Is ESG Profitable? The Numbers Don’t Lie - WSJ - "The market was down overall, by 1.8% for the S&P 500 and 3.2% for the Russell 1000. ESG funds performed worse, with most losing 2.5% to 6.3%. A simple index composed of only neutral companies gained 2.9%, significantly outperforming both broad-market and ESG indexes in up and down markets. Notably, the benchmarks include the outperforming neutral companies—indicating that the politically active companies further underperformed. We checked the robustness of this result in several additional analyses by varying the time frame (extending the index return calculation back five and 10 years) and the index construction (weighting). Across each time frame, the index of neutral companies significantly outperformed the S&P and Russell benchmarks. Essentially none of the performance difference could be attributed to sectoral composition or to how recently stocks were added to the indexes. For a longer view, we compared the performance of the more than 200 companies that remained neutral over our data period with the benchmarks over the past 10 years. The neutral portfolio’s cumulative return (334%) outgained the market (230%); the results were substantially more compelling using equal-weighted returns as an alternative method. One interesting result is the point at which performance notably begins deviating—2017-18, around the time companies (and perhaps their profits and returns) began feeling pressure from the power and influence of supposedly passive asset managers such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, as those behemoths’ push into ESG intensified. The data indicate that, as common sense would suggest, companies that focus on profits outperform companies that don’t. As a corollary, it seems obvious that asset managers won’t maximize shareholder returns if that isn’t their focus. It’s hard enough to generate profits and returns when that is your focus, let alone when you’re trying to change the world."
The Rise and Fall of the Chief Diversity Officer - WSJ - "Two years ago chief diversity officers were some of the hottest hires into executive ranks. Now, they increasingly feel left out in the cold. Companies including Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have recently said that high-profile diversity, equity and inclusion executives will be leaving their jobs. Thousands of diversity-focused workers have been laid off since last year, and some companies are scaling back racial justice commitments. Diversity, equity and inclusion—or DEI—jobs were put in the crosshairs after many companies started re-examining their executive ranks during the tech sector’s shake out last fall. Some chief diversity officers say their work is facing additional scrutiny since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions and companies brace for potential legal challenges. DEI work has also become a political target. “There’s a combination of grief, being very tired, and being, in some cases, overwhelmed,” says Miriam Warren, chief diversity officer for Yelp, of the challenges facing executives in the field. Warren says the fear that company commitments are imperiled fuel her and others to feel “more committed to the work than ever.” Yelp’s DEI budget has grown for the past five years... In the wake of George Floyd’s murder in police custody in May 2020, companies scrambled to hire chief diversity officers, changing the face of the C-suite. In 2018, less than half the companies in the S&P 500 employed someone in the role, and by 2022 three out four companies had created a position, according to a study from Russell Reynolds, an executive search firm. Once mostly tasked with HR matters, today’s diversity leaders are expected to weigh in on new product development, marketing efforts and current events that have an impact on how workers and consumers are feeling. Warren and other CDOs said the expanded remit is playing out in a politically divided environment where corporate diversity efforts are the subject of frequent social-media firestorms. New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer. “I got to 300 applications and then I stopped tracking,” says Stephanie Lubin, who was laid off from her role as diversity head at Drizly, an online alcohol marketplace, in May following the company’s acquisition by Uber. In one case, Lubin says she went through 16 rounds of interviews for a role she didn’t get, and says she is now planning to pivot out of DEI work. The number of CDO searches is down 75% in the past year... During the pandemic, some companies moved people into diversity leadership if they were an ethnic minority, says Dani Monroe, even when they weren’t qualified. Monroe served as CDO for Mass General Brigham, a Boston-based hospital system and one of the largest employers in the state, until 2021 and convenes a yearly gathering of more than 100 CDOs. “These were knee-jerk reactions,” she says of the hurried CDO hires, adding that some of those elevations didn’t create much impact, leaving both sides feeling disillusioned... People are more resistant to company-backed efforts to advance diversity when they are worried about their own jobs, whether because of impending layoffs or disruptions from AI"
Clearly greedy companies hate "minorities" more than they love making money, since we all know that diversity is good business
Richard Hanania on Twitter - "Starbucks paid Eric Holder, who charges up to $2,295 an hour for such work, to teach them how to be less racist. He told them to give racial preferences to minorities. They're now getting sued for anti-white discrimination."
College Affirmative Action Policies Backed by Major Companies - WSJ - "“Empirical studies confirm that diverse groups make better decisions thanks to increased creativity, sharing of ideas, and accuracy. And diverse groups can better understand and serve the increasingly diverse population that uses their products and services,” more than 60 companies said in one friend-of-the court brief on Monday, citing a range of research. “These benefits are not simply intangible; they translate into businesses’ bottom lines.” Signatories to the brief titled, “major American business enterprises,” included tech companies such as Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google unit; manufacturers including Corning Inc. and General Motors Co., pharma and biotech companies and transportation operators such as American Airlines Group Inc. and Lyft Inc. The brief cited reports published by journals including the Academy of Management Journal, Corporate Governance, and the Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting. Other companies joined separate briefs supporting the colleges. No businesses filed briefs opposed to the university policies... The 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and corresponding provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have generally been read to prohibit official classifications of individuals based on race"
More corporate directors welcome rules to boost board diversity, but skepticism still rampant - "The shift in directors’ thinking comes as they’re increasingly pressured to improve gender and racial diversity. Investors such as BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group Inc. are voting against members of non-diverse boards, and the new California law fines companies that don’t comply... One in three men on boards said the push for more diverse directors results in boards nominating “unqualified” and “unneeded” candidates. Less than 20 per cent of female directors said the same. “I’m very concerned about that statistic,” Tim Ryan, PwC’s U.S. chair, said in an interview. “When I see that it tells me we have work to do.” There’s little evidence that the increase in female directors has resulted in less competent boards. Also, almost six in ten directors said diversity is driven by “political correctness,” an increase from the last two years’ surveys. And half of those surveyed said shareholders are “too preoccupied” with diversity, a slight uptick from last year... California requires boards based in the state meet gender and other diversity requirements. Its gender quota law will head to trial"
Greedy companies are more evil than they're greedy, so they refuse to increase diversity even though, we're told, it's good for business
When ideologues are unwilling or unable to be aware of the evidence, they need to indoctrinate others
RedBalloon Could Be the Job Seeker's Exit Ramp From Woketopia - "For those of us on the right who knew the culture wars were not going to stay on college campuses. The woke ideology has been seeping into corporate America for well over a decade. Perhaps tech entrepreneur and CEO Andrew Crapuchettes’s RedBalloon can offer a solution that allows those who wish to leave Woketopia an off-ramp. According to RedBalloon’s website, the company’s mission is to unite a community of businesses and job seekers who value the freedom to work and want to preserve it...
This message mirrors the sentiments of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who extracted his company from politics. In a blog post, he laid down the guardrails and gave severance packages to employees who were not satisfied with working in a company that refused to engage in political activism. He listed four specific things the company would not do:
Debate causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work
Expect the company to represent our personal beliefs externally
Assume negative intent, or not have each other’s back
Take on activism outside of our core mission at work
These four items were called professional behavior when I entered the corporate world 20 years ago... I can recall having to investigate a male employee patting a woman’s shoulder and saying, “Thanks” when she moved out of an aisle so he could pass by. It got that bad. A law meant to prevent sexual abuse and coercion devolved into babysitting."
'Woke' Google bosses ban staff from using terms including 'man hours' - "Several phrases targeted by Google chiefs include 'whitelist', 'blackhole', 'blacklist' and 'black box', as well as 'chubby' - and to refrain from describing people or things as 'crazy, bonkers or mad'... a Google employee told the newspaper that staff had ignored the guide and focused on getting on with their jobs. They revealed: 'We're much too busy to be worried about whether some totally harmless phrase that's been used for years might upset someone, somewhere.'"
Farrah Nazir on Twitter - "💥🚨Massive job Klaxon🚨💥 We have a new role going at @wellcometrust ✨Chief Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Officer✨ This role will sit on our Executive Leadership Team to help drive our EDI strategy £211,500K Apply by 5th Mar Please retweet"
Mike Diplockre on Twitter - "Right wingers used to laugh about students 'wasting' their money on 'useless' degrees like gender studies. But today equality & diversity is the fastest growing area of employment in the UK, commanding colossal salaries, all mandated by equality law. Who's laughing now?"
Crypto firm Kraken offers workers four months severance to quit if they are offended - "The CEO of Kraken, one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, has offered his employees four months of severance pay to quit if they are 'triggered' by new policies cracking down on culture-war debates in the workplace. CEO Jesse Powell, 41, issued the company's new culture guidelines in a memo on Wednesday, warning employees to stop calling each other 'toxic' or 'racist' and saying 'being offended doesn't necessarily make you right.' On Twitter, Powell said that the new guidelines were prompted by a handful of employees sparking 'heated debates' over issues such as diversity, pronouns and 'being 'harmed' by 'violent' words.' 'Most people don't care and just want to work, but they can't be productive while triggered people keep dragging them in to debates and therapy sessions'... 'Being offended doesn’t necessarily make you “harmed”' and that 'Words nor silence are ever “violence”' (sic). The same section continues: 'Being offended doesn’t necessarily make you right. We say why we disagree and calmly challenge ideas with logic, reason and better ideas. We do not call someone’s words toxic, hateful, racist, x-phobic, unhelpful, etc.'... Powell said that among the majority of employees, there 'was a huge amount of support for this move, huge amount of support for the company's culture and mission and the reinforcement of those.'... The new company guidelines include a lengthy section on internal communications, and warns that avoiding feelings of offense is not the company's primary goal. 'If nobody is ever offended, we either don't have enough diversity of thought or we don't have enough transparency in communication'... The policy bans calling 'someone's words toxic, hateful, racist, x-phobic, unhelpful, etc.' and says that neither 'words nor silence are ever 'violence'.' The guidelines were released on the same day that the New York Times published a lengthy article detailing the culture wars within the Kraken workplace. The article, citing five Kraken employees and internal documents, said that some workers accused Powell of 'fostering a hateful workplace and damaging their mental health.'"
The collapse of the ‘diversity’ industry can’t come soon enough - "Many black people will attest that it isn’t unusual to fall prey to “well-meaning” assumptions about our supposed “victimhood”. There are those, usually on the Left, who think that we ethnic minorities are always suffering and that we therefore require their support and counsel, whether we know it or not. That is what seems to have happened at the broadcaster Sky, where a diversity officer told a colleague of Latina heritage that she must have been “oppressed”. The colleague rightly objected and she later won a claim of race discrimination at an employment tribunal for the comments... A new ideology is being imposed on corporate Britain, promoted by over-mighty HR managers. What were once straightforward personnel departments have been taken over by highly-organised activists who are successfully exploiting moral confusion on questions of race with dispiriting consequences. Despite claiming to be “anti-racist”, their worldview perversely rehabilitates racial thinking – arguing that seeing race and judging by race is not unjust but a virtue so long as it is done by the right sort of person. They have attempted to delegitimise colour-blindness, which argues for equality under the law. And they spout all the usual fashionable lingo – including hierarchies of oppression, “white fragility”, and “white privilege”. The result has been the opposite of inclusive: it has stoked divisions between groups and encouraged patronising attitudes towards ethnic minority employees who just want to be judged on their ability to do their jobs... Even the savviest of corporate executives have been blind to this. Out of a combination of fear and PR opportunism, they have fallen over themselves to jump on the bandwagon, forking out millions of pounds on diversity “tsars”, “fellows” and “officers”. In boardrooms, only the bravest souls have been willing to state the obvious: that stereotyping should be rejected no matter who it comes from; that making negative assumptions about people because of their race is racism; and that ethnic minorities are not all the same, but indeed have a wide range of experiences and political views. These truths are the antidote to the Diversity Industrial Complex – which, incidentally, has a financial interest in rejecting evidence that Britain is in fact a good place to get on if you are from a minority background. So the onus now is on corporate leaders to take up this fight. They should distance themselves from this industry and replace their ideological “working groups” and implicit bias training with robust complaints systems to deal with individual accusations of racism. Not only would this free employees from the burdens of politics, it would surely save a great deal of money too."
The ‘woke workplace’ is devouring itself - "She championed the cause of "respect, dignity and belonging for all". She pushed for extra leave for "non-birthing parents". She led a "mission on neurodiversity" for the firm... all policies pushed by Dimple Agarwal, Delotite’s deputy chief executive and its head of "people and purpose". And yet now, she has resigned her leadership roles, after multiple complaints from staff of bullying and harassment. Like Bill Michael at KPMG, who told staff to "stop moaning", she was toast as soon as the story broke. At this rate, there soon won’t be anyone left at the big audit and consulting firms... By embracing a politically correct agenda, firms are creating anarchy where there should be leadership. They are adopting a box-ticking culture, where form is always more important than substance... everyone needs to get back to checking accounts, fixing tax returns, and re-configuring supply chains, or whatever it is the business they work for actually does - and agree that wokery and business are a bad combination. Agarwal was probably always inviting trouble. When you make a big thing about championing diversity and inclusion, and speak up for every fashionable cause you can think of, and yet at the same time hold down a major position at a firm such as Deloitte, then your own behavior is always likely to come under intense, and perhaps unwelcome, scrutiny... by embracing a woke agenda, firms are empowering staff to simply remove any senior manager they don’t like... These things are very hard to prove one way or another, and in a climate of extreme sensitivity the chances are they will be gone within days. No one will be safe. Even worse, the "woke" ideology is based on perceived oppression, a victim culture where everyone can claim some kind of special status or other, and an unhealthy obsession with power imbalances where even the idea of a "boss" is suspicious. The result? Big companies that buy into Wokedom are forced to roll over whenever they are accused of acting improperly or unfairly by staff. That might work - sort of - on a university campus but it is fatal for a business. It will quickly turn into anarchy. After all, organisations need to be led from the top - but that is impossible when staff can witch-hunt anyone out of work in an instant... many business and professional firms have created a box-ticking culture where form matters more than substance. It is very similar to the corporate social responsibility racket. Giant conglomerates such as Volkswagen were winning lots of awards for all they were doing for society at the same time as systematically cheating on emissions standards... t tells us something significant about the weird year we have all been living through. After 12 months of lockdown, and working from the kitchen table, many workplaces are simply going a little haywire...
UPDATE: An investigation into the complaints against Ms Agarwal resulted in no findings of bullying. Ms Agarwal resigned from her leadership roles at Deloitte at the time of the allegations and left the firm at a later date."
Save America's Workers from the Church of Wokeness - "Woke corporations in America today think they can fire employees for their politics without legal liability. They're mistaken... It's well established that an employer violates Title VII if it fires an employee because of his religious beliefs. But was Ms. Carano expressing religious beliefs through her social media post? Very unlikely. Nor was Mr. McNeil when he uttered the racial slur, nor was Mr. Cafferty, who said nothing at all. But that's not the end of the matter. Often forgotten is that Title VII protects not only religious employees from being fired for their beliefs, but equally protects nonreligious employees from being fired for refusing to endorse an employer-mandated religion. "What matters in this context is not so much what [the employee's] own religious beliefs were," the Seventh Circuit federal court of appeals said in the 1997 Venters v. City of Delphi. What matters is whether the employee was "fired because he did not share or follow his employer's religious beliefs." The real question, then, is whether wokeness in America today qualifies as a religion under Title VII. If it does, Ms. Carano has a straightforward claim of religious discrimination—she was fired for refusing to follow an employer-mandated religion. Surprising as it may seem, the answer to that legal question is almost certainly yes. The Supreme Court's definition of religion used to require a belief in God, but the Court abandoned that position 60 years ago in Torcaso v. Watkins. Today, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—which administers Title VII—employs a much more expansive definition: "A belief is 'religious' for Title VII purposes if it is...a 'sincere and meaningful' belief that 'occupies a place in the life of its possessor parallel to that filled by...God.'" "Religious beliefs include . . . non-theistic 'moral or ethical beliefs as to what is right and wrong which are sincerely held with the strength of traditional religious views.'"... courts have repeatedly found non-theistic belief systems to be religious. For example, in Peterson v. Wilmur Communications, the court held that "Creativity," a non-theistic worldview that adheres to white supremacy as its main axiom, counted as a religion. According to the court, Creativity teaches that its adherents should "live their lives according to the principle that what is good for white people is the ultimate good and what is bad for white people is the ultimate sin." If Creativity, professing white supremacy, is a religion, then wokeness, professing the opposite, must be too... The Supreme Court has called even Secular Humanism a religion for legal purposes. "If there is any doubt about whether a particular set of beliefs constitutes a religion," stated a federal district judge in United States v. Meyers, "the Court will err on the side of freedom and find that the beliefs are a religion." If Secular Humanism is a religion, surely wokeism is too. This doctrine protects woke employees from being fired for their woke beliefs. That's intuitive, but legally it also means woke employers can't fire employees for failing to adopt those same beliefs. Yet that's the essence of what's happening across corporate America today. Further strengthening the legal case that wokeness is a religion is the uncomfortable fact that, well, wokeness really is a religion. As Joshua Williams argues, Americans "have not lost their religion" but "relocated their religion to the realm of politics." Like most religions, wokeism is comprehensive and indivisible; just as no good Christian can pick his or her favorite five commandments, no woke practitioner can pick and choose which parts of the LGBTQ or BIPOC acronyms to like or dislike. Wokeism doesn't give suggestions; it gives affirmative commands. You can't just be "not racist," but must be "anti-racist." And like any good religion, wokeness has its catechisms, clothing guidelines (no cultural appropriation) and taboo words... Ritualized confession and excommunication are hallmarks of religion, and wokeness has cornered the market in both. Mr. McNeil learned as much when he was obliged to recite a repentant shibboleth for his sin before being banished from his institution. For the truly faithful, the greatest sin is not nonbelief, but apostasy. That's why J.K. Rowling was excommunicated with a special vengeance reserved for traitors. When she said that Dumbledore was gay, she became an LGBTQ ally and was baptized to great celebration. But when she said transgender women aren't women, she became an apostate—a sin even greater than being a deplorable."
This is also how the Satanic Temple files its lawsuits despite not actually being a religion
Woke, Inc. - "It can’t have escaped people’s notice that the Black Lives Matter protests which erupted in the wake of the brutal killing of George Floyd have had the overwhelming backing of the capitalist elites... the S&P rose by 3.4 per cent following Floyd’s killing. This was compared to a rise of just 2.9 per cent following Martin Luther King’s assassination (which sparked the riots of 1968), and 1.2 per cent after both the acquittal of the police officers who brutalised Rodney King (leading to the LA riots of 1992) and the police killing of Michael Brown (which sparked the Ferguson uprising of 2014). The Fox graphic said the quiet part out loud – that the brutal execution of an innocent black man would be a good opportunity for business. Why? Because it would offer every brand the opportunity to restate its commitment to the vaguely defined values of diversity and inclusion and to present itself as a force for progress in a cruel, heartless and reactionary world. This is surely what Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase (America’s largest bank), was communicating when he ‘took the knee’ in front of a giant open bank vault. On the whole, wokeness is good for business. According to an Edelman survey of 35 countries, 64 per cent of customers say they would reward firms for taking a stand on social issues... many of the firms that have praised Black Lives Matter have very few black people in leadership positions. Others have noted that the employment practices of those who supply the likes of Nike and Apple in the developing world are not all that unlike slavery... Consider Dow Chemical, a company which made napalm for the US military during the Vietnam War. It is also considered to be liable for the world’s worst industrial disaster – the Bhopal gas tragedy, which killed at least 3,000 people. Last year, Bloomberg Businessweek devoted a feature to how ‘Dow Chemical got woke’. The standfirst featured the following astonishing sentence, which seemed to imply that the second half cancelled out the first: ‘The big conservative chemical company with a legacy of making napalm during the Vietnam War has a gay CEO.’ Wokeness absolves all sins, it seems. It is easy to portray these moves as mere cynicism or ‘wokewashing’. But the embrace of these values by the corporate world is very real. Capitalism has struggled to justify its existence for decades, especially since the dawn of the Long Depression from the 1970s onwards... Wokeness offers the capitalist class a new sense of mission and moral purpose. There is a similar dynamic at play with ‘sustainability’ and green capitalism. And it’s not just brands who are benefitting. A whole diversity-and-inclusion industry has emerged. According to Iris Bohnet, in an interview with McKinsey consultants, US companies spend an estimated $8 billion on diversity training alone – though Bohnet could not find any evidence that this has led to increased diversity. Yet corporate enthusiasm for diversity remains undiminished. It is a mission without end... Industries and sectors which are already diverse still insist on finding more diversity. For instance, the UK TV industry’s latest Creative Diversity Network report finds that ‘those who identify as female, transgender, BAME and lesbian, gay or bisexual (LGB) are all represented at levels comparable with (or above) national population estimates’. The BAME population is actually more prevalent on screen than in the country as a whole – making up nearly 23 per cent of screen contributions but just 14 per cent of the population. The job of diversity seems to be largely done, but there is a lot of money available which depends on people pretending otherwise. In the public sector, diversity and inclusion is practically a religion. Even the NHS, which everyone knows has a disproportionate number of BAME doctors and nurses, is engaged in a bizarre drive for more diversity. One in five NHS staff is BAME and a whopping 30 per cent of doctors have an Asian background. Most normal people couldn’t care less about the skin colour of the people saving their lives. Nevertheless, hospital trusts across the country are employing diversity managers, some of whom are earning around £70,000 per year from the taxpayer"
Corporate America’s war on the unwoke - "California governor Gavin Newsom called on Hollywood to support California’s so-called liberal values by shutting down its film and television activities in conservative states, such as Georgia and Oklahoma... Newsom’s call for the film and television industry to punish states like Georgia and Oklahoma for their state legislatures’ positions is part of a growing pattern of corporate involvement in political and cultural battles. Earlier this year, Newsom went on the offensive against Florida’s adoption of a bill restricting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity – and he did so by calling on the the Walt Disney Company to pull out of Florida. He tweeted: ‘Disney, the door is open to bring those jobs back to California – the state that actually represents the values of your workers.’... San Francisco has led the way in sanctioning states who refuse to embrace Californian values. In 2016, the San Francisco city government passed an ordinance preventing city bodies from doing business with any company based in any state with ‘anti-LGBT laws’ and from funding travel to any such state. The ordinance has since been expanded – first, in 2019, to boycott any state that enacted anti-abortion laws and again, in 2021, to boycott any states with so-called voter-suppression laws. Consequently, San Francisco has banned itself from conducting business with any entity headquartered in 28 states. This use of economic force to achieve political objectives is actively supported by the leaders of corporate America. In April 2021, more than 120 CEOs, business leaders, lawyers and experts gathered for a Zoom meeting to discuss and organise a campaign to defeat ‘Republican-led efforts to restrict access to the ballot box’. They discussed plans to refuse to move businesses and jobs to states that passed Republican voting laws. Those involved claimed they were trying to ensure the future of democracy. And they were soon joined by hundreds of other leading companies, law firms and foundations, including all the usual suspects from Amazon to BlackRock and Google. Even at the best of times, big business is no friend of democracy. But today it is exerting considerable influence over political life. Major corporations and their CEOs are effectively insisting that their worldview, rather than that of elected politicians, should prevail. And Democratic politicians are egging them on. This domestic-sanctions movement is bad news for democracy. From the perspective of corporate America, it seems it is not up to the people and their elected representatives in states like Georgia, Texas or Oklahoma to decide on moral matters. These states are being told they have to embrace Californian values... for all their talk of tolerance, those promoting California’s values are being profoundly intolerant towards those who hold a different worldview."
