The night after I saw the mind-boggling documentary about a group of young women whose guts and guile and selfless, single-minded sacrifice allowed them to perform something like 10,000 relatively safe abortions in Chicago in the years immediately before Roe v. Wade made them legal …
… I spotted this headline in The New York Times: “Companies Scramble to Work Out Policies Related to Employee Abortions.”
Like, how to make it so you don’t need to ask your boss for time and money to have an abortion. How to avoid alienating many customers, who will see your policy as pro-abortion activism. And how to withstand inevitable endless lawsuits from anti-abortion people and politicians.
The Times reporter concluded hopefully that “some executives seemed prepared for it,” quoting Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who tweeted last Friday: “I believe CEOs have a responsibility to take care of their employees—no matter what.”
Did no CEO, ever.
Having watched the behavior of CEOs over the last 30 years, guts and guile and selfless, single-minded sacrifice would not be how I would describe it.
I’m glad CEOs are talking this way. But they’re going to need support—probably in the form of tough love, at the end of a whip.
Or as Gloria Steinem put it this week, “I expect to see them do what we make them do.”
Regretfully, agree.
SI at the top in business, politics, religion, etc. has always been the marker and perhaps always will be. I’m not talking Sports Illustrated. Self-interest is the name of the game.
SI: It’s almost part of the job.
Yup. Implicit in the job description, I guess.