Companies

ASOS.com is a British online fashion retailer primarily aimed at young adults. The company was founded in 2000 in London and ships to 196 countries! The primary stake holder, Anders Povlsen has an estimated net worth of more than $11 billion.

• Multiple Asos employees and warehouse workers have come forward alleging that the company is disallowing them to wear protective equipment while on the job. Due to the nature of the warehouse, these employees are working in very tight quarters to one another.
• One Facebook post from a union group called GMB revealed that as many as three ambulances were called to one ASOS fulfillment center in a single day over an alleged COVID-19 outbreak within the warehouse.
• Asos’ CEO has disputed these claims from his twitter account.

Atlas Restaurant Group is headquartered in Baltimore and owns and operates several high-end restaurants. The Atlas Restaurant Group is the largest privately held Baltimore-based restaurant group, employing over 500 people in 9 different establishments. Atlas Restaurant Group owns Ouzo Bay, Azumi, Loch Bar, Harbor East Deli, Tagliata, The Elk Room, The Bygone, Italian Disco, Ouzo Beach, The Choptank & Maximón.

• The Atlas Group faced a lot of backlash when a video surfaced on social media showing an Atlas Group restaurant denying service to a black woman and her nine-year-old son due to the boy's clothing. In a video shared on social media, Marcia Grant and her child, Dallas, were repeatedly told by a manager at Ouzo Bay Restaurant that they could not eat there because of their dress code prohibiting athletic wear. The video, which shows Grant's son wearing sneakers, gym shorts and an Air Jordan T-shirt, also recorded another child, who was white, in a similar outfit enjoying his meal at an outside table.
• The Atlas Restaurant Group has since issued an apology and fired the two managers involved in the incident.

AutoNation, a national network of auto sellers, provides buyers with new and pre-used vehicles throughout the United States. AutoNation was founded in 1996 and has more than 360 retail outlets.

• AutoNation received more than $77 million in federal small-business funds despite being a company worth billions that employed more than 26,000 people before the pandemic.
• It should be noted that they returned the money after publicity regarding this loan went viral.

Axios is an American news website that was founded in 2016 and launched in 2017. Since their inception, Axios has managed to raise $57 Million in funding over 3 rounds. Axios is known for their digital media presence from Facebook and Snapchat to their own website.

• Despitebeing backed by numerous billionaires and big name companies, Axios applied for and secured a $5 million forgivable Paycheck Protection loan intended for struggling small businesses.
• It should be noted that they returned the money after publicity regarding this loan went viral.

Bird is a shared electric scooted company based in Santa Monica, CA. Bird was founded in 2017 and since then has expanded to over 100 cities in Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Bird saw much early success with their scooters logging over 10 million rides in its first year of operation.

• On March 27th, 2020, Bird sent a mandatory one-way Zoom call invite to over 400 of their employees with no explanation. When the employees logged onto the Zoom call they were met with a woman’s voice that began reading a scripted speech, informing the attendees that they had all been laid off. The speech was only two minutes, at which point the call ended without giving the employees a chance to ask questions. Immediately afterwards the laid off employees were also automatically logged out of their company email and slack accounts.

Boeing is a U.S. based, corporation that designs and manufactures airplanes, satellites, rockets, missiles, rotorcraft, and telecommunications equipment worldwide. Boeing is best known for their aerospace technologies and is one of the largest global aerospace manufacturers. Boeing was founded in Seattle, WA in 1916 and currently has its headquarters in Chicago, IL.

• After 346 people lost their lives from two separate Boeing 737 Max crashes only months apart, investigations into the new 737 Max aircraft began. Multiple reports came out detailing how the crashes were caused by a new flight control system that was faulty. Due to the faulty systems, the pilots of both planes were unable to override the controls before they crashed. Further, when Boeing debuted these new 737 Max planes, they touted that the planes could be put into service without needing to put pilots through costly simulator programs.
• After further investigations, damaging internal messages were found between employees from 2015 to 2018. The messages showed a coordinated effort to conceal information about flaws in the 737 aircraft. Peter DeFazio, the House transport committee chairman, who investigated the Max 737 scandal said the messages “paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public, even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally.

Boohoo.com is a UK-based fast fashion website for teens and young adults. Founded in 2006, Boohoo has grown in popularity offering buyers over 36,000 products and generating £856.9m in sales on 2019.

• On July 5th, 2020, The Sunday Times revealed that workers at Boohoo were being paid as little as £3.50 an hour ($4.40), an amount significantly less than the £8.20 ($10.30) U.K. national minimum wage. This information came after an undercover reporter spent two days working in the factory.
• Since the news of this “modern day slavery” came to light, the share price of Boohoo has fallen by nearly 50% from $5.24 in mid June to $2.64 on July 8th, 2020.

Cargill, Inc. is a U.S. based privately held global corporation that focuses on purchasing and trading agricultural commodities. Founded in 1865, it is the largest privately held corporation in the United States in terms of revenue. In 2018, their revenue exceeded $114 billion. Cargill employs over 166,000 employees in 66 countries. A subsidiary of Cargill Inc, Cargill Meat Solutions, recently came under fire for employee mistreatment during Covid-19.

• The meatpacking industry has always had a notorious reputation for poor working conditions and Covid-19 has only made this more apparent. Currently meat and poultry employees have among the highest illness rates of all manufacturing employees and are the least likely to report said illnesses for fear of repercussions.
• At Cargill’s High River slaughterhouse, supervisors were given N95 masks and plastic face shields while workers claim it was weeks before they were even given paper and/or cloth face masks. 900 of the plants 2,200 employees became ill with Covid-19.
• Cargill decided to not tell employees about their colleagues who were falling ill in an effort to keep everyone working. In fact, one Cargill meat plant didn’t tell employees about the illness racing through the plant until 130 employees had already tested positive. One worker even stated that he was told to remove his mask because “it was creating unnecessary fears among plant employees”. A few weeks later that worker died of Covid-19.
• According Bloomberg who interviewed 32 workers, supervisors were telling symptomatic employees without high fevers to simply take acetaminophen and keep working.

Caterpillar, Inc. is a Fortune 100 company which designs, develops, manufactures, and sells construction equipment and machinery. Caterpillar employs over 100,000 workers and earned revenue of $54.7B in 2018.

• Despite having to shut down three major plants during the COVID-19 crisis, Caterpillar still opted to distribute $500M to shareholders via dividends.

Equifax is one of the three major credit bureaus in the United States and collects information on more than 800 million consumers throughout the world. Equifax is a publicly traded company with annual revenues over $3 billion.

• In 2017, hackers broke into Equifax's servers and stole sensitive information about more than 145 million consumers, including names, social security numbers, addresses, birth dates, and driver's license numbers.
• More than 200,000 credit card credentials were also stolen in the attack.
• The hackers had access to Equifax's servers for approximately 134 days.
• Hackers accessed the servers by exploiting a flaw in Equifax's software, which Equifax has admitted it knew about two months before the attack, and failed to address.

Facebook is an US-based social networking website. Founded in 2004, Facebook now has 2.5 billion monthly active users and is worth over half a trillion US dollars.

Facebook is a publicly held company.

• Facebook has been heavily scrutinized for its role in the 2016 US presidential election. It has been found to have accepted at least $100,000 in payments for ads for 470 inauthentic Facebook pages likely owned by Russian actors.
• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to fight such manipulation in the future
• The company has also been known to dabble in questionably immoral social experiments with its users, unbeknownst to them. In 2014 Facebook was found to have conducted an experiment wherein users' news feeds were altered to emphasize either negative or positive stories from their friends. The users' behavior on the site was then monitored to determine whether their altered news feeds had affected their own emotional attitude. It must be emphasized that the participants in this experiment were unaware that they were the subjects of a deliberate experiment.

GameStop is the world’s largest video game retail chain. The company is headquartered in Grapevine, TX and has over 5,800 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

• GameStop tried to defy orders and argue that it was essential after it was told to shut down. It remained open until March 21st.
• In a memo from GameStop, employees were told to “tape a GameStop plastic bag over their hand and arm” while handling credit cards.

The corporate company, Hillstone Restaurant Group was founded in 1976 and owns the following restaurants: Gulfstream, Bandera, Rutherford Grill, Palm Beach Grill, Cherry Creek Grill, Los Altos Grill, Woodmont Grill, R+D, Hillstone, The Honor Bar, South Beverly Grill, East Hampton Grill, White House Tavern, Big Jake’s Steaks, and Houston’s. As of 2019, the group owns and operates 76 restaurants under 13 different brands in the United States.

• Hillstone Restaurants that are re-opening in Texas are prohibiting employees from wearing PPE, specifically masks.
• Employees have come forward saying that Hillstone has relayed that if they refuse to not wear a mask they will be taken off the schedule and not given any working shifts.

Hobby Lobby is a private for-profit corporation which owns a chain of American arts and crafts stores. Hobby Lobby was first established in 1972 and has grown to over 900 locations within the United States. Hobby Lobby CEO, David Green, has an estimated net worth of over $7 billion.

• Hobby Lobby has been under constant scrutiny in the past from multiple scandals. Some of the more prominent scandals that Hobby Lobby has been under fire for in recent years are the illegal antiquities trading scandal, the health insurance scandal, and the Dead Sea Scrolls scandal.
• When Covid-19 first emerged, Hobby Lobby CEO, David Green, wrote a letter to his staff urging employees tocontinue working despite wide scale shutdowns of similar business around the United States. Green even allegedly cited in his letter that his wife “received word from god” that it would be ok to stay open and keep working.

Holland America Line is a cruise line headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and offering cruises throughout the world on its 15 ships.

• Due to travel restrictions, many crew members have been stuck on cruise ships since the outbreak of the corona virus. However, Holland America has opted not to pay those crew members who are not necessary for the essential operations of the ships, leaving employees stranded without pay on a ship with no opportunity to try and find employment elsewhere.
• It should be noted that other cruise lines with employees in the same situation opted to pay stranded employees for some length of extra time. For example, Royal Caribbean extended pay such employees for an extra month.