gay rights

Wal-Mart CEO has a problem with gays

May 4, 2009

Mike Duke, who has been chief executive of Wal-Mart Stores for just three months, is getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere. It’s not the kind of attention a new CEO wants.

“Shameful, bigoted and discriminatory” is the headline over one blog post about Duke.

Why? Because, it turns out, Duke signed a petition last year that put an initiative known as Act 1 on the ballot in his home state of Arkansas. The controversial initiative says that only married couples may become adoptive or foster parents in the state, closing the door for same-sex couples. It passed in November with 57 percent of the vote.

Mr, Duke, what on earth were you thinking?

Needless to say, this is unwelcome news for Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, and it’s especially hurtful to the company’s gay employees. Wal-Mart has struggled in recent years to figure out how to deal with LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) issues. It supported an employee group called Wal-Mart Pride, which triggered a backlash, which subsequently caused the company to pull back its support for national gay-rights group. (See my 2007 FORTUNE.com column headlined Wal-Mart shuns gay groups.) More broadly, Wal-Mart has worked hard and for the most part effectively to position itself as a good corporate citizen as it tries to expand from its rural roots into urban, liberal areas. This will be a setback.

News that Duke had signed the petition caught the company flat-footed. When I asked a Wal-Mart spokesman for a comment, I got this response and no more:

I can confirm that Mr. Duke did sign the petition. Also, Wal-Mart did not take a position on the ballot initiative.

I learned from a source inside Wal-Mart that Duke was going to meet with the Wal-Mart Pride group to talk about the issue. (Note to Wal-Mart employees—feel free to let me know how that meeting went by email at marc.gunther@gmail.com.) A gay employee told me that he hopes that this incident will be a catalyst for positive change.
The story of how Duke’s name came to light—you can see a photocopy of the petition sheet (PDF) here—is the latest illustration of how digital media is exposing corporate and individual behavior.

Last week, a gay rights group i called KnowThyNeighbor.org posted online the names of the 83,000 Arkansas citizens who signed the petition, in a searchable database. The petitions are public records.

KnowThyNeighbor.org had previously published names of more than 500,000 people who signed anti-gay petitions in Massachusetts and Florida. In a press release about the Arkansas outing (my word), Tom Lang, the group’s director, says:

These petition signers need to stand behind their signatures and be responsible for this dehumanizing attack on the gay community. It’s disgraceful that they have chosen to exercise their prejudice at the expense of children who are now being denied access to loving adoptive and foster parents.

Lang urges family members, friends, co-workers and customers of those who signed the petition to confront them:

These conversations can be uncomfortable for both parties but they are desperately needed.  The more that gays and lesbians talk about the importance of their relationships and their love for their children, the faster stereotypes break down and both sides begin to realize how much they have in common.

Two days later, a reader identified as Concerned Arkansas Citizen posted a comment:

One VERY prominent person in Arkansas that has signed the petition is Michael Duke of Rogers, AR. He is the new CEO of Walmart Stores, Inc. He should explain himself.

By Monday, gay and liberal bloggers like Queerty and Daily Kos were running with the story and gettings lots of comments. Who says bloggers never dig up news?

For what it’s worth, Wal-Mart got a 40% rating in 2008 on the Corporate Equality Index published by the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s biggest LGBT advocacy group. Target, a rival, got a 100% rating and Costco got a 93% rating.

Ellen Kahn, Director of the Human Rights Campaign’s Family Project, sent me this comment by email:

When Mike Duke voted in favor of ACT 1…he essentially closed the door to a hopeful future for the hundreds of children in Arkansas’s foster care system…Duke should think about the real lives of these kids and show some compassion.

Duke’s defenders including Jerry Cox, director of the Arkansas Family Council, who called it an invasion of privacy to publicize the names of citizens who are exercising their right to petition the government, according to the Arkansas Times. What’s more, he wrote, many voters will sign any petition based upon “one simple principle: that the people, whenever possible, have the right to vote on issues that could directly impact their lives.”

I’m not persuaded. Duke chose to sign a petition, which is a public document, so how has his privacy been invaded? What’s more, if you believe, as I do, that equality for LGBT people under the law is a civil rights issue, then there’s no reason to put it up to a popular vote.

At the very least, Duke’s decision to sign the petition reflects poor judgment. As a senior executive of Wal-Mart, he should have known that supporting a controversial measure widely seen as anti-gay could boomerang. (The Arkansas Democrat and Gazette called Act 1 “just another exercise in stirring up bad feelings.”) Duke has alienated LGBT customers and their allies, as well many of his own employees.

And if Duke figured that no one would ever know, well, that wasn’t very smart either. Several years ago, the writers Don Tapscott and David Ticoll wrote a book about transparency in business aptly called The Naked Corporation. There are few secrets these days in corporate America. CEOs (and future CEOs) need to pay close attention to how they behave—on and off the job.

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Big Business and gay rights

September 2, 2008

You won’t hear much about gay marriage this week at the Republican convention, but it remains a hotly-contested political issue, particularly in California, where a fall ballot initiative would overturn the state Supreme Court decision giving same-sex couples the right to wed. John McCain supports the ballot Proposition 8 while Barack Obama and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger oppose it. A recent poll shows that most Californians side with their governor, Obama and gay rights groups like Equality for All. Should gay marriage win at the ballot box in the nation’s most populous state, that would be big news.

A political win for same-sex marriage would also reflect the fact that in corporate America, support for gay marriage – or at least workplace policies that treat same-sex couples the same as they treat heterosexuals – is fast becoming business as usual. Indeed, the shifting political tides are being driven, in part, by business.

Two new reports, released on the day after Labor Day, point to the changes unfolding in hundreds of American workplaces.

The Human Rights Campaign, in its seventh annual Corporate Equality Index, awarded 259 businesses, each with at least 500 employees, a 100% score for their treatment of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) workers. These business collectively employ 9 million people, and among them are dozens of household names, some of which may surprise you—Shell Oil, which is based in Houston, Texas (Bush country the last time I looked), Lockheed Martin, America’s biggest defense contractor, and Marriott Corp., which is led by the politically conservative and Mormon Marriott family. Longtime gay-friendly companies like AMR Corp. (American Airlines), Eastman Kodak, Intel, JP Morgan Chase, Nike and Xerox also notched perfect scores, even as HRC has raised its benchmarks over the years.

Joe Solomonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, writes in his intro:

Since (our) first report in 2002, the rates at which corporate America has expanded policies, practices and benefits to include LGBT employees have been faster than perhaps many thought possible.

All 259 companies with perfect scores support domestic partner benefits for same-sex couples. They stand behind their LGBT workers for pragmatic business reasons, as Marvin Odum, president of Shell, told the Human Rights Campaign: “A 100-percent rating helps us to better attract, recruit and retain diverse talent.”

These 259 companies are part of a self-selected group that chooses to work with HRC. But Daryl Herrschaft, director of the HRC’s Workplace Project, who oversees the report, tells me that 283 of the FORTUNE 500 companies now provide domestic partner benefits for same-sex couples. Think of that as a majority vote of Big Business for gay rights.

Companies that scored 100% also provide employment protection for transgender workers. The transgender issue is contentious inside the LGBT community because some gay rights groups supported the idea of removing protection for transgender workers from ENDA, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a proposed federal law that was passed last year by Congress but vetoed by President Bush. Removing transgender protection was seen as making the bill more palatable to moderates.

Transgender issues are also highlighted in a new survey from Out & Equal, a nonprofit network of workplace LGBT networks and their supporters. The online opinion survey found that “seven out of ten heterosexual adults (71%) agree that how an employee performs at their job should be the standard for judging an employee, not whether or not they are transgender.”

“A lot of people now have colleagues who have transitioned on the job, and life goes on,” says Selisse Berry, executive director of Out & Equal. Of course, professing to be fair-minded in a survey is a different thing from going to work on a Monday morning to learn that Grace from accounting has turned into George.

The Out & Equal report itself demonstrates that surveys are an imperfect measure of workplace behavior: Nine out of 10 heterosexual adults said they would feel indifferent or positively upon learning that a co-worker was lesbian or gay, and only 10% said they would feel negatively. Yet about 20% of gays and lesbians report being harassed on the job by co-workers and two-thirds say they have faced some sort of discrimination at work. So it appears that the bigoted 10% minority have been pretty vocal.

Still, both surveys make clear that all the trends are moving in the right direction for supporters of gay rights. Other research indicates that people who actually know other people who are gay tend to be far more supportive of gay rights than those who don’t.

As Selisse Berry told me:

Because we all spend so much time at work, and people are sitting in meetings and cubicles next to people of different races and gender and sexual orientation, we’ve come a long way. People get to know a person as a person and, by the way, she’s a lesbian.

The Out & Equal survey was conducted by Harris Interactive in conjunction with Witeck-Combs Communications, a Washington D.C.-based marketing and consulting firm that specializes in the LGBT market and advises such big companies as Wal-Mart and American Airlines. Bob Witeck, a founder of Witeck-Combs and all-around good guy, has a column addressing these issues on Huffington Post.

Here’s a graphic from the Human Rights Campaign report that shows which way things are going:

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