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Pro-Gay Companies Stop Being Pro-Gay in Russia. Here's How to Fix That.
Pity the multinational corporation. It operates in many nations, and those nations are all so different!
Take, for example, a company like AIG or Ford. Or Coca-Cola. At home, in the United States, they have to be good for the gays, because that's good for business. In Russia, the opposite is true. The level of corruption in the Russian government is rivaled only by its level of homophobia, and failing to toe the Kremlin's anti-gay line can bring the ire of its entire extortionist, business-killing machine upon the corporation.
But even as the human-rights gap between countries widens, communication continues to improve. So when a company does something in Russia, its customers in America hear about it. Like when IKEA edited an interview with a British lesbian couple out of the Russian edition of its in-house magazine. (It ran in other editions around the world.) Or when a Hilton in Moscow canceled its contract with the Russian LGBT Network a day before its conference was to convene there. Or when it turns out that companies on the Human Rights Campaign’s list of “best places to work” have entirely different personnel policies in the United States and in Russia, where their LGBT employees have a much greater need for protection.
Which companies have different policies in Russia than in the United States? Why, most of them. Last month, a Russian online magazine contacted companies from the HRC list that have offices in Russia and asked them a single question: Do they provide health insurance to the same-sex partners of their employees? “What we got was no so much an investigation as a fascinating account of our reporter's attempts to get an answer out of the multinational companies,” the editors wrote in an introduction to the resulting report.
Take, for example, a company like AIG or Ford. Or Coca-Cola. At home, in the United States, they have to be good for the gays, because that's good for business. In Russia, the opposite is true. The level of corruption in the Russian government is rivaled only by its level of homophobia, and failing to toe the Kremlin's anti-gay line can bring the ire of its entire extortionist, business-killing machine upon the corporation.
But even as the human-rights gap between countries widens, communication continues to improve. So when a company does something in Russia, its customers in America hear about it. Like when IKEA edited an interview with a British lesbian couple out of the Russian edition of its in-house magazine. (It ran in other editions around the world.) Or when a Hilton in Moscow canceled its contract with the Russian LGBT Network a day before its conference was to convene there. Or when it turns out that companies on the Human Rights Campaign’s list of “best places to work” have entirely different personnel policies in the United States and in Russia, where their LGBT employees have a much greater need for protection.
Which companies have different policies in Russia than in the United States? Why, most of them. Last month, a Russian online magazine contacted companies from the HRC list that have offices in Russia and asked them a single question: Do they provide health insurance to the same-sex partners of their employees? “What we got was no so much an investigation as a fascinating account of our reporter's attempts to get an answer out of the multinational companies,” the editors wrote in an introduction to the resulting report.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2014/03/12/coca_cola_ford_ikea_pro_gay_in_america_but_not_in_russia.html
2 replies
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