Group aiming to hire 1 million Black workers created 21,000 jobs this year

A corporate pledge to hire and promote one million Black workers into middle-class jobs within a decade needs to increase five-fold over the next year to get on pace to reach that goal.

The OneTen initiative, created in 2020 by former International Business Machines chief executive officer Ginni Rometty and former Merck CEO Ken Frazier, is working with member companies to get 1 million Black workers into jobs that don’t require 4-year college degrees and pay family-sustaining wages.

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A year in, the 60 companies in the group, including Walmart and General Motors, reported hiring 17,000 new Black employees and promoting 4,000 more into better jobs, the group announced Thursday. The coalition needs to be creating, on average, 100,000 jobs a year to reach its goal.

Maurice Jones, the CEO of OneTen, said he has a plan to ramp up new hires and promotions to get on track. Next year, the group aims to get 75,000 people into new jobs, and between 100,000 and 150,000 people in new roles each year by the end of 2023.

“That’s a substantial jump; we basically want a 5X increase,” Jones said in an interview. “There's a lot of hard work that will be needed between now and one million, but this is doable.”

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U.S. companies have come under rising pressure from investors, employees and activists to increase workforce diversity and give more opportunities to minorities after 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Black Americans consistently have higher unemployment rates and trail in promotions and pay.

To achieve its ambitious goal, OneTen aims to add another 50 companies next year to the group and focus on improving the promotion rates for Black workers inside those organizations. Current OneTen members have at least 850,000 Black workers already on the payroll, and as many as 65% of those employees are in front-line jobs that make them good candidates for higher-paying roles.

The group also wants to focus more on recruiting from community colleges, which have about 360,000 Black students enrolled.

To increase outside hiring, the companies are in the process of re-writing job requirements so that half of listings will no longer require a 4-year degree, from about 12% now.

The key to the project is that the results are measurable, Jones said. It will be clear in the end whether OneTen succeeds or fails.

“It's the year of scaling,” he said. “We need to take this foundation and scale it."