle, a gram of weed costs about $20: That works out to be over $500 per ounce. Meanwhile, on the black market in Washington, an ounce of pot costs about half that, according to the website Price Of Weed, which crowdsources the cost of marijuana in each state.

The state’s pot prices are high for a number of reasons. First of all, the state taxes pot at every step of the way -- from the farm to the consumer -- meaning that customers end up paying a tax burden of 30-40 percent when they go to buy a dime bag. Second, there was (and still is) a supply shortage. This is partly because the state put a cap on the number of shops allowed to open, and then handed out licenses randomly to entrepreneurs who either weren't prepared to open a business or who had trouble finding a location because of the state's strict zoning laws. Washington's supply shortages are also due to the fact that growers who were given licenses needed time to cultivate the plants (a process that takes about three months.)

In an especially ludicrous illustration of Washington’s inability to snuff out the black market for weed -- which was one of the primary reasons the state decriminalized the marijuana in the first place -- dispensary owners in Washington have reported having to chase drug dealers off their doorsteps.

Now compare that to Oregon, where recreational marijuana, if it becomes legal, would cost just $145 an ounce, according to a report from the consulting firm ECONorthwest. Even if dispensaries divided that ounce into smaller units and marked up the price, that’s still significantly cheaper than what legal retail weed costs in many Washington dispensaries. As a result, experts say it’s inevitable that Washington residents will motor over the border to get their herb in Oregon.

“There will definitely be lots of people coming from Washington to Oregon [to buy cannabis],” said Robert Whelan, an ECONorthwest economist who co-authored the report. Whelan said Oregon -- which is one of the few states in the nation with no sales tax -- already does billions of dollars in business selling other commodities to out-of-state residents from Washington and California.

“No one in their right mind buys a TV set or a computer in Washington if they live anywhere near Oregon,” Whelan said. “Because if you come here, you save $100.” The same will be true for marijuana, he said.

Brian Budz, who co-owns a retail marijuana store called New Vansterdam in Vancouver, Washington, said he’s worried that if Oregon passes a law permitting recreational pot stores to open, he could go out of business.

“It’s absolutely a concern, yes,” Budz told HuffPost. His business is forced to pay a 25 percent excise tax when they buy weed wholesale from a grower and another 25 percent fee when they sell to the customer, Budz said. “And that doesn’t include the federal taxes, or the fact that because we’re selling a Schedule I drug, we can’t write anything off. So we’re getting blasted from all angles.”

In Oregon, the proposed law would “make it easier for retailers to breathe and make a profit,” because the taxes are so much lower, Budz said.

The price discrepancy problem would likely only affect southern Washington, since dispensaries in other parts of the state are far from the border. And in the longer run, the price gap could close, said Brookings Institution’s Phil Wallach.

“Because Oregon’s tax would be by weight and Washington’s is by price,” Wallach said, “if the supply problems in Washington eventually get alleviated and the price comes considerably down, that will also lower the amount of taxes [consumers will pay]. Eventually, there could be an equilibrium.”

Top photo courtesy of New Vansterdam.

Meet The Working Mother Taking Her Pregnancy Discrimination Case To The Supreme Court

WASHINGTON -- When Peggy Young became pregnant in 2006, she had every intention of continuing to work delivering packages for UPS in Maryland. At the urging of the company's occupational health manager, Young visited her doctor to obtain a note detailing any work restrictions she might need. Her doctor recommended that she not lift more than 20 pounds for the first 20 weeks of her pregnancy.

Based on the doctor's note, UPS placed Young on unpaid leave, an all too common experience for women nationwide. Although UPS often put workers with other conditions on light duty, it told Young that such accommodations wouldn't apply to an "off-the-job" condition such as her pregnancy. Not only would she lose her income, she would have to suddenly switch to her husband's health insurance plan, changing the hospitals at which she could potentially give birth.

"I wanted to work," Young told The Huffington Post. "I all but begged for them to let me work."

The unborn child Young was carrying in 2006 is now a 7-year-old girl named Trinity. Young no longer works for UPS, but she's still fighting the shipping giant for denying her accommodations while she was pregnant. Young sued UPS alleging discrimination, and her case, Young v. UPS, is now before the Supreme Court, with oral arguments expected in December.

If the policy enforced on Young in 2006 doesn't seem particularly enlightened, UPS itself would seem to agree. In a memo sent to employees this week, the company announced that it will begin offering light duty to pregnant workers on Jan. 1, the Washington Post reported Wednesday. The turnaround puts UPS in the peculiar position of defending before the Supreme Court a policy that it is already walking away from.

In a brief filed last Friday, UPS maintains that its decision to deny Young an accommodation was "lawful at the time it was made," a position it reiterated to HuffPost. The company said it decided to alter the policy to respond in part to new guidelines from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates workplace discrimination.

"Laws have been changing, and there's a growing consensus looking at best practices," said Kara Gerhardt Ross, a UPS spokeswoman. "We want to provide good benefits. We saw this as a good thing for our employees."

Even though it may now be moot for UPS's own workforce, Young's case could have far-reaching consequences for working women throughout the country. The underlying question is whether or not the Pregnancy Discrimination Act compels companies to offer light-duty options to pregnant workers if they already do so for non-pregnant workers in other situations. The 1978 law, which amended the Civil Rights Act, forbids companies from treating pregnant workers differently from workers who are "similar in their ability or inability to work."

UPS maintains that its leave policy was pregnancy "neutral," treating workers like Young no better or worse than their colleagues who aren't pregnant. The circumstances under which UPS drivers were entitled to light duty, the company notes in its argument, were laid out in a collective bargaining agreement with the Teamsters union. Under that agreement, the company didn't have to provide temporary accommodations to workers with "off-the-job injuries or conditions," unless it was a cognitive disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Ultimately, the company argues, the policy "treats a lifting restriction resulting from pregnancy in exactly the same way" as, say, a "back injury sustained off the job."

Young's legal team says the policy violated the "plain language" of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, deeming the company's off-the-job distinction irrelevant. They note that the law includes no exceptions for a "pregnancy-blind" reason to deny a pregnant worker accommodations. If the company is willing to provide light duty to other workers, then it has to grant them to pregnant workers, they argue.

"If a person wasn't pregnant but was injured on the job and had the same restrictions, UPS would have provided an accommodation," Sam Bagenstos, a lawyer for Young and a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, told HuffPost shortly before UPS announced its policy change. "UPS actually accommodates a very large swath of its drivers who have lifting restrictions, but not for workers whose restrictions result from pregnancy."

Bagenstos said the case is more likely to affect women in low-wage and manual-labor jobs than anything else. After all, women in higher-paying, white-collar positions generally don't have to worry about heavy lifting in the course of their job duties, and are therefore less likely to find themselves having to request light duty from their employer.

Given the stakes of the case, a broad and rather unusual coalition of stakeholders have lined up behind Young. Those filing briefs in her support include not only a host of women's rights organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union, but also the U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce and 23 pro-life groups. The interest of the pro-life crowd is obvious. As the groups note in their brief, "economic pressure is a significant factor in many women’s decision to choose abortion over childbirth."

Ariela Migdal, a lawyer handling pregnancy discrimination cases at the ACLU, said the ideological diversity of Young's alliance is an asset for her.

"They kind of came together around this because it offends many people to think workplaces should be forcing pregnant workers to make horrible choices," Migdal said.

Now 42 years old and a mother of three, Young works for a government contractor outside of Washington, D.C. Eight years after becoming pregnant with Trinity, she still has the same lawyer, Sharon Fast Gustafson, who pressed UPS to accommodate her pregnancy in 2006.

Last year, Young and Gustafson celebrated Maryland's passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, a law that requires the state's employers to make reasonable accommodations for their pregnant employees. Similar laws have been passed in other states since Young first filed her case, and a federal version has been championed by Democrats in Congress, though it hasn't passed either the House or Senate yet.

Despite the progress that has been made, Young said that both the law and corporate America have plenty more catching up to do.

"It's not just about me; it's about all women considering becoming pregnant," Young said. "You're not pregnant forever, and a lot of families these days need both their incomes. I think if hard-working women want to work and become pregnant, then we should let them."

Here Are All The Openly Gay CEOs In The Fortune 500

Actually, Tim Cook is the only openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

"I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me," the Apple CEO wrote in an essay published in Businessweek Thursday.

Before Cook came out, there were no openly gay CEOs in the Fortune 500, according to Deena Fidas of the Human Rights Campaign.

Glen Senk, the former CEO of Urban Outfitters Inc. has said he was the first openly gay CEO of the Fortune 1000 company, but he resigned from the company in 2012. The former CEO of BP, John Browne, resigned in 2007 after being called out as gay.

Tim Cook Comes Out As Gay In Powerful Businessweek Essay

Apple CEO Tim Cook came out as gay in a powerful essay for Bloomberg Businessweek.

In the essay, published Thursday, Cook said that he has never denied being gay, but has not publicly discussed his sexuality until now: "So let me be clear: I’m proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."

He described how his sexuality has given him an acute social perspective.

Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It’s made me more empathetic, which has led to a richer life. It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.

The revelation comes just days after Cook advocated on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights in his home state of Alabama.

"[Alabama is] still too slow on equality for the LGBT community," he said, per the Associated Press, while calling for laws protecting people based on sexual orientation and gender identity. "Under the law, citizens of Alabama can still be fired based on their sexual orientation. We can't change the past, but we can learn from it and we can create a different future."

Cook's sexuality has been a point of speculation for quite some time. Gawker reported that Cook was gay back in 2011 before he succeeded Steve Jobs.

Since then, Cook himself has seemingly dropped hints about his sexuality. Last year, during a speech about human rights at Auburn University Cook discussed the discrimination he faced as a young person, according to ValleyWag.

"Since these early days, I have seen and have experienced many types of discrimination and all of them were rooted in the fear of people that were different than the majority," he said.

However, since the 53-year-old had not publicly come out, the question still remained. In May, the New York Times ran a story titled "Where Are The Gay Chief Executives?" and had to subsequently clarify their definition of "openly gay." CNBC's Simon Hobbs made headlines for mistakenly saying Cook was "fairly open" about being gay during a live segment back in June.

Head over to Businessweek to read Cook's full essay.

Majority Of Kroger Shoppers Want Gun-Friendly Chain To Ban Guns

The cadre of mothers crusading to ban the open carry of firearms in stores has added a new poll to its arsenal.

Sixty-four percent of shoppers in states allowing gun owners to brandish their weapons in public want supermarket giant Kroger to prohibit open carry in its stores, according to the poll, commissioned by Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense In America, the increasingly powerful gun-control group backed by billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

On Wednesday, the moms plan to picket outside Kroger’s annual investor relations meeting in Cincinnati armed with a 300,000-signature petition and the poll, which was released Tuesday by the Benenson Strategy Group.

“People are now just realizing how absurd it is that someone could bring a loaded AR-15 into Kroger with them while they’re shopping,” Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, told The Huffington Post on Tuesday.

Moms Demand Action has already notched significant victories through powerful social media campaigns. At its urging, corporate food chains Chili’s, Sonic, Jack in the Box, Chipotle and Starbucks asked customers to leave guns at home or in the car. After a prolonged fight, during which the moms faced fierce rallies by rifle-toting open-carry advocates, the group convinced Target to announce a no-guns policy.

But the Kroger campaign marked a shift for the group toward more sophisticated tactics. Flush with cash from Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety fund, the moms rolled out campaign ads for the first time last month. Meant to jolt shoppers into realizing the absurdity of allowing assault-grade firearms in the stores, the ads juxtapose a person with an AR-15 slung around his shoulders with either a child holding an ice cream cone, a shirtless man or a teenager with a skateboard. The message: Deadly weapons are allowed at Kroger, where policy forbids these other, relatively harmless things.

One of the ads released by Moms Demand Action to pressure Kroger to ban guns.

Two radio ads, made by recording real customer service calls to Kroger, are also getting air time.

Since the moms embarked on the campaign, smaller grocers have approached the group for help drafting gun bans of their own.

Watts said her group chose the supermarket giant because of its size and visibility. Kroger operates 2,419 stores in 31 states, most of which are in the South and Midwest, regions where gun culture and the powerful National Rifle Association maintain a stronger grip than in, say, the liberal Northeast.

“We wanted to pick a campaign that would give us the opportunity, frankly, to do more brand damage by running ads,” Watts said. “They may at first sit back and allow the brand damage to occur, and then realize, ‘Oh, wait, we’re alienating most of our customer base, which is women and mothers.”

Kroger said it has no plans to change its current policy, and that it believes the Everytown is "a national political organization that is attempting to use retailers to further their agenda."

"Kroger's policy has been and continues to be to follow state and local laws and to ask customers to be respectful of others while shopping in our stores," Keith Dailey, a spokesman for the chain, wrote in an email to HuffPost. "We believe the controversial gun issue is best resolved by lawmakers, not retailers."

Though the results of the moms' new poll should be taken with a grain of salt, considering the group financed the poll, the findings indicate a desire to leave guns out of the grocery store.

A huge majority of those polled, 83 percent, said they believe Kroger has the right to prohibit guns if it so chooses. And 61 percent of shoppers who have guns in their homes say they don’t think such a policy would violate their Second Amendment rights. Most notably, 52 percent of shoppers who said they support a gun ban at Kroger keep firearms in their homes.

Open-carry activists marched through a Target location in Texas to protest the moms' early efforts pushing the retailer to ban guns.

Watts said most of the retailers that have announced no-guns rules over the last year conducted their own polls ahead of any policy changes.

But the rules aren’t always legally binding. It can be difficult for individual chains to enforce the policies, both legally and logistically, if a defiant customer decides to carry in a loaded assault rifle strapped to their back. But Watts, who has endured violent threats and brutal, misogynistic hate speech since founding the group after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, said the policies are first steps toward loosening the grip of the NRA gun culture.

“Ultimately,” she said, “businesses cannot withstand the wrath of American moms and women.”

This story has been updated with a statement from Kroger.