Increasingly, big corporations are
opposing legislation they see as discriminatory
Earlier this year, as LGBT advocacy groups geared up to fight a
religious-freedom bill in Georgia, some of the nation’s most
powerful executives were rallying behind the scenes. By late March,
after the measure passed Georgia’s legislature, Coca-Cola, Delta
Airlines, Disney and nearly 500 other companies big and small–as
well as major sports organizations like the NFL and NCAA–were
warning of consequences should Republican Governor Nathan Deal sign
the measure. “There was such a swelling of voices and breadth of
industry,” says Atlanta city-council member Alex Wan. “It became
impossible to ignore.”
When Deal did veto the bill on March 28, he criticized companies
that “resorted to threats” like relocating jobs or canceling
conferences, film shoots and sporting events. But he acknowledged
that “providing a business-friendly climate” was part of his
calculus. And how could it not be? After Indiana passed a similar law
last year–which arguably provided legal cover for individuals or
businesses with moral objections to deny service to LGBT
people–Indianapolis lost an estimated $60 million in economic
activity and was pilloried by businesses from Apple to NASCAR.
Spurred by a desire to attract younger, more diverse employees and
cater to a new generation of consumers who expect brands to reflect
their values, corporations accustomed to lobbying quietly are
increasingly taking public stances on social and political issues
they wouldn’t have touched in the past. “That traditionally has
not been part of business,” says Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff, who
heads a cloud computing company with 20,000 employees. But, he adds,
it is part of “the new reality.”
In this new reality, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg not only forms
an advocacy group to change immigration laws but also announces that
his new daughter has been vaccinated. Target publicizes its move
toward gender-neutral toys. And Cheerios, after sparking racist
backlash for featuring an interracial family in a commercial, doubles
down by using the same family in another ad. “You expect businesses
to be speaking out on taxes and regulations,” says political
strategist Doug Hattaway, a former aide to Al Gore and Hillary
Clinton. “But more and more businesses these days are
values-driven, not just profit-driven.”
The rationale is not all selfless: those values can help drive
profits. In a global survey of some 10,000 adults by Havas Worldwide,
68% of the respondents said they believe that businesses bear as much
responsibility as governments for driving positive social change.
People want to buy things from companies whose values they share, and
many young employees feel the same way about the places they choose
to work. “There is this pressure to be relevant and share a point
of view that is bigger than ‘We sell this product,'” says Rohit
Bhargava, a marketing lecturer at Georgetown.
With any public stance, businesses risk alienating workers,
investors and consumers. But at least on the matter of LGBT rights,
the likelihood of a backlash is shrinking. Some 60% of Americans
support same-sex marriage, double the percentage that did in the
’90s. Employers now vie for top scores on the Human Rights
Campaign’s corporate equality rankings, recognizing their value as
a recruiting tool. In North Carolina, where Republican Governor Pat
McCrory signed a bill invalidating local nondiscrimination
protections for LGBT people less than a week before Deal rejected
Georgia’s measure, Charlotte-based Bank of America has been vocal
in its opposition. And in South Dakota, Citibank and Wells Fargo were
among the firms that pressured the Republican governor to veto
another bill seen as anti-LGBT in early March.
Even if you agree with these stances, the growing displays of
corporate conscience raise questions about the role of businesses in
shaping public policy. But barring a groundswell of weary consumers
who decide they just want the product without the homily, thank you
very much, don’t expect that to change anytime soon. C-suiters may
not be trained for the stump, but some of them are starting to sound
an awful lot like politicians. “This is about being an American,”
Benioff says of his public stand. “This is what America is about
today.”
For more on these ideas, visit time.com/ideas
This appears in the April 11, 2016 issue of TIME.
Katy Steinmetz
