Amazon following through on changes aimed at benefiting Black employees

SEATTLE — Three months after pledging its support for Black lives, Amazon has made several substantive changes to the benefit of Black employees, said the leader of the company’s Black Employee Network affinity group.

These include more prominent roles for Black executives and support for the broader Black community, through things like a virtual startup conference this week culminating with a keynote address Friday by Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy.

Angelina Howard, president of the network and a senior product manager on the company’s digital software and video games team, said the company’s top executives have been engaged.

“It’s really been a lot of partnership with our leaders to figure out how can we better show up in the community, but also better show up for our employees,” Howard said.

There’s more work to be done, she said, but Howard, whose group organized the virtual startup conference attended this week by some 2,300 entrepreneurs from as far away as Ireland, is heartened by the company’s response following the killing of George Floyd in May, which sparked a renewed civil rights movement.

Howard co-led the Black Employee Network initial event in 2018 with Jasmine Farrar after seeing little representation of Black company founders in the broader Seattle Startup Week program.

This year, in addition to the goal of empowering and celebrating Black entrepreneurship and pitching Amazon Web Services’ cloud-computing resources for new companies, the conference, led by Ashia Johnson and Bryan Belliard, focuses on long-term revenue and growth opportunities, as a response to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We want to make sure that we’re sowing seeds into the community so that there is an opportunity for that long-term growth impact,” Howard said.

Jassy, viewed as a possible successor to founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, became the executive sponsor of Black Employee Network in January. In February, the company flew the Pan-African flag in a breezeway between two buildings at its Seattle headquarters.

In early June, a few days after video of Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer set off a summer of protests and calls for reform, Amazon posted “Black lives matter” atop its main shopping site. The company worked with the network to identify 11 education and equity groups to receive $10 million in donations.

Howard said executives have also been listening more closely to feedback and issues raised not just by Black corporate employees, but also those in the company’s vast and growing operations network of warehouses and delivery services, where the majority of its employees work. In the U.S., 26.5 percent of Amazon’s employees identified as Black or African American at the end of 2019.

“I think there’s a lot of things that are going on behind the scenes, which I’m super excited about,” she said, noting that some were already happening prior to June. “There’s a lot of great momentum. My biggest thing is making sure that momentum doesn’t start to fade.”