Corporate DispatchPro JOHN FOLEY VIA REUTERS BREAKINGVIEWS
Corporate boycotts expose an inconvenient truth Boycotts can really work. Think of what happened to the Montgomery city transit system in Alabama in 1955, when Black passengers stopped taking buses for over a year to protest racial segregation. Or its British counterpart in Bristol eight years later, triggered by the local transport company’s refusal to hire Black workers. Both shared a similar recipe: large numbers of customers willing to make short-term sacrifices, and businesses that couldn’t function without the cash they provided.
What about when companies boycott each other? Something like that is happening to Facebook. Advertisers are threatening to pull their spending for July from the $670 billion social network because they say it’s not doing enough to remove racist content. Unileverowned ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, and fashionable outfitters The North Face and Patagonia, are among those who have joined the “Stop Hate for Profit” movement, triggered by protests over racial injustice and police brutality. Verizon Communications, the $225 billion U.S. telecom group, “paused” its spending with Facebook on Thursday. It’s tempting to think the spirit of Montgomery has revived in Menlo Park, California, where Facebook resides, and that racial justice has rocketed to the top of corporate board agendas. But it hasn’t, much as chief executives might love to argue otherwise. Corporate assaults like this are at best an inconvenience for a company like Facebook – and at worst, they are a marketing opportunity for the companies who participate, that distract from efforts that can effectively drive change.
45
www.corporatedispatch.pro
