The WSJ reports an unsurprising development; namely, an emergent backlash against social justice warrior CEOs:
The campaign launched Tuesday by Consumers’ Research, a conservative nonprofit, takes aim at Nike, Coca-Cola and American Airlines. But others could be the targets, says Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research. The 30-second spots will air on national cable news, as well as “in local markets where the companies are headquartered,” the nonprofit said. One source says the overall ad buy could be up to $13 million.
Each ad treats the companies like a political candidate would an opponent, hitting the company’s reputation and contrasting its high-minded social-justice rhetoric with its other behavior. ...
My favorite of the three aims at American Airlines:
“Why is CEO Doug Parker trying to appease the radical left? To distract from billions in taxpayer bailouts, from his $10 million payday, from American’s record layoffs.” It takes the airline to task for losing baggage, shrinking leg room amid the pandemic, and attacking Texas’s voter ID law even as it requires identification from its passengers.
The Journal opines that:
The woke business trend isn’t healthy for the free-market cause. CEOs risk undermining support on the grass-roots and Congressional right for business, mirroring the anti-corporate sentiment that dominates the left. CEOs can never buy enough absolution from the left as long as they believe in profit. Alienating the right leaves them friendless. We warned CEOs that this would happen when they went for woke, and now it has.
I refer interested readers to my article Corporate Purpose in a Populist Era, 98 Neb. L. Rev. 543 (2019), available at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/nlr/vol98/iss3/2. In it, I make the point that:
Left-of-center corporate social responsibility campaigners have long advocated the use of “boycotts, shareholder activism, negative public- ity, and so on” to pressure corporate managers to act in ways those campaigners deem socially responsible. Right-of-center populists could use the same tactics to induce corporate directors to make decisions they favor.
I remain particularly puzzled why so few conservative activists have seized upon the SEC shareholder proposal rule (Rule 14a-8) to put proposals on company proxy statements supporting conservative causes or opposing woke policies by corporations. Especially when there's a slightly bored corporate law professor just waiting to advise them.
