INSIGHT: LatAm chemicals needs to be as plural as society to reach full sales potential

BUENOS AIRES (ICIS)–For years, Latin American petrochemicals companies have been trying to increase diversity within to better represent the consumers they want to sell their products to – without much success.

Company boards and middle management levels continue to be mostly populated by men, and most of them tend to be white, in a region where ethnic minorities are sometimes the majorities.

The environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mantra has been used so many times that it has become a bit futile. A few statistics to show off positive trends are one thing – real change is another.

Companies need to go the extra mile to be as plural as society. And in some Latin American countries like Brazil, that mostly means one thing: blackness, in the country outside Africa with the largest black population.

They will need to hire and promote people who will not conform to the norm; visionary people who will be wise enough to know a company will not reach its sales potential until they try, at least, to resemble the society they operate in.

Brazil’s polymers major Braskem – the largest petrochemicals producer in Latin America – seems to have found one of those people: meet Debora Ferraz, global senior HR manager at the company and specialist in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) issues.

“My job is not only about gender inequality, although that is still a big part of it, of course. My job goes much further than that and it involves making Braskem more like the country: in Brazil, 50% of the population are black or have black roots,” said Ferraz.

“We have now established a system in which the HR person looking to hire will not see in what university the candidate coursed his or her studies. Before, we always ended up hiring people who were anything but plural: they all spoke English, they all came from the same universities. Behavior is now the key element in our hiring processes.”

Ferraz went on to say that in Braskem’s Mexican operations, a country with painful statistics showing sexism is women’s everyday life, a hiring process will not go ahead if there is not at least one woman shortlisted.

In Europe, where nationality is probably the biggest factor determining discrimination, Braskem pays more attention to that; in the US, it is veterans of war, many of whom find themselves lost in a competitive labor market after 20 or 30 years of service, she said.

Ferraz was speaking to delegates at an event about sustainability organized by the Latin American Petrochemical and Chemical Association (APLA). Her talk captivated the audience, and it was recurrently referred to thereafter.

RACISM: LONG SHADOW
Brazil is Latin America’s largest economy, with 220 million consumers, and it is a case increasingly studied when it comes to racism and discrimination. The shadow of four centuries of Portuguese Empire rule, where enslaved black Africans composed the bread and butter of the workforce, have left a mark present still today, in all aspects of life.

“The black and brown [Brazilians with black roots] populations represent 9.1% and 47% of the Brazilian population, respectively. Yet, the share of these population is lower in the indicators that reflect higher levels of life conditions,” said a report by Brazil’s statistics office IBGE in 2022.

“This indicator already shows a disadvantage of those populations when inserting in the labor market. The proportions of the black and brown populations among those unemployed and underutilized are higher than what they represent in the labor force,” it added.

Racism is so ingrained in Brazil that when the country officially abolished slavery in 1888, the last nation in the western hemisphere to do so, it gave no rights worth the name to its black population and even decided to go as far as Italy or Japan to look for the workers it needed to feed its nascent industrial sectors.

Hence the large Japanese or Italian minorities present in the country, who were allowed to integrate fairly well and some of whom went on to build business empires, quickly becoming part of the economic fabric.

Meanwhile, blacks remained at the favelas, Brazil’s famous shanty towns, only mixing with the non-black population when they went to do the badly paid jobs, many times in the informal economy.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Brazilian center-right president who stabilized the economy in the 1990s and gave way to the successes of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in his first and second terms (2001-2011), has become a reference in racism studies.

A quote by Cardoso lies in one of the walls of Sao Paulo’s Museu Afro-Brasil, which only opened its doors in 2004 and is a painful journey through Brazil’s most shameful past, a quote which sums up why the integration of all Brazilians will be a long-term and laborious enterprise.

“An economic system which was based in slavery and violence for four centuries creates a deformed society,” said Cardoso.

And a deformed society will invariably take many decades – hopefully not centuries – to be fixed. Companies like Braskem should make more efforts to bring people like Ferraz in but, most importantly, listen to what they have to say and follow their advice – Ferraz is black herself, and without doubt she will have suffered racism.

“We need to aim to have a good representation of society within the company. To get serious with this, we must have quantitative targets: we can do continuous training with employees, but if we don’t set clear targets, nothing will be achieved,” said Ferraz, who has been in her current post since 2022.

“Up to that year, 30% of our workforce was black but that figure had not changed in the preceding 15 years, no matter how many trainings we did. Since 2022, that figure has increased to 37%. What has changed? That we set clear targets, and we are fighting hard to achieve them. I speak monthly with the CEO and with other board members, because they are the first ones who must believe in this.”

Speaking at the same panel, Paola Argento, head of diversity at Argentina’s energy and petrochemicals major YPF, corroborated that until a company does not employ a plurality of workers – each of them feeling free enough to bring its own singularity to the workplace – a company will not reach its potential.

“If we all come from the same universities, the final product we offer will not be innovative. Plurality allows us to produce better products and services. These days, most consumers do care about these issues, so the lack of plurality and innovation will end up negatively affecting sales,” said Argento.

“But to achieve this true plurality of thinking, the highest executives at a company have to understand it and be fully behind it.”

The APLA sustainability event runs in Buenos Aires on 4 September.

Front page picture source: Brazil’s statistics office IBGE

Insight by Jonathan Lopez