timosman
04-25-2016, 04:26 AM
Unlikely Alliances: When North Carolina’s legislators tried to limit L.G.B.T. rights, big business was their toughest opponent.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/25/the-corporate-fight-for-social-justice
When you think about the role that big corporations play in American life, fighting for social justice is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet many corporations are doing precisely that in the ongoing struggle over the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. This year, legislators in at least twenty-five states have proposed more than a hundred bills limiting L.G.B.T. rights, often under the guise of protecting religious freedom; North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi have passed laws that, in various ways, make anti-L.G.B.T. discrimination legal. In an effort to roll back these laws, and prevent new ones from being enacted, some of America’s biggest companies are pushing a progressive agenda in the conservative heartland.
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/160425_r28056-320.jpg
Last month, executives at more than eighty companies—including Apple, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Marriott—signed a public letter to the governor of North Carolina urging him to repeal the state’s new law. Lionsgate Studio is moving production of a new sitcom out of the state, Deutsche Bank cancelled plans to create new jobs there, and PayPal has cancelled plans for a global operations center. In Mississippi, G.E., Pepsi, Dow, and others attacked the law there as “bad for our employees and bad for business.” Disney said that it would stop making movies in Georgia, which has become a major venue for film production, if the governor signed the bill. Something similar happened last year in Indiana, after the state passed a religious-freedom law allowing businesses to discriminate against L.G.B.T. customers and employees. At least a dozen business conventions relocated.
A little corporate muscle flexing can work wonders, it turns out. Last month, Georgia’s governor vetoed its religious-freedom bill, implicitly acknowledging that the state could not afford to lose Disney’s business, and South Dakota’s governor, citing opposition from Citigroup and Wells Fargo, vetoed a law that would have required people to use the bathroom that corresponded to their biological sex at birth. Last year, Indiana and Arkansas amended their religious-freedom bills after a corporate backlash (led, in Arkansas, by Walmart).
This isn’t entirely unprecedented. During the civil-rights era, when local administrators across the South resisted desegregation and suppressed protests, business élites in Dallas and Charlotte pushed for moderation; Dallas had desegregated its downtown businesses by 1961, and Charlotte began desegregating public accommodations the year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Those efforts, though, were driven by local businesses and were a response to protests. Today’s fight is driven by national companies, and they’re in the vanguard: there is no federal law protecting L.G.B.T. people from discrimination, but three-quarters of Fortune 500 firms have policies forbidding it.
The emergence of companies as social activists is complicating traditional attitudes on both the left and the right. Progressives have long complained of corporate influence over government policy. They’ve pilloried companies that threaten to move operations in order to extract favors from state legislatures; they’ve attacked the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council for its role in drafting a slew of pro-business state laws; they’ve called for overturning Citizens United. Now, though, progressives are confronted with a situation where meddling with the legislative process and overriding popular opinion seems desirable.
The implications for modern conservatism are even more consequential. Social conservatives were an essential part of the Republican coalition that Ronald Reagan assembled—composed of pro-business conservatives, national-security hawks, and the Christian right. The coalition always entailed fudging policy differences: not all social conservatives were true believers in big tax cuts and deregulation; business élites often didn’t feel strongly about abortion and prayer in schools. But, as Daniel Williams, a historian at the University of West Georgia and the author of a history of the Christian right, told me, “Even though the relationship between the two sides was always complicated, they were willing to make a bargain, because each side needed the other.”
The L.G.B.T. fight shows how far that bargain has eroded. To many conservative business leaders, today’s social-conservative agenda looks anachronistic and is harmful to the bottom line; it makes it hard to hire and keep talented employees who won’t tolerate discrimination. Social conservatives, meanwhile, think that Republican leaders are sacrificing Christian principles in order to keep big business happy. “There’s more than a fair amount of anger and a great deal of disappointment,” Williams said. Evangelicals have called companies like Apple and Disney “corporate bullies,” to whom Mammon matters more than morals.
Needless to say, the forces of Mammon are winning. In a comprehensive 2014 study of two decades of public-opinion data, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page showed that the views of business leaders and the economic élite matter far more to politicians than what ordinary voters want. Social conservatives have been the most loyal Republican voters for thirty years. But now they are waking up to the fact that their voice counts for less than Disney’s.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/25/the-corporate-fight-for-social-justice
When you think about the role that big corporations play in American life, fighting for social justice is probably not the first thing that comes to mind. Yet many corporations are doing precisely that in the ongoing struggle over the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. This year, legislators in at least twenty-five states have proposed more than a hundred bills limiting L.G.B.T. rights, often under the guise of protecting religious freedom; North Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi have passed laws that, in various ways, make anti-L.G.B.T. discrimination legal. In an effort to roll back these laws, and prevent new ones from being enacted, some of America’s biggest companies are pushing a progressive agenda in the conservative heartland.
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/160425_r28056-320.jpg
Last month, executives at more than eighty companies—including Apple, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Marriott—signed a public letter to the governor of North Carolina urging him to repeal the state’s new law. Lionsgate Studio is moving production of a new sitcom out of the state, Deutsche Bank cancelled plans to create new jobs there, and PayPal has cancelled plans for a global operations center. In Mississippi, G.E., Pepsi, Dow, and others attacked the law there as “bad for our employees and bad for business.” Disney said that it would stop making movies in Georgia, which has become a major venue for film production, if the governor signed the bill. Something similar happened last year in Indiana, after the state passed a religious-freedom law allowing businesses to discriminate against L.G.B.T. customers and employees. At least a dozen business conventions relocated.
A little corporate muscle flexing can work wonders, it turns out. Last month, Georgia’s governor vetoed its religious-freedom bill, implicitly acknowledging that the state could not afford to lose Disney’s business, and South Dakota’s governor, citing opposition from Citigroup and Wells Fargo, vetoed a law that would have required people to use the bathroom that corresponded to their biological sex at birth. Last year, Indiana and Arkansas amended their religious-freedom bills after a corporate backlash (led, in Arkansas, by Walmart).
This isn’t entirely unprecedented. During the civil-rights era, when local administrators across the South resisted desegregation and suppressed protests, business élites in Dallas and Charlotte pushed for moderation; Dallas had desegregated its downtown businesses by 1961, and Charlotte began desegregating public accommodations the year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Those efforts, though, were driven by local businesses and were a response to protests. Today’s fight is driven by national companies, and they’re in the vanguard: there is no federal law protecting L.G.B.T. people from discrimination, but three-quarters of Fortune 500 firms have policies forbidding it.
The emergence of companies as social activists is complicating traditional attitudes on both the left and the right. Progressives have long complained of corporate influence over government policy. They’ve pilloried companies that threaten to move operations in order to extract favors from state legislatures; they’ve attacked the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council for its role in drafting a slew of pro-business state laws; they’ve called for overturning Citizens United. Now, though, progressives are confronted with a situation where meddling with the legislative process and overriding popular opinion seems desirable.
The implications for modern conservatism are even more consequential. Social conservatives were an essential part of the Republican coalition that Ronald Reagan assembled—composed of pro-business conservatives, national-security hawks, and the Christian right. The coalition always entailed fudging policy differences: not all social conservatives were true believers in big tax cuts and deregulation; business élites often didn’t feel strongly about abortion and prayer in schools. But, as Daniel Williams, a historian at the University of West Georgia and the author of a history of the Christian right, told me, “Even though the relationship between the two sides was always complicated, they were willing to make a bargain, because each side needed the other.”
The L.G.B.T. fight shows how far that bargain has eroded. To many conservative business leaders, today’s social-conservative agenda looks anachronistic and is harmful to the bottom line; it makes it hard to hire and keep talented employees who won’t tolerate discrimination. Social conservatives, meanwhile, think that Republican leaders are sacrificing Christian principles in order to keep big business happy. “There’s more than a fair amount of anger and a great deal of disappointment,” Williams said. Evangelicals have called companies like Apple and Disney “corporate bullies,” to whom Mammon matters more than morals.
Needless to say, the forces of Mammon are winning. In a comprehensive 2014 study of two decades of public-opinion data, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page showed that the views of business leaders and the economic élite matter far more to politicians than what ordinary voters want. Social conservatives have been the most loyal Republican voters for thirty years. But now they are waking up to the fact that their voice counts for less than Disney’s.