ADL affiliate JLens launches tracker ranking 100 US companies on Jewish employee support

JLens has launched a new workplace tracker that ranks how openly America’s largest public companies support Jewish employees. The initiative arrives ahead of the High Holy Days, when questions about religious leave and workplace accommodations become especially immediate for Jewish workers.

The JLens Workplace Tracker examines 100 companies across three areas: Jewish Experience in the Workplace, Religious Accommodations and Workplace Protections. Its measures include Jewish employee resource groups, antisemitism training, safeguards against ancestry-based and religious discrimination, floating holidays, prayer or reflection spaces, and confidential reporting systems.

Only 30 companies received medal designations based on publicly available or company-reported information. Amazon, Bank of America, Cisco, JPMorgan Chase, KKR, Pfizer, S&P Global, Spotify and Uber received gold ratings. Accenture, Coca-Cola, Eli Lilly, GE Vernova, Intuit, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Thermo Fisher Scientific received silver. AbbVie, Adobe, Alphabet, American Express, Apple, Citigroup, CrowdStrike, Medtronic, Morgan Stanley, Netflix, Palo Alto Networks and Texas Instruments received bronze.

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Asking for religious accommodation is not easy. A new Jewish employee who has not accrued enough time off, facing the Jewish High Holidays a few weeks into the job, has to decide whether to raise it with a manager they barely know.

The other 70 companies were marked “Not Rated” because JLens said there was not enough public data to assess them. Alongside the tracker, the organization released The JLens Workplace Guide, which cites KKR’s Jewish Heritage Network, Alphabet’s holiday scheduling guide, Citigroup’s floating Heritage Day and Salesforce’s multi-faith prayer space as examples of workplace practices.

Ari Hoffnung, JLens’s managing director, said employees can face difficult choices when religious holidays arrive soon after they start a job. “Asking for religious accommodation is not easy. A new Jewish employee who has not accrued enough time off, facing the Jewish High Holidays a few weeks into the job, has to decide whether to raise it with a manager they barely know,” he said. Hoffnung argued that publishing accommodation policies and explaining them during orientation can make such requests routine rather than unusual. The initiative comes as Clal’s Jewish@Work 2024 survey points to continuing workplace gaps and hiring biases.

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When a company publishes its religious accommodation policy and walks new hires through it at orientation, that employee is asking for something routine rather than something extraordinary.