Dozens more companies have come out against Republican voting legislation which critics say will disproportionately discriminate against African-Americans, after a group of top black executives urged the rest of corporate America “to move past indecision to action”.
The chief executives of Uber, Salesforce, PayPal and Dow were among more than 170 executives who signed a statement on Friday expressing solidarity with their peers and denouncing lawmakers who “impose barriers that result in longer lines at the polls or that reduce access to secure ballot drop boxes”.
The statement, organised by a business coalition called Civic Alliance, captured a striking change of tone from US businesses as voting rights have shot up the corporate agenda in recent days.
As two bills made their way through Georgia’s Republican-controlled legislature in recent weeks, the largest companies that call Atlanta home seemed to tune out the activists who argued that the proposed changes to voting rights were discriminatory.
Campaigners had urged the likes of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, Home Depot and UPS to oppose the legislation, warning that pledges those companies had made over the past year supporting racial justice and democratic participation would otherwise ring hollow.
Several companies issued statements supporting broad voter participation but hedged them by saying elections also needed to be “secure”, which critics saw as perpetuating debunked Republican claims about the integrity of the vote that ushered Joe Biden into the White House.
If companies had concerns about the legislation, they chose to voice them in private. Days after Georgia governor Brian Kemp signed the bills into law, that strategy looks to have backfired.
On Wednesday, 72 of the country’s most senior black executives issued a letter calling on the rest of corporate America to publicly oppose “discriminatory legislation” in Georgia and other states where Republicans have introduced similar measures.
“When it comes to protecting the rights of all Americans to vote, there can be no middle ground,” they warned.
Other chief executives should be embarrassed by the reprimand from their peers, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale School of Management, who said those executives who stayed silent on voting rights had been “seriously misadvised by cautious legal and public relations advisers”.
Their reticence stemmed from their staff’s “cowardice”, he argued, and from their fear of boycotts from Republicans who say the changes are needed to prevent voter fraud and restore public confidence in elections.
Richard Edelman, chief of the eponymous public relations consultancy, countered that many business leaders feared broaching what they saw as a partisan issue.
“They do not want to get into the politics. They feel this is a red flag issue for Republicans and they feel it’s beyond their remit. What I’m hearing from my clients is it’s a bridge too far,” he said.
Many large US companies have already picked sides in several debates over which voters are deeply divided, from which bathrooms transgender employees should use to immigration, policing and gun control. But the rift over voting rights is unusually fraught, as it is being presented as a test of two of their biggest recent public commitments.
Late last year, as former president Donald Trump questioned the validity of his election loss, many executives issued calls for a peaceful transfer of power, restating the importance of democratic norms for a stable business environment.
Months earlier, after police officers in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, countless business leaders had made high-profile pledges to do more to erase racial inequities in their own companies and throughout US society.
Today’s voting rights battles are “where the ‘big lie’ [that election fraud is rife] and Black Lives Matter meet”, noted Tom Rogers, former chief of DVR company TiVo. And Georgia is no isolated case: with similar legislation being debated in an estimated 43 states, companies risked getting “bogged down in trench warfare” across the country, Edelman warned.
Some companies remained uncomfortable discussing specific legislation, said Mike Ward, co-founder of Civic Alliance. But, he added, their black colleagues’ letter added urgency to a growing consensus that they should speak up for the principle of broad voter access, which most of their employees and consumers support.
By Thursday there were signs of some companies trying to get ahead of the next wave of headlines in their home states, as American Airlines declared that it was “strongly opposed” to legislation passed by the Texas State Senate that day which would limit voting access.
One way to avoid state-by-state fights on the issue would be for businesses to support federal legislation to expand voting rights nationwide, said Daniella Ballou-Aares, co-founder of the Leadership Now Project, which rallies executives to support US democracy.
But HR1, the For the People Act, which congressional Democrats have proposed, was probably too broad, too aggressive and too embroiled in procedural arguments about the Senate filibuster for companies to support unless it was narrowed down, Rogers cautioned.
Companies were engaging more readily with the narrower HR4, the Voter Rights Advancement Act also known as the John Lewis Act, Civic Alliance’s Ward said.
“Congress should immediately hive off and target a very specific motion related to voting rights and get it done now” to win the support of business, argued Tim Wirth, the Democratic former senator from Colorado.
In the meantime, he said, it was essential for the business community to speak up because of its status as one of America’s most trusted institutions. Executives should make clear to politicians that “if they continue this sort of thing, businesses are going to stop their activities [in their states]”, he added.
Teri Plummer McClure, a former UPS general counsel who issued another call for corporate action on voting rights with Sonnenfeld this week, said she had not heard of companies threatening to pull investments over voting restrictions. But that possibility hangs over companies’ discussions about a turn in US politics few of them welcome.
As Microsoft president Brad Smith spelt out the software company’s concerns about the Georgia legislation on Wednesday, he noted pointedly that it had agreed a decade-long investment in Atlanta only last month, but “a healthy business requires a healthy community”.
“Capitalism does not work if we don’t have a functioning democracy,” echoed Craig Robinson, a former WeWork executive working with Leadership Now.
Within 36 hours of the letter from the 72 black executives, some other business leaders were endorsing its message, including Apple’s Tim Cook, Julie Sweet, the Accenture chief, and the Business Roundtable, the Washington lobby group. Brad Karp, chair of Paul Weiss, urged fellow lawyers to fight voter suppression efforts.
Most significant, though, were the statements from two Atlanta-based chiefs who had spent weeks saying little about the furore in their own state. Georgia’s new voting legislation was “unacceptable”, said James Quincey, Coca-Cola’s chief, and “based on a lie”, said Ed Bastian, chief of Delta.
Asked on CNBC why he had not said as much before the Georgia bills passed, Quincey noted that companies had previously managed to achieve many of their aims in private discussions with lawmakers and others, without having to take a public stand. “But in this case it did not work, clearly.”
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