Anheuser-Busch hit with civil rights complaint over discriminatory hiring practices
Breccan F. Thies
Anheuser-Busch has been hit with a federal civil rights complaint for “illegal, racist, and sexist hiring practices.”
In the wake of controversy over its transgender promotion scheme, America First Legal looked into the beer giant’s hiring, training, and promotion practices, finding the company had several that excluded white and Asian people.
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In response, AFL filed a civil rights complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming “Anheuser-Busch is knowingly, intentionally, and unlawfully discriminating based on race, color, national origin, and sex with respect to employment and job training opportunities.”
“Anheuser-Busch isn’t just promoting a radical transgender agenda that is at odds with the values of their customers, but they’re also engaged in something even more insidious and destructive, and that’s hiring based on race and sex,” AFL Vice President and General Counsel Gene Hamilton told the Washington Examiner. “America First Legal reviewed their corporate materials and other publicly available information, revealing that Anheuser-Busch appears more interested in hiring someone because of their race than their skillset.”
AFL found a “Leadership Accelerator Program” that invites only persons who “identify as black, Latinx [sic], and Native American to apply, as well as those who identify with a historically underrepresented group.”
The program is part of a larger push by the company of “championing [diversity, equity, and inclusion] at the highest levels of the organization.”
The EEOC complaint argues this initiative, in conjunction with its 2022 Environmental, Social, and Governance Report, shows “sex-based hiring during the years 2017 to 2022.”
They are “nothing more than a vehicle to implement race, national origin, and sex quotas in hiring and promotion,” the AFL press release says, as the beer company states the goal of increasing “overall representation of women in top leadership positions.”
“The corporation has chosen to promote and use employment practices that are both patently illegal and deeply harmful,” AFL’s complaint states, quoting Brown v. Board of Education. “Discrimination based on immutable characteristics such as race, color, national origin, or sex ‘generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.'”
Anheuser-Busch has received the mark of approval, scoring 100, from the Human Rights Campaign — the country’s largest gay political lobbying organization.
“What we are seeing through stakeholder capitalism is that consumers are increasingly subjected to progressive ideologues calling the shots at the highest levels of corporate America,” Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild told the Washington Examiner. “These companies are incentivized to go woke in order to score high on ratings systems like ESG and the Corporate Equality Index because activists like the Human Rights Campaign and asset managers like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink hold far too much power to force their progressive agenda on the American people.”
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“Iconic American brands, like Anheuser-Busch, have become shells of their founders’ visions due to weak-kneed corporate leadership who routinely cave to idealogues whose thirst for an ever-changing notion of ‘social justice’ is relentless,” Hamilton said in the press release. “All racial discrimination is wrong, and race-based employment programs or opportunities are antithetical to the American ideal.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to Anheuser-Busch for comment.