Are you ‘fueling discrimination’?

By RYAN LEE – “This article originally appeared in Southern Voice and is posted with permission.”

As many Americans search high and low for the cheapest gas prices, Allen Cornelison fills the 27 gallons in his Dodge Durango at $3.19 per gallon without blinking an eye.
“I don’t even know what I paid for this today,” Cornelison, 26, said after filling up his SUV Wednesday.
If spending more than $80 per fill-up isn’t going to influence Cornelison’s gasoline-buying habits, it’s hard to imagine what will — and Cornelison admits nothing much does.
“I’m all about convenience — whatever’s close,” he said.
On this particular day, the most convenient gas station for Cornelison happens to be the Exxon station at the corner of Monroe Drive and Piedmont Road. While pumping gas, Cornelison is unaware of the oil company stockholders’ stubborn resistance to offering employment protections and benefits to its gay workers, and how gay organizations have been calling for a boycott against Exxon-Mobil for almost a decade.
Once informed, Cornelison admits it makes little difference to him.
“I’m ambivalent to it, I guess — it’s awful isn’t it,” Cornelison said. “I know, I’m just lazy. [A boycott] is a good idea if it was 100 percent effective, because you’re never going to get 100 percent participation.”
In some ways, Cornelison is part of Daryl Herrschaft’s worst nightmare. As director of the Workplace Project for the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights group, Herrschaft has spent years trying to convince Exxon-Mobil leaders to alter their policies, or risk losing gay consumers.
“Rather than really being able to have a demonstrable impact on their profits, we highlight Exxon-Mobil’s policies to educate consumers about what we expect from companies that expect us to buy their product,” Herrschaft said. “We’re not advising people to run out of gas before going to Exxon, but I think you will find a lot of people in the GLBT community who, when they’re driving down the road and they see a Shell and an Exxon, I think they’re going to pass the Exxon by.”
A Shell station is located directly across the street from the Exxon Cornelison visited Wednesday; but with gas prices reaching all-time highs, it’s difficult to expect gay people or other folks to prioritize their sense of social justice above their pocketbooks, said state Rep. Karla Drenner (D-Avondale Estates), who is gay and also one of the leading energy experts in the Georgia General Assembly.
“The vast majority of people are so wrapped up in their day-to-day stuff that they don’t know what’s going on around them, and if they do know, they don’t think they can do anything about it,” Drenner said. “I don’t think gay people are any exception here — I think most people don’t pay attention to things until it becomes a personal issue.”
Early in her career as an elected official, Drenner received a $500 campaign contribution from Exxon-Mobil. Despite being a neophyte politician eager to raise cash, she was “ballsy” and turned down the contribution. she said.
“I sent it back, and I wrote a letter to the lobbyist that sent it to me, and I wrote a letter to the CEO, and I told them I was not going to accept money from a company that doesn’t offer benefits to domestic partners,” recalled Drenner, who also asked the Georgia State Auditor to withdraw any investments the state had in Exxon-Mobil.

Exxon-Mobil Stonewalls

Exxon has been in the crosshairs of many gay activists since it acquired Mobil in 1999. Prior to the merger, Mobil offered domestic partner benefits to its gay and lesbian employees, and prohibited discrimination based on sexual orientation. Exxon leaders eliminated both policies.
Since then, various gay rights groups and shareholder activism organizations attempted to use shareholder resolutions to compel Exxon leaders to reinstate the gay-friendly policies. In the most recent shareholder vote on May 30, 37.8 percent of Exxon-Mobil shareholders supported adding sexual orientation to the company’s non-discrimination policy, but gay leaders still called the vote historic progress.
“The trend is clearly in the right direction — the vote has increased every single year,” said Herrschaft, who noted that 34.6 percent of shareholders supported the resolution in 2006. “We’ve gone through eight of these resolutions, a change in the leadership of the company and CEO, and they still have not caught up with their competitors.”
Exxon-Mobil representatives insist their company’s “existing global policies prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in any company workplace, anywhere in the world [and] therefore, the board did not support the shareholder proposal concerning this issue.”

The corporation’s ‘Equal Employment Opportunity & Harassment in the Workplace’ policies constitute the foundational documents of our employment non-discrimination policy,” said Exxon-Mobil spokesperson Gantt Walton. “The EEO communication initiatives, training programs, and investigating and stewardship processes explicitly state that any form of discrimination or harassment in the workplace based on sexual orientation will not be tolerated, and more broadly, that no form of discrimination or harassment in the workplace will be tolerated.”
Exxon-Mobil scored a zero on HRC’s “Corporate Equality Index,” which ranks Fortune 500 companies based on their gay-friendly employment policies. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Chevron and BP each scored a perfect 100 on the HRC ranking.
“The reason that Chevron has been a leader in the industry on this issue is really down to the company’s core values,” said Chevron spokesperson Alex Yelland. “The richness of our cultural and creative diversity increases our ability to achieve our vision and enhances Chevron’s work environment.
“We recognize that in our global environment, having a workforce that mirrors the composition of the marketplace where we operate and serve is a key competitive advantage,” he added.
Yelland also touted Chevron as the first major American oil company to add sexual orientation to its non-discrimination policy in 1993, and to offer domestic partner benefits in 1997.
The average score for oil and energy companies ranked by HRC is 71, with only Exxon-Mobil scoring under 50. Shell received an 85 from HRC, followed by Conoco Phillips, which earned a 65.
Quick Trip is not technically an oil company because it buys refined gasoline from multiple oil distributors, but the popular gas station has several gay-friendly policies, including prohibiting workplace discrimination and offering domestic partner benefits.
“It’s just a core philosophy we’ve had for years,” said QT spokesperson Mike Thornbrugh. “We understand we live in a very diverse world and we deal with that.” However, many other companies would do well to follow their lead and implement more policies promoting equality in the workplace. Many workplaces where discrimination is still an issue are often forced to deal with employment law firms london when their outdated policies are found out for what they truly are.

‘Wasted Effort’?

Not only is Exxon-Mobil among the last oil companies dragging its feet when it comes to implementing gay-friendly policies — it stands out among Fortune 500 companies as one of the few remaining corporations without any kind of workplace protections for gay employees.
Even Exxon-Mobil’s No. 2 ranking on the Fortune 500 list doesn’t insulate the company from consumer backlash, said John Kilduff, an energy analyst with the Man Financial Group in New York.
“The industry gets enough negative press, especially in these sorts of times, and they do battle for market space all the time,” Kilduff said. “I would expect [gay] consumers to be sensitive to those issues, and with gay prices as high as they are, if you’re going to irritate folks for various reasons, they’re going to shop elsewhere.”
But Drenner believes part of Exxon-Mobil’s stubbornness is because of the necessity for their product.
“They don’t need any group one way or the other, because they’ve got what we want, and that’s our fault because we haven’t done enough as a society to have alternatives,” Drenner said.
The gay-friendly policies of other gas companies will eventually impact Exxon-Mobil’s bottom line, leaving executives at the company to experience “a what-took-so-long moment,” Herrschaft predicted.
“They’re taking up an awful lot of time on a subject they could rectify really in a matter of minutes,” Herrschaft said. “Most companies don’t see a need to spin their wheels on this for a decade, and I just think it will be a case study in wasted effort.”