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 <JPM.N>, IBM
<IBM.N> CEO Arvind Krishna and Accenture <ACN.N> CEO Julie Sweet
will co-chair the group.
Other companies in the group include Amazon.com Inc <AMZN.O>,
Google, Microsoft Corp <MSFT.O> and Goldman Sachs <GS.N>,
according to a press statement.
U.S. 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.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Edwina
Gibbs)
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