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A new report has uncovered what some Black employees at Peloton have suspected for a while: white employees are being paid more.
According to an in-depth investigation by Business Insider, a group of Black employees at the fitness firm began sharing their salaries and found that some of them were being paid upwards of $15,000 less a year than white employees in their same department.
The employees have shared info in a private Slack channel and meet regularly on Zoom while the company denies paying below market standards, though it does put workers into varying "levels" to assess pay based on geography and experience.
In one meeting with the Peloton exec who's responsible for salaries, Michael Gettlin, the 200-plus member group of Black employees were told that "it is entirely possible that two team members could be in the same level but paid significantly differently."
Gettlin added that if two workers are on the same level should be receiving "similar" pay and that Peloton has hired an outside firm to evaluate its pay-equity issues. To some former and current employees, the revelations about pay discrepancies come at no surprise.
"I just had a hunch," one former employee told Insider. Another employee the outlet spoke to said they spoke to three white workers who "were all getting paid more than what I started at," even though two of those people started several months after him.
For some Black employees, news of the pay discrepancies makes Peloton's $100 million pledge to fight racism questionable.
"None of it is genuine," one Black employee told Insider. "The Black dollar is powerful, and Peloton sees the benefit with aligning themselves the BLM/Anti Asian Hate stance, but does little to address inequity and diversity concerns internally."
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