Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said he doesn’t view himself or Apple as an “activist,” casting the company’s battles over privacy rights or its opposition to President Donal Trump’s immigration order in moral terms about right and wrong. Just before that he had invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quotation about the problem with “the appalling silence of the good people.”
Yet more and more, consumers and employees are like that student in Scotland, expecting the companies they buy from or work for to take a stand on social issues. And increasingly, CEOs are responding.
American companies have emerged as a force for social change in recent years and are among the most vocal critics of the new president’s executive order to temporarily ban migrants from seven Muslim-majority countries.
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Although Silicon Valley has led the opposition, companies as diverse as Chobani, Nike, Ford, Goldman Sachs and MasterCard all said they were against the immigration order or expressed concerns about it. More than 160 biotech executives blasted it in a letter published last week. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said he planned to hire 10,000 refugees in 75 countries over five years; he said that “we will neither stand by, nor stand silent, as the uncertainty around the new administration’s actions grows with each passing day.”
