Amazon seeks to block proposal calling for greater diversity in hiring

Amazon has asked federal regulators to block a number of shareholder proposals that strike to the heart of many recent criticisms of the Seattle-based commerce behemoth, including its stances on curbing hate speech and offensive content, diversity in hiring, workplace conditions for hourly warehouse employees and its surveillance technologies.

If granted, Amazon’s requests would mean shareholders would not have an opportunity to vote on those proposals at the company’s shareholder meeting this year, where they would likely be rejected regardless. Last year, none of a dozen shareholder proposals were approved.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) declined to comment Wednesday on whether it intended to allow Amazon to drop the proposals from the shareholder meeting docket.

Companies often ask the SEC for permission to drop shareholder proposals they see as needless meddling into day-to-day business, and Amazon is no exception. Last year, it sought to exclude nine shareholder proposals before the annual meeting. The SEC sustained Amazon’s request in seven of those instances.

According to letters filed Tuesday with the SEC, Amazon is now requesting the regulator block shareholder proposals asking the company to report on its efforts to check hate speech across its many platforms, consider qualified women and nonwhite candidates for open positions in all roles, add an hourly associate to its board of directors and assess whether its products with surveillance capabilities violate human rights.

Amazon is also attempting to suppress a proposal from the New York State Common Retirement Fund that would require the company to conduct an audit on race and diversity, Bloomberg reported last week.

Even if Amazon is successful in preventing the proposals from surfacing at its shareholder meeting, Amazon likely will face continued scrutiny on the subjects of the petitions.

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 uprising at the U.S. Capitol, media outlets reported that white-supremacist and far-right militants had found havens on Amazon’s online marketplace and cloud-computing infrastructure. Conservative-dominated social network Parler, which Amazon booted from its cloud-computing service due to what it deemed was a proliferation of posts advocating violence, recently argued in court that even as one Amazon division was flagging abusive content for review, another was attempting to upsell Parler on enhanced cloud-computing technologies.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation, a Jewish nonprofit focused on social justice, introduced a shareholder proposal last month asking for a comprehensive report on Amazon’s “efforts to address hate speech and the sale or promotion of offensive products throughout its businesses.”

At the time of the foundation’s proposal, Amazon’s policies on offensive products did not apply to books, music, video and DVDs, meaning that “with respect to these products, Amazon’s algorithm for product searches proactively directs customers who search for white supremacist content to additional extremist content,” the foundation wrote.

Amazon said in a Monday letter to the SEC that a report on its efforts to repress hate speech is unnecessary because it had published a 559-word blog post the previous day outlining its policies and efforts to