Blessed Are the Patient
June 27th, 2007 at 2:34 pm
We recently caught up with the Benedictine Sisters of St. Scholastica Monastery, down in Boerne, a couple months after they made national news when Wal-Mart’s surveillance division (probably hidden behind one of those giant smileys) dubbed the socially conscious sisters “security threats” at the company’s upcoming annual meeting. Story first broke as part of a larger expose in the Wall Street Journal on Wal-Mart’s spying, but local media in San Antonio played up the nuns-as-security-threat angle, and tons of blogs ran with it.
Of course, the nuns, who also happen to be stockholders, were hardly threats to disrupt the event with protests. Their status as a thorn in Wal-Mart’s side is much more overt and happily acknowledged. They’ve been raising hell at the board-room level for the better part of two decades when it comes to Wal-Mart, with no plans to stop, said Sister Susan Mika, who also heads the Socially Responsible Investment Coalition, the mechanism that the nuns and other religious organizations use to get their message into board rooms around the country.
This year the SRIC is celebrating its 25th anniversary, which gives you an idea of how many times they’ve seen media flurries like this come and go.
“Certain companies or certain issues kind of rise up to be more high profile than others at times,” Mika (pronounced MEEK-ah) said. Back in the ’80s, it was protests against the South Texas Project nuclear plant. “People just went crazy. (They) didn’t know nuns or priests would work on that kind of issue.”
The big issues on the coalition’s radar right now range from climate change and emissions controls to local issues like the working conditions in maquiladoras on the Texas-Mexico border.
The goal — and Mika said she can’t stress this enough — is long-term commitment to pressuring companies to act as agents of positive social change. “Companies often just look at the next quarter and what are the dividends going to be, or what is Wall Street going to say,” she said.
How the coalition works is that it gets together to decide which issues are most important. Then they buy enough stock in the appropriate companies that the group’s complaints and suggestions, which now come from partial owners of the company, become legal documents, formally lodged at annual meetings and filed with the SEC. These complaints enter at the level of a corporate secretary and require response from management. This is different from a letter the average customer might write, which would be handled as public relations.
The effort is forward-looking, but it’s also a way to get companies on the record years, or sometimes decades, before they actually take action on an issue. It prevents the companies from saying after the fact that there was never any push from stockholders to take the socially-aware action. Mika said, companies would probably do well to listen to what these focused religious groups are asking for and get ahead of the controversy. She said one executive told her that her organization and others like it were usually good barometers of what would be important to the general public, only the nuns, et al., were about seven years ahead of the curve. With the way information disseminates faster now, Mika said that the lag between when the general public catches up is even shorter.
“Something starts small and then all of the sudden gets more and more traction. Everyone wants to talk about it and everyone wants to do something about,” she said.
Getting back to that old pillar of American-made, Christian-founded capitalism, Wal-Mart has for years been barraged by the socially responsible investors’ calls for better wages and benefits for employees. In one example, Wal-Mart only offered benefits to some employees after they had been with the company two years. They recently shortened that to one year, a move Mika praised. But it wasn’t enough she said, and the coalition continues to point out at annual meetings that most Fortune 500 employees give employees benefits after three months.
As with all of the issues, “You stay in there and you just keep saying, ‘This is not acceptable,’” she said.
UPDATE: Corrected where I erroneously said FCC instead of SEC.
June 28th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I think shareholder complaints are filed with the SEC, not the FCC. I may not always be right about such things, but I’m never wrong.
June 28th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Right you are. Text has been corrected, thanks.