The Reason Big Business Got Behind Gay Rights
After Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed Senate Bill 1062, there was much written about how her decision reflected pressure from the business community. For insight on this issue, I turned to the political scientist Timothy Werner, of the University of Texas at Austin, who has just written a book that looks in part at how businesses both make and affect policy on gay rights. We communicated via e-mail, and a lightly edited transcript follows.
“Private politics consist of efforts to shape the behavior of economic actors, especially business firms, rather than relying on public policymakers. When thinking about private politics, rather than thinking of the state as the decision-maker, we instead think of the targeted actor itself as making “policy.” Private politics have existed for a long time — one could argue that the Boston Tea Party is even an example — but they have largely been studied by scholars outside of political science, especially in sociology and management.”
The pressures on firms and industries to change their behavior can come from without or within. Examples of the former include traditional corporate boycotts, which push consumers to avoid firms that engage in what is perceived to be controversial behavior, or corporate “buycotts,” which ask consumers to reward firms that are perceived to be socially responsible. Pressure for change within firms and industries comes from managers, employee groups, and competitive pressures in the different fields in which firms operate.
"In my book, I investigate why firms in the 1990s and early 2000s adopted policies toward their gay employees that went beyond what the state and federal law required of them. Specifically, I ask why Fortune 500 firms expanded their nondiscrimination policies to include gays and lesbians and/or their benefits programs to include domestic partners. Although it almost seems foreign to write it now, at that time these decisions may have not made much sense for many large firms. In most states and certainly at the federal level, there was little threat of regulation on these issues, and indeed, most public policymaking on gay rights was overtly hostile toward LGBT individuals.”
But, in part, the hostility of the state and federal governments explains corporate America’s progressivism on these issues: Seeing that public policy was hostile, gay rights groups made big business their number one target and sought through various confrontational and cooperative ways to get firms to change their policies. What ultimately enabled these groups to succeed, whether they were national gay rights organizations or gay employee groups within the firms, was the shift in public opinion on gay rights that was already well underway on issues other than marriage in the 1990s. So two things — the combination of activists pointing to shifts in public (meaning, consumer) attitudes, and the speed at which a firm, as opposed to a public policymaking body, can change policy — helped accelerate the expansion of gay rights in the private sector. s to catch up.
BY JOHN SIDES
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