Companies were already announcing ways they would help, even before Roe v. Wade was officially overturned by the Supreme Court in June. PayPal, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft and other Companies announced they would extend their healthcare benefits for employees to pay for travel to abortion clinics. Lyft and Uber later stated that they would provide legal support to drivers if they were sued by passengers for traveling to have an abortion. “Employers like us may be the last line of defense,” one tech executive told the New York Times.
Businesses have been saying the same thing for years about Climate change. In the absence of strong federal policies, the private sector has insisted that it’s stepping up with pledges to slash emissions and prevent catastrophic global warming.
“As a strong global franchise, we have an important role to play in the transition to a world where net-zero carbon emissions are a reality,” an insurance executive said in a survey for a recent report on Corporate sustainability.
With both issues — abortion access and climate change — companies have framed themselves as nimble, socially responsible protectors of the public good. However, there are limits to the extent that corporate action can achieve. Experts say that while the private sector may be able to draw attention to important issues, they cannot replace strong federal action. Whether it’s protecting the climate or the right to choose, they argue that businesses’ profit-seeking nature makes them ill-suited to deliver broad and important social goals.
“Companies don’t do anything out of the goodness of their hearts,” said David Levy, director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise and Regional Competitiveness at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “They’re going to look after their profits,” he added, even if that means privately lobbying against the values they espouse.
For example, tech and auto companies promise climate action while supporting conservative trade groups like U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has actively lobbied against federal climate action. In the same way, corporations with major financial interests who have opposed Roe V. Wade being overturned have donated hundreds and thousands of dollars to Republican Attorneys General Association. A group that has made it a top priority to reduce reproductive rights even after Roe’s reversal.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned, thousands marched for abortion rights. Jerry Holt / Star Tribune via Getty Images Beyond rank hypocrisy, there’s another big problem with trusting corporations to address society’s biggest problems: They can only deliver piecemeal social and environmental protections. They create “islands of progressive activity,” as Chris Wright, a professor of organizational studies at the University of Sydney Business School, put it. For example, corporate promises to guarantee abortion access for employees may only cover a small fraction of the population, leaving those most in need behind.
“The people for whom money is a barrier” often don’t work for the Fortune 500 companies that have offered employees up to $7,500 in abortion-related travel assistance, said Linda Hirshman, a lawyer and author who writes about social change. Most companies — including Walmart, the U.S.’s largest employer — made no plans to expand health care benefits as it became clear that Roe would be overturned. Last month, Walmart informed employees that it was considering its options. As of June 30, a survey from the asset management firm Mercer found that only 5 percent of companies had adopted a formal policy to cover a portion of their employees’ travel costs, although 23 percent said they were planning to implement one.
There’s a parallel to climate action here. States and corporations have been left to fill in the gaps because there is no strong federal climate policy. As with reproductive rights, the Northeast and West Coast states are passing policies to stop catastrophic global warming. While the rest of the country is still stuck in inaction, it’s a similar story. Although corporate action makes up a substantial portion of the climate change action, it is still very small in red states.
Problem is, not all companies have a climate commitment. As of June 1, only about one-third of companies listed on the global Forbes 2,000 list had net-zero targets, leaving a large gap in the bloc’s collective climate commitment. And even then, research published this spring suggests that some of the planet’s dirtiest assets — things like oil fields — are being offloaded by oil majors to smaller companies without climate pledges. This allows large companies to clear their carbon ledger books, even as they continue to emit.
Amazon’s founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos, speaks to the media on the company’s sustainability efforts, which include decarbonizing by 2040. Eric Baradat / AFP via Getty Images What’s more, under closer scrutiny, many climate pledges tend to fall apart — perhaps because they lean on unreliable carbon offsets, or because they set far-off goals with no interim targets or accountability mechanisms. A recent report from Net Zero Tracker, an analysis project coordinated by nonprofit organizations and research labs, highlighted an “alarming lack of credibility” throughout the net-zero landscape. It found that the majority of companies promising to achieve net-zero had no plans to address “scope 3” emissions — the emissions associated with the products they sell to consumers. This category accounts for more than 75 per cent of the climate pollution in oil and gas companies.
Lena Moffitt (chief of staff for Evergreen Action), doubts the sincerity many corporate climate pledges. “Fossil fuel companies are making net-zero pledges left and right while they are also doing the opposite,” she said, highlighting oil majors’ plans to keep expanding oil and gas exploration. “They are saying one thing and doing another.”
Auden Schendler, senior vice president of sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company and a prominent critic of corporate responsibility commitments, suspects that most companies make pledges just to burnish their reputations — not to realistically address urgent problems. On reproductive rights, for example, there are lots of unresolved questions about how companies’ travel assistance programs will actually work. Are contractors eligible? Employees will have to reveal their pregnancies to HR. What happens if states subpoena businesses to search for information about employees who have traveled outside of the state for an abortion?
“While I think it’s great that [companies] are trying to help, there are some real worries with requiring people to disclose their abortions and their medical procedures in general to their employers,” said Brittany Leach, a feminist political theorist and an incoming assistant professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Levy, a University of Massachusetts professor says that company leaders are limited by the reality of capitalism’s economic system. They can nod to social and environmental values that their customers hold, but it’s harder to flesh out far-reaching policies on those issues because the firms they control are designed to be profit-driven. They can’t deviate much from that, Levy said. “You can’t ask a shark to stop eating small fish; it’s in its DNA.”
According to Schendler, solving climate change and protecting all Americans’ reproductive rights requires a nationwide approach that only the federal government can provide. “The only way you solve giant problems is through policy regulations,” he said.
House Democrats applauded when Speaker Nancy Pelosi signed The Inflation Reduction Act. It provides $369 million in tax breaks and other funding to clean energy programs. Drew Angerer / Getty Images On climate, Moffitt said Congress should continue to pass far-reaching legislation that transforms every sector of the economy “at the magnitude and scale” that the crisis demands. This could mean imposing stringent emission standards for buildings, heavy industries, and power generation as well as strengthening supply-side policies that limit new fossil fuel extracting. The President Joe Biden signed the $433 billion Climate Act. This would encourage clean energy technology adoption and increase drilling on public lands. Proposed rules by the Securities and Exchange Commission (a federal agency that supervises publicly traded corporations) could crack down corporate pledges. They would weed out disingenuous ones and help to unify all around a scientifically supported path for limiting global warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
Levy interviewed corporate leaders to conduct his research. He believes that many companies would appreciate more government regulation. It provides certainty and can be incorporated into long-term planning.
The fight for reproductive rights presents a different set of options for the federal government, starting with the passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would enshrine the right to an abortion into federal law. Even more broadly, it could recognize the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment — which guarantees women a suite of human rights and would support the right to an abortion — and ratify the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. It would also be beneficial to repeal the Hyde Amendment which prohibits federal funds being used for abortion-related purposes.
Schendler advised companies to support federal efforts and not just lobby against them privately or adopting only internal policies regarding climate change and health care. CEOs “need to go to Washington, need to be writing op-eds,” he said. Businesses should be “using corporate-power lobbying and leadership to drive systems change.”
Schendler echoed the other experts Grist spoke with, who mentioned a fundamental mismatch between corporate actions and the systemic problems they’re meant to address.
“The argument that we’ve still got corporations and possibly local governments? That’s woefully insufficient for what’s required,” said Wright, speaking specifically about climate change. To reduce the harm that’s coming from rising temperatures, he added, “you need a whole systems approach, and that requires government regulation.”
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