ESG (environmental, social and governance) and CEI (corporate equality index) are smokescreens for corporations who do not give a damn about their customers, products, suppliers, employees, neighbours, regulations, regulators and anyone else with a legitimate interest in the company's activities.
They don't give a flying toss about Trans rights, Gay rights, Taiwanese rights, Aboriginal rights or anyone else's rights. They aren't supposed to. They are supposed to make products that don't come back to customers who do, treat their employees well, pay their suppliers a fair price and on time, and pay a decent dividend to investors while following evermore complex laws and regulations. In reality they do the exact opposite of that, and they need a whole lot of smoke to blow at the public and their own staff. We can't be a**h****s, look, we have an Inclusivity Director and a sticker from a CEI agency saying we have 5-stars for Equality.
Nobody has any idea who the certifying agencies are, how they are financed, who runs them, what qualifications they have, and so on. All anybody needs to know is that the hedge funds will accept a particular agency's certifications. We-the-public assume these agencies must be okay. I mean, look at their client list. Would all those big companies sign up if the whole thing was one huge con-job and grift?
Hell yeah.
These companies pay their fees to the grifters, tick some boxes, and get to put the claim that they are some kind of virtuous something on their corporate literature, and so stay on the good side of Black Rock and all those other ESG-pushing hedge funds.
Those hedge funds are only doing it because they can wave the ESG / CEI certifications to prove that they are not really investing in Bad Companies who make firearms, kill endangered species, or hire contractors who hire contractors who use children in Lahore to make masks for Western nurses. Even better, they use these ESG / CEI certifications to create special funds of "Good Companies" for which they then charge a premium fee.
Follow the money.
This is why the companies whose donations to BLM were used to buy multi-million dollar properties don't care about that. They paid BLM so they could say they support BLM. The corporate donors don't care what BLM did with the money: they were buying the publicity.
There's also this: a company dips its toe into Woke Marketing. If it works, they do more, but most importantly, if it doesn't, they can stop any further attempts dead in their tracks. We tried that and it didn't give us the results we needed. Thank you for coming in and sharing your ideas with us. Gillette is still solvent, last time I looked, despite alienating every man in the Western World with its toxic masculinity ad in 2019. They don't do it now. Anheuser-Busch will survive what may very well be the episode that finally makes senior management understand that social media and influencers are as important as TV and poster ads. Right now the older guys don't really get it. In the meantime, their CEI certification for this year is a shoo-in.
There's no doubt that some corporations do not choose their ESG / CEI grifters well. Some are extremists with ultra-minority causes, a talent for guilt trips and moralising invective, and useful connections in social media, journalism and the big-name management consultancies. As a result, an unsuspecting corporate finds itself co-branding with an organisation that offers their children puberty-blockers at school. Not a good look, but fortunately most of the public will never know that level of detail.
The final point is this. Managers, Head Teachers, sports teams, record labels, publishers and other such are always on the look-out for reasons to get rid of people, preferably at a really low cost, whom they don't want for whatever random reason. MeToo dispatched many an unprofitable artist or under-performing executive: it was hi-jacked for exactly that purpose. Trans rights are just another such excuse.
We take inclusion seriously at ABC Corp, unless you're a fifty-something white man who can be replaced at half the cost by a Gen Z diversity hire, when we will sack you for not using someone's pronouns (which you are going to do at least once by accident in the next three months). That's what we at ABC Corp mean when we say we take pronouns seriously. We don't give a s**t about anyone's rights, but we love a BS reason for cutting costs.
Follow the money.
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