How can we ask that question, if the companies we work for and all the work we do, is asking exactly the opposite question?

Exactly - this is why direct action that challenges the root of power is needed. Instead of organizing to get the government to ban straws, we need to get the government to ban plastic fishing nets, cap carbon emissions, etc.

this is an area where i think that voting with our wallets as consumers is one of the best courses of action, if not the only, that can yield results

Neoliberalism replaces the citizen with the consumer. Voting with your wallet is part of the ideology that destroys public power, creates short-term selfish thinking and behaviour. So I don't think counting on wallet voting makes much sense in reality.

i was pretty young (<10) when i realized the television was always referring to me as a "consumer" and it felt awful, even then. if anything, i'm a "customer".

i hadn't, until today, realized that it was a Neoliberal thing.

thanks for your comment.

As Mises wrote: "When we call a capitalist society a consumers' democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers' ballot, held daily in the marketplace."

https://mises.org/library/meaning-market-democracy