Key Insights:
- Black Peloton employees have voiced concern over pay equity.
- The company will conduct a 3-month long pay equity audit next year.
- The majority of Peloton’s lowest-paid workers— like other big tech companies —are Black
Current and former Black employees of Peloton have voiced their concerns over pay equity gaps. Multiple Black employees, who spoke under conditions of anonymity, describe making little more than $50,000 compensation in their IT roles despite having an average of 10 years experience. One Black employee found that he made $15,000 less than a white counterpart for the same role at the same experience level.
This has opened up a pay equity audit that will start in January and go until March 2022. What is happening at Peloton exemplifies the need to more closely examine what happens to Black employees after diversity recruitment campaigns are successful and representation improves. The company has yet to release a full diversity report but says 31 percent of senior leadership roles in the company are occupied by employees of color, collectively, with no breakdown of how many of these high-ranking employees are Black.
Similar to other big tech companies, like Amazon, the majority of frontline and lower-paid workers are Black. The pay equity issue at Peloton is not unique, but Peloton, like most of big tech, pledged funding towards racial equity.
At the very least it would seem paying the company’s undisclosed number of Black employees an equal salary would be a part of this commitment, but the $100 million in racial equity funds, in part, have been allocated to take their hourly workers from $16 to $19 per hour. To set this as part of a racial equity pledge makes being a lower-paid Peloton worker synonymous with being a Black Peloton worker.
“None of it is genuine,” an employee told Business Insider. “The Black dollar is powerful, and Peloton sees the benefit with aligning themselves with the BLM/Anti Asian Hate stance, but does little to address inequity and diversity concerns internally.”
