According to a Newsbusters article, the group Clean Yield Asset Management sent an activist to the June 2 meeting in light of Roe v Wade likely being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. That expected decision has led Walmart competitor Amazon to pay the travel expenses for its employees to travel for an abortion, a decision that was followed by Starbucks and by Tesla in the name of “reproductive rights.”
Clean Yield urged Walmart to do the same but the push didn’t work: Only 12.9% of investors voted in favor of the proposal that demanded Walmart analyze the “potential risks and costs to the company” created by state laws that restrict “access to health reproductive care.”
"It's good," Ethan Peck, of the Free Enterprise Project, says of the lopsided shareholders’ vote.
“There is a bunch of left-wing activists,” he tells AFN, “that tried to get Walmart to capitulate to the pro-abortion activists in the way that Starbucks and even Tesla did."
Clean Yield: Abortions help retain employees
Clean Yield, based in Vermont, describes itself as a "progressive" investment firm that encourages investment for "a more just and environmentally sustainable economy."
According to the proposal it submitted for a vote, Clean Yield openly told Walmart and its investors abortion helps Walmart maintain a strong work force. Women are “three times more likely” to leave their job if they can’t get an abortion, the proposal said.
Walmart, which is not known for supporting conservative causes, did not directly address abortion. It responded to Clean Yield with a statement that urged investors to vote against the proposal “because we believe the preparation of the requested report would be of little value for our shareholders, associates, and other stakeholders and, therefore, would be an unnecessary distraction and redirection of resources.”
Walmart challenged on DEI
At the same Walmart shareholders' meeting, FEP director Scott Shepard introduced another proposal: Proposal 8 urged Walmart to analyze its corporate embrace of D-E-I, or diversity, equity, and inclusion, for examples of unfairness and even illegal discrimination.
That left-wing ideology is now common place in Fortune 500 companies, including at Walmart, where a vague goal of "diversity" often leads to mandatory training for white employees about racism and "white privilege."
That is certainly the case at Walmart, the country's largest private employer, where a whistleblower revealed years of mandatory race-based training for top executives. Walmart acknowledged last year it worked with the Racial Equity Institute in workshops that denounced the "white supremacy system" in the United States.
A spokesman for Walmart called the training "thought-provoking and constructive."
Shepard challenged Walmart this week to audit its DEI-inspired hirings and promotions for patterns of illegal discrimination based on sex and race.
Responding to Proposal 8, Walmart unhappily objected to it by claiming Walmart policies "strictly forbid discrimination." The same written response also praised Walmart's "equity and inclusion strategies."
According to Peck, both Clean Yield and the Free Enterprise Project have a common goal: Use shareholders’ meetings as an opportunity to put an issue before the shareholders. That also means the issue can’t be ignored by corporate executives.
But there is a crucial difference in the grassroots activism, he insists.
“We buy shares in companies to try to depoliticize corporations and left-wing activists,” Peck says. “They buy shares to further politicize corporations, (and) they're trying to get Walmart to do what they can't do through legislation."
