Race at work since George Floyd

This is an audio transcript of the FT News Briefing podcast episode: Race at work since George Floyd

Marc Filippino
Good morning from the Financial Times. Today is Tuesday, May 31st. And this is your FT News Briefing.

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A major chipmaker wants to band together with its rivals. And how does a Swiss mining company rebound after years of bribery scandals? Plus, we’ll take a look at whether companies kept their promises to address racism, two years after the police murder of George Floyd.

Federica Cocco
There was a lot of donations, external events. But generally people felt like there were a lot more words than actual deeds.

Marc Filippino
I’m Marc Filippino, and here’s the news you need to start your day.

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The head of Qualcomm wants to shake up the semiconductor industry, and he wants to do it with Qualcomm’s rivals. The goal is to invest in the major chip designer Arm. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because SoftBank tried and failed to sell this company to chipmaker Nvidia for an astounding $66bn.

Anna Gross
Just to give you a sense of Arm’s scale, its chip designs are in over 95 per cent of smartphones around the world, but they’re also in computers, TVs, cars, data centres.

Marc Filippino
That’s the FT’s Anna Gross. She recently spoke to Cristiano Amon, the head of Qualcomm. He said the US chipmaker wants to buy a stake in Arm with its rivals after it lists on the New York Stock Exchange. The goal is to create a consortium so that Arm stays neutral.

Anna Gross
It’s important to note Qualcomm is one of Arm’s biggest customers. And it uses Arm’s IP for the chips it makes for smartphones, computers, servers and much more. So its chief executive, Cristiano Amon, he was vehemently opposed to Nvidia’s purchase of Arm, saying it would give the company a huge competitive advantage and that it didn’t make any sense for a company that designs chips for pretty much all chipmakers around the world to be owned by just one of those companies. But at the same time, Amon and other semiconductor executives are conscious of just how important Arm is to that whole ecosystem. They know that if the company doesn’t receive considerable investment, it might not be able to innovate enough to meet the technological advances that are taking place at the moment. And so Amon said that Qualcomm would be interested in investing in Arm when it lists on the public market, but that it would like to do so alongside other chipmakers.

Marc Filippino
So Anna, would any of Qualcomm’s rivals be interested in joining this consortium, the one that Amon has suggested? I’m especially curious about Nvidia, which was supposed to buy Arm.

Anna Gross
Yes, it’s an interesting question because the idea’s come up several times across Arm’s history, including before its sale to SoftBank and also when Nvidia’s purchase was first announced. Earlier this year Intel’s chief executive, Pat Gelsinger, also suggested that Intel could be interested in forming a consortium to invest in or even buy Arm. So I think that is potentially some support out there. Though Amon was clear that for any such consortium ownership to work, there needs to be enough chipmakers participating so that ultimately Arm remained independent.

Marc Filippino
Anna Gross is the FT’s technology, media and telecoms correspondent. Thanks, Anna.

Anna Gross
Thanks a lot, Marc.

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Marc Filippino
A Swiss-based mining company is trying to put a very public scandal behind it. Glencore has pleaded guilty to bribery and market manipulation. It also agreed to pay more than a billion dollars in settlements to the US, UK and Brazil. The FT’s Harry Dempsey says court filings show that this was happening in several countries across Africa and Latin America.

Harry Dempsey
So the court documents provided some great detail into how this works, and traders at Glencore and their counterparties would call these bribes “newspapers”, “filings” or “chocolates”. It’s almost like something out of the movies. And they would pay agents who they had in the country money for bribes to pay local officials, and that would give them preferential terms to access oil. And then in terms of market manipulation, there was a probe by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and that showed that Glencore basically was increasing or decreasing bids to manipulate the price of fuel oil in the US. And they also were providing misleading or insufficient information to Platts, who helped to basically assess the price of different fuels in the market, and that would then help it to sell cargoes of oil that artificially low or high prices, depending on whether they were buying or selling them.

Marc Filippino
Prosecutors also revealed that these practices were baked into the corporate culture at Glencore. So what’s the company gonna do to try and restore its reputation after all this?

Harry Dempsey
Well, I think there’s a question whether it’s restoring its reputation or in fact, trying to improve a reputation that has never been the squeakiest clean of reputations. But what they’ve been doing is they have tried to improve their compliance. They’ve overhauled their executive team. And they claim there’s been vast improvements and some of the analysts who follow the company say that this has improved. I think there’s a big question of whether it has or not. There’s also another question, I think, around whether any of Glencore’s financiers or customers which include the likes of Tesla and General Motors, whether they will want to keep dealing with a company that gets embroiled in things like this.

Marc Filippino
Harry Dempsey is an industry reporter for the FT.

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The 2020 police murder of George Floyd sparked massive protests in the US and around the world. It also caused companies to make big promises to address racism and diversity in their workplaces.

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The events of summer 2020 highlighted long standing inequalities, particularly . . . 

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We wanna keep a spotlight on racial equity and keep the work moving forward.

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We must use our voice to express that we are against racism.

Marc Filippino
But a new survey commissioned by the Financial Times shows that a majority of workers in the United Kingdom don’t think any progress has actually been made. The FT’s Federica Cocco looked into this and she joins me now. Hey, Federica.

Federica Cocco
Hi, Marc.

Marc Filippino
So, Federica, you wrote an article about all this and in it you start with a story of someone you’re calling James, to protect his identity. It’s not his real name. Tell us about him and what he’s experienced at work over the past two years.

Federica Cocco
So in 2020, James was working for a large advertising agency in London, and because he had experienced what we call microaggressions in the office, and there’s a variety of those, you know, it could be people making racially insensitive statements or getting people of colour confused among each other. He went to speak to his manager to ask what specifically they were going to do in terms of actions. And his manager was vague, but he said, so definitely we’re going to do a big drive, it’s a big company priority to increase diversity. And then a week later, he was in a Zoom call. And during this Zoom call, this same manager showed a racist cartoon, you know, depicting sort of a racist stereotype of a black person. And he was just showing it to everyone laughing away.

Marc Filippino
Now, how often do you see an experience like the one we’re talking about here with James? Break down some numbers, and in the survey that you did for the FT here.

Federica Cocco
So in this survey, we surveyed a thousand six hundred workers. The survey was actually carried out by Ipsos Mori. And we found that basically overall, two-thirds of workers think that when it comes to racial inclusivity, when it comes to, you know, these pledges that these companies did, two-thirds of workers think that things are either the same or have actually worsened since 2020.

Marc Filippino
Now, I remember there were a lot of donations at the time. We played a clip with a lot of promises to the public. People weren’t satisfied. The company James worked for did those black squares, the blackout Instagram posts. But he still left because it wasn’t enough considering the real problems his company had.

Federica Cocco
He eventually moved to another company, which he found to be a lot better. They do trainings twice or three times a year for diversity, for unconscious bias. And he says the main thing also that’s made a difference is the fact that he just sees other people of colour in the office and they can speak to each other, they can share stories. They just, they don’t feel as isolated as he did when he was at that company and he was one of two black men on his floor.

Marc Filippino
So what else are workers saying would actually be helpful? Is there something that sticks out to you?

Federica Cocco
There was one that was improving grievances process. You know, like James, for example, James didn’t really feel like he could speak to anyone in the office and his manager clearly was useless. So having an HR process that actually protects people of colour and makes them feel comfortable if they have any complaints in the office, that would be huge progress for companies to have. But only 44 per cent of those surveyed said that they had trusted their HR department.

Marc Filippino
Federica Cocco is a statistical journalist for the FT. Thanks, Federica.

Federica Cocco
Thanks, Marc.

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Marc Filippino
Before we go, the news about the global economy has not been great. Production slowdowns in China, big sell-offs on Wall Street, and high inflation pretty much everywhere. So we wanna know: are you changing your financial habits? Putting more money into savings, going out to dinner less, or are you not changing anything at all? Record and send us a voice memo telling us your plan for this economy. We might just feature it in an upcoming episode. Just email me at marc.filippino@ft.com. We’ll also leave that email in the show notes and thanks.

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You can read more on all of these stories at FT.com. This has been your daily FT News Briefing. Make sure you check back tomorrow for the latest business news.

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