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"PERSONAL CAUSES"?! This paragraph in yesterday's New York Times article on Hillary Clinton's 1986-1992 tenure on the Wal-Mart board really brought me up short:
Fellow board members and company executives, who have not spoken publicly about her role at Wal-Mart, say Mrs. Clinton used her position to champion personal causes, like the need for more women in management and a comprehensive environmental program, despite being Wal-Mart's only female director, the youngest and arguably the least experienced in business. On other topics, like Wal-Mart's vehement anti-unionism, for example, she was largely silent, they said.Wal-Mart, readers will recall, is the subject of the largest private civil rights case in U.S. history, the federally-certified class action case involving up to 1.5 million current and former female Wal-Mart employees that alleges they were denied pay and promotions on account of their gender. If you go to the Wal-Mart Class website, the top four questions they ask are:
The fact that Wal-Mart's one-time executives and board members would still describe concern for the equal treatment of women in the workplace as a "personal cause" despite the very public court battle current and former female Wal-Mart employees are waging against the firm, would seem to be a symptom of the attitude female employees are fighting against, and possibly even evidence for their suit. If the executives and board members are to be believed, Clinton tried to press the company to make progress on this issue years before the firm's employees felt the situation so intolerable they had no recourse other than to sue. The class action suit only covers the period from late 1998 through the present, but the board of directors appears to have known there was a problem years before this -- even Clinton's 1986 invitation to join the board was the result of pressure from female Walton family members to increase women in higher-level positions with the company -- and failed to take adequate action. Reports the Times:Have you been denied career opportunities in management? Have you been denied equal pay for equal work? Have you been getting the run-around about promotions or raises? Have you hit the glass ceiling?
Early in her tenure, she pressed for information about the number of women in Wal-Mart's management, worrying aloud that the company's hiring practices might be discriminatory.Perhaps instead of seeing Clinton's interest in women in management as a "personal cause," the largely male, Southern, and conservative group of board members ought to have worked more expeditiously to improve their record of promoting female employees into management positions. Who knows -- they might thereby have avoided becoming the defendent in the landmark civil rights case that has helped galvanize a national movement against their company.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
