One of the most surprising excrescences of modern woke-ism is the emergence of the “woke corporation”. I mean, aren’t corporations the “Masters of War”, run by “Sgt Dow-Jones”? Corporations, in the “progressive” worldview , are the very agents of capitalism, who, according to the celebrity leftists of Team America: World Police, “sit there in their corporation buildings, and…they’re all corporation-y, and they make money!”
So why are so many corporations suddenly getting woke, even if it means they end up going broke?
Partly, it’s yet another victory for the left in their Long March through the institutions. HR and PR departments of the major corporations are stuffed with overwhelmingly left-wing sociology and communications graduates who’ve imbibed a steady diet of neo-Marxist theory.
But most importantly, it’s because corporations have become absolutely risk-averse. So, when the bright young graduates they’ve hired to run their hiring tell them they need more “diversity”, or the 20-something running their PR warns them that they’re trending down on Twitter, they panic. The tail gets wagged, all the way to the top.
This forms the basic modus operandi of the likes of sleeping giants. Using dozens, if not hundreds, of “sock-puppet” social media accounts, a tiny clique of activists bombard corporate PR departments with boiler-plate complaints about “racism”, “sexism”, “transphobia”. Living as they do almost entirely on social media, the PR kiddies mistake this for a real-world “backlash”. Cue panic in the boardroom.
Nine Entertainment boss Hugh Marks[…]has joined a small but growing club of chief executives that have been pushed onto their swords for breaking cultural rules about conduct with subordinates.
But in the corporate world it’s less about morality and more about risk. Risk to the reputation of the company, the performance and focus of the senior leadership team, and in the case that a relationship goes pear shaped, risk the company itself might get caught up in the wreckage.
Investor tolerance for this kind of risk has become incredibly low in 2020, as some very high profile cases, including at AMP and QBE, have shown.
Every serious listed company now has a board risk committee that deals with all major financial and non-financial risks, from behaviour of management and staff to related party transactions and climate.
So, as even the ever-so-woke SMH concedes, it’s nothing to do with morality: it’s still, first and last, about money.
And woke-ist bullying.
Corporations have become accountable to their large institutional shareholders, who in turn are accountable to the people whose money they invest.
Those “institutional shareholders” are dominated by union-run superannuation funds. That’s where the left-corporate rubber really hits the road. Using their members’ money – acquired via the compulsory superannuation contributions legislated by left-wing governments – left-wing unions are cashed to the gunwales and all-too-willing to use those rivers of gold to bully corporations into submitting to their leftist agendas. Far from “accountable to the people whose money they invest”, most workers have no idea and probably little sympathy for how their money is being used to force the “progressive” agenda on the corporate world.
But since when do the left actually care what a bunch of “deplorable” workers think?
Corporations are letting know-nothing Millennials bully them into faux-wokeness. The BFD
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