Welcome to Is This Working?, a column about the future of work through the lens of gender. That’s a question many workers, particularly women, are asking nearly two years into a pandemic that has strained many systems to their breaking point, laid bare longstanding inequities, and prompted people to reevaluate what they want and need from work.
Stark added “the corporate response behind the scenes is growing” with the Supreme Court decision looming this year and state-level restrictions advancing in states like Florida and Ohio. To learn more about what business leaders are thinking as they await the Supreme Court’s ruling, we spoke with two companies and one ESG-focused investment firm that signed on to the Don’t Ban Equality in Texas campaign. Here’s what they said:
After CEO Jeremy Stoppelman saw a 2018 “Last Week Tonight” episode on crisis pregnancy centers, which tend to offer pregnancy tests and resources but work to persuade people against seeking abortions, Yelp’s user operations team combed through more than 2,000 businesses and clinics and recategorized them accordingly to ensure such centers didn’t appear in search results for users looking for abortion services.
Related: Facebook, Google, Amazon and more marked Black History Month with fanfare — after donating to lawmakers who blocked voting rights bills — Chris Miller, Ben & Jerry’s head of global activism strategy Ben & Jerry’s: ‘We align our business as best we can with our values’ Ben & Jerry’s, a Unilever UL, +1.18% subsidiary since 2000, has long taken progressive social stances and calls itself a “values-led business.” For example, the company said last year it would stop selling ice cream in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories because doing so was “inconsistent with [its] values.
Miller said it was important for corporations to continue to speak out on abortion access. He added that Ben & Jerry’s would continue to stand with other companies, publicize its stance in online posts and provide opportunities for fans of the brand to contact legislators.
Trillium Asset Management: ‘You’re going to have difficulty retaining employees’ Access to reproductive rights “is going to start becoming more of a competitive issue for companies,” in a similar vein to healthcare benefits overall, says Jonas Kron, the chief advocacy officer of Trillium Asset Management PPT, -0.55%, an investment firm that engages companies in its portfolios to improve their environmental, social and corporate governance practices.
“The best solution here is really a public-policy solution at the federal level,” Kron said. In the absence of that, “we need to do the best we can within the limitations that exist to support people who need to exercise their reproductive rights.”
Companies should stay out of personal health decisions as should the Supreme Court. It does seem ridiculous though that we would force people to vaccinate or be fired because they expose someone to risk but support killing babies. We certainly know the risk for that child.
Conservatives will coming after birth control next
If it’s companies who harvest fetal organs then f’em.