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Tuesday, October 13, 2026

Companies Are Stuck Between Their Workers and Politicians - The New York Times

When Florida revoked Disney’s tax privileges, business leaders were shocked. Now, a Supreme Court leak has made some of them terrified of speaking out. More than a decade after the rise of the employee activist movement, corporate America faces tougher decisions.

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A little more than a decade ago, workers started increasingly raising their hands and voices against company policies. Since then, employee activism has been a cultural phenomenon that has demanded that business leaders not only take a strong, public stand on a political issue — something companies assiduously avoided in previous decades — but also take real action.

Then, last month, Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor in Florida, took action that threatened to derail that movement: Angry that Bob Chapek, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, had spoken out against a Florida law called the Parental Rights in Education act or, by its critics, the “Don’t Say Gay” law, the governor retaliated. In a special session of the Legislature, Mr. DeSantis rammed through a bill to strip Disney, one of the largest private employers in Florida, of the autonomous district that it had managed near Orlando for 55 years.

And this week, Politico published a leaked Supreme Court draft...



Read Full Story: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/07/business/dealbook/companies-abortion-flori...