Every time we stay quiet in the face of a corporate injustice, and decide that a corporation isn’t worth the fight (or the funding), we are telling them what they can get away with doing to us—lowering the floor for them and for everyone else.
Next Tuesday, millions of us will make a choice about who holds power in this country. It's a choice most of us get to make, at most, twice a year. And yes, it matters a lot. But there are other choices we make every day, usually without noticing: choices about what we let corporations get away with. If we let the standards get lower and lower in that realm, it will be harder and harder to make election wins meaningful because it won’t put the few politicians aligned with corporate accountability in a good bargaining position. And without corporate accountability both inside and outside government, we will not be able to advance progress on the issues we care about most.
A recent interview with the head of Chick-fil-A was a reminder of that.
On October 14, Chick-fil-A’s CEO, Andrew Cathy, sat down with Craig Melvin on Today for what NBC called his first broadcast interview. Melvin asked him directly where the company stands on equal rights, and what he’d say to the people who protested and boycotted the chain because they felt it didn’t stand with the LGBTQ community. Cathy’s answer, each time he was asked, came back to the same line, which he delivered with a smile: Chick-fil-A is focused on hospitality, good food, and great service, and everybody willing to walk in the door is welcome to eat.
For context: In 2012, his father, Dan Cathy, publicly opposed same-sex marriage, and people soon learned how many millions the family’s foundation had been giving to groups working against LGBTQ equality. There were protests and boycotts. Then there were also counter-rallies where people lined up around the block to buy sandwiches in solidarity. In 2019 the company announced it was shifting its giving toward education, homelessness, and hunger.
After the interview aired, Katie Couric commented that Melvin should have followed up by asking whether Cathy agrees with his father. But I haven’t seen too much else. I noticed there was no organized response to Cathy’s answer from the groups that led the fight in 2012, or from anyone else in our movement.
Cathy’s non-answer and the lack of response to it are a reminder:
All across corporate America, companies are testing how far backwards they can go. Where they stop has little to do with what they believe. It's about what we’re willing to let them get away with. It may start with something small, like getting away with playing games during an interview. But as we’ve seen over these last years, there is now an accelerated path from unchallenged rhetoric to unstoppable action.
As I've talked about before, most of the companies rolling back their DEI commitments aren’t doing it because the government is forcing them to. I wrote last December that corporations didn’t become racial justice advocates in 2020. They did what they thought they had to do then, and they’re doing what they think they have to do now.
Every time we stay quiet, or decide a company isn’t worth the fight (or the funding), we change their sense of what they have to do, and the floor drops a little lower for everyone.
When the head of one of the biggest restaurant companies in the country is asked about equal rights and his answer is that everyone is welcome to buy a sandwich, he is telling you where his—and, if we're not careful, our—floor is. And it’s a sub-basement floor. He’ll serve gay customers because, well, of course he will. First of all, he wants to maximize profit above all. Secondly, he understands he isn’t allowed to openly turn people away anymore. His message amounts to, Of course we’ll take your money, but we won’t say whether you deserve equal rights—and we’ll even oppose them when we can.
Some will hear his answer and see a win, because he didn’t repeat his father’s position. But that’s not a win. It’s a requirement. It’s a standard set by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A sixty-year-old standard shouldn’t satisfy us.
Cathy is also threading a needle because corporations now get punished from both sides. If he said he supported marriage equality, he might face a whole other boycott or outcry from the right. So instead he just decides to say nothing. But we know that all the right-wingers out there hear that silence as agreement.
Yes, we built enough power over the years to force him to thread that needle at all. But a CEO can now sit on national television, decline to say whether gay people deserve equal rights, and face no organized consequence.
That tells us where we are with corporations… and more importantly, it tells corporations where they are with us. As I often say: Nobody in those boardrooms is nervous about our power.
It’s not that I don’t understand why organizations stay quiet. In some ways it’s strategic. The worst thing that can happen to a movement is to pick a fight and get exposed as weak, and the resources for these fights are thin. That can leave us worse than we started. On our side, there’s a real shortage of money for corporate accountability work, right when we need more of it. So we choose our fights carefully, and a lot of fights never get chosen.
The right wing has so much wealth behind it that it can keep funding causes that look lost for years, so that when the moment finally comes, their movement is ready. The imbalance in funding and commitment is not lost on them. They count on it.
We also have to be honest about the Chick-fil-A fight itself. It’s tempting to point to the company’s 2019 change in giving as proof that pressure worked, but too many other things were shaping the company’s decisions for us to take the credit, and the boycott never closed a restaurant. The corporation has grown enormously since 2012. Reporting in 2021 found Dan Cathy personally still giving to a foundation that funds groups working against LGBTQ equality. Thankfully, even though we lost the fight to hold this one corporation accountable, we won the fight over marriage during that same time.
So it’s tempting to look back at the Chick-fil-A fight and claim victory. But if we can never call something a loss, we can’t learn from it. And then we can’t regroup and win.
Part of the lesson is that people’s attachment to a product is a serious factor. In conversations about whether Chick-fil-A deserves our money, I’ve heard some version of “But the chicken is so good” more times than I can count. And I get it.
It's not just about one of us, either. I’ve never thought a pile of individual shopping choices adds up to change on its own, so whether you or I skip a spicy deluxe this week isn’t going to move a corporation with nearly $24 billion in annual sales. An effective boycott requires so much more, and its success must be measured in more than headlines.
Yet, consumer-facing brands are still where we have so much potential leverage. That's because a corporation that needs millions of people through its doors every day depends on how those people feel about it. But those feelings become leverage only if they are organized. When we call a boycott before we have the people with us, it fizzles, and the corporation (and everyone) learns our threats are empty.
Like I said above, this is about floors and ceilings, which I also wrote about recently. Every corporation operates inside a permission structure, a working sense of how it can behave and still keep our business. The floor is the least it can do without facing consequences, and the ceiling is the most we can push it to do. That starts with our own strategy, too.
The floor should be our definition of what’s necessary, and the ceiling should be our vision of what’s possible. In 2020 we watched the ceiling rise across corporate America, and since then we've seen how corporation after corporation walked those commitments back. Their definition of what’s necessary, the floor, is inching back down to 1965.
Pushing back will take strategies built for this era. For a long time, a lot of our corporate accountability work rested on the idea that even against a hundred-million-dollar marketing budget, we could damage a brand, make it uncool, and hurt the business enough that the corporation would raise its floor and the rest of its industry would follow.
Many of the assumptions behind that theory don’t hold anymore:
Whatever happens on Tuesday will be an indicator of whether we’ve built enough power to set the floor ourselves. Every time we decide a corporation is a lost cause and walk away, it feels to us like a neutral choice. For the corporation, its larger sector and the forces it represents, it’s a huge win: It tells every other corporation that they can take us back in time.
If we let people run their businesses like it’s 1965, we’re going to end up living in 1965. We must be able to match their commitment to taking us all back with our own, well-funded commitment to push us all forward.
If you have thoughts on this, I'd love to hear them.
Rashad
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