Texaco
The Texaco Culture Change
The 1999 lawsuit involving Texaco and its discrimination against African-American employees was the largest settlement of $175 million in U.S. history. In an effort to fight the lawsuit, Texaco chose to settle out of court.
Bari-Ellen Roberts, a former senior financial analyst for Texaco, further exposed Texaco's discriminating practice amongst minority employees in her book. With Texaco's dirty laundry made available to the public in this book, Texaco acted quickly with then CEO Peter Bijur taking drastic actions to settle the issues. His course of action was to launch a complete cultural change in attitude in the company. At this time, Texaco faced financial difficulties with decreased revenues and earnings and a reduction in their workforce. Texaco reduced their employees from 27,000 to 18,500. Peter Bijur's course of action to resolve this problem was to "make us a better company". (Dat 1999) As Texaco's CEO, he made everyone aware that Texaco would change for the better and no longer tolerate disrespect as it had done so in the past. The employee's not willing to change and go along with Bijur's plan would be dismissed. Aware of the bad publicity Texaco was facing, Bijur also spoke to various groups which included the Urban League. His objective involved strategies for developing, hiring, and showing the public that Texaco would promote and now have a diversified workforce. His vision was to establish leadership development programs so that Texaco would have minorities for leadership programs. With his changes in plan, Texaco spent over a billion dollars with women-owned vendors and minorities in 1997 and 1998. Confident with the changes and progress the company demonstrated, Texaco applied for inclusion in Fortune magazine's 1999 list of America's 50 Best Companies for minorities.(Fortune 2006) Unfortunately, Texaco did not make the list. However, attitude and changes in the company were evident as...
View Full Essay