Starbucks and Amazon are hardly "progressive". Most folks I know would describe them as pretty much bog standard big capitalist companies. Sure, they slap a rainbow logo on their twitter during June, but so does Raytheon.

I'm less sure about Apple, which might actually have more of a progressive streak in it (I'm simply not knowledgable), but the other two are pretty much standard exploitative mega corps.

Apple is absolutely ruthless toward employees. For example, they were the ringleader behind an illegal anti-poaching conspiracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Oh totally, I was more remarking on whether they were progressive at all. That's the part I'm not sure about.

> they

Well, Steve Jobs specifically.

Maybe because I am in denial, but I like to sort of differentiate the two. However you feel about the twain a decade ago, to be blunt, Steve is no more and Apple continues on.

Jobs recruited Tim Cook to Apple, make Cook the COO, and then made Cook his successor.

Moreover, Cook was the main driver for putting all of Apple manufacturing in totalitarian China, which has caused many difficulties for Apple's "progressive" image, because the Chinese government has forced Apple into censoring the App Store and even into censoring the operating systems (removing references to Taiwan, for example). Not to mention the often terrible working conditions in iPhone factories.

Yeah, all ideals any large company claims to have are shed for the sake of China's market. That should be evidence enough that it's just a method to maximize their profits.

Specifically in the case of Starbucks, they absolutely think they are.

Does anyone besides me remember that CEO Howard Schultz thought he should be president back in 2016? This whole thing just makes me want to shout from the rooftops: We do not have a left-wing party in the United States! The Democrats are anti-union and pro-austerity. We have a center-right party and a far-right party, that's it!

In the context of discourse in American politics -- and increasingly Canadian ones as well -- "left wing" has been rewritten to be almost exclusively about cultural politics. This is the only way one can decode everyday conversations when people talk about "the left"; they clearly don't mean what it meant "classically": socialist politics / economic policy, working class politics.

It's basically a marginal position at this point to be outright pro-union, even more so to be pro-nationalization / pro-interventionist. Apart from outliers like maybe Bernie Sanders, an explicit working class orientation has been taken over almost completely by the populist right, and much of the self-identified "left" speaks mostly to the concerns of the upper middle class. Not just the mainstream of the US Democrats, but even much of what is spoken about by "the squad", or the Canadian NDP party.

Regular working people are not the audience anymore.

Every socially conservative pro-labor movement in the USA is rapidly labeled as "fascist" in America, usually because they promote economic protectionism by reducing immigration and raising barriers to cheap imports from countries that don't protect their workers to the degree the US does.

Part of the problem is that those organizations allow fascists to enter them. (Like many left wing movements allow authoritarian communists -- tankies -- to enter them.)

If a part of your platform is "No immigration" it becomes very difficult to distinguish that from "No immigration (because I don't like brown people)".

> Specifically in the case of Starbucks, they absolutely think they are.

Specifically in the case of Starbucks, progressives do not think they are.

I thought I implied that pretty heavily, but yes, I agree.

Around 2015 (still under Schultz), I got the impression Starbucks actually cares about its partners. They paid above-market wages to attract good people and provided good benefits.

AFAIK, they still do pay high wages and provide excellent benefits compared to other fast food chains.

This isn't necessarily true although it is parroted quite a bit due to SBs excellent PR and marketing.

One of the complains perusing the SB subreddits discuss how pay doesn't keep up with cost of living and that the benefits are difficult to qualify for due to the company scheduling hours under qualifying threshold for them in a 6 month period.

It is also interesting to hear that these locations are running skeleton crews while overhiring just to be able to schedule each worker fewer hours.

I can assure you that anything done by Shultz is a decision based purely on money and shareholder interest, masked as a benefit for partners.

There's no such thing as a progressive company. They do it for marketing reasons, only after a movement made up of many people taking risks "normalised" a particular form of social progress.

If corporations are people, every one is a psychopath willing to lie and cheat to get what they want.

Willing to murder too.

There are companies though with a progressive image that appeals to their progressive customers. Whether Corporate™ are progressive or not, they best beware when they offend their customer base.

To that end they are forced to behave progressively — so I don't think there's much of a distinction with regard to whether the company truly is or is not "progressive".

"progressive customers" are not the same as "social media influenced dimwits with more money than sense". or may be they are!

and what the heck do you mean by "progressive"?

The term is well understood and has its origins in the contrasting positions and approaches of "Progressive" and "Revolutionary" Marxists.

It has come to mean anyone who is generally left-liberal and favors achieving those policy goals through gradual reform rather than sudden reform, or direct action.

> The term is well understood and has its origins in the contrasting positions and approaches of "Progressive" and "Revolutionary" Marxists.

well-understood by marxists (are there any of them around any more?) but not i suggest by the rest of us.

or is this just another part of mad usa politics and wokeness?

There's dozens of us!

More seriously, revolutionary Marxist parties exist in all countries with varying degrees of success. Most of us are involved in the labour movement, often organising within unions.

I am in fact a little reluctant to use "progressive" since it is becoming overloaded and meaningless these days, but that was the term used by the OP so I'm going with it.

> There's no such thing as a progressive company.

There are progressive companies, but they are usually labor coops.

> There's no such thing as a progressive company

Patagonia.

They'll continue to turn up the dial on all the race/gender/sex preference things as they have since Occupy. Is it shocking that numerous billionaire families and wealthy people support these causes? Their only god is money and they'll do anything to make sure it keeps rolling in.

> They'll continue to turn up the dial on all the race/gender/sex preference things as they have since Occupy.

Exactly, they want the focus to be on divides within the working class and away from the labor/capital class divide. This is why corporate DEI messaging is frequently very accusatory and divisive; the point is to make workers feel uncomfortable among themselves, and therefore, less likely to organize. It's designed to make workers walk on eggshells around each other.

Those are companies with a progressive facade thanks to good marketing and PR.

It is not possible to be a progressive mega corp.

Those apparent progressive values are actually corporate values. Corporate values and progressive values can at times come to the same conclusion about a matter for completely different reasons. In these cases it may seem as though the corporation is championing progressive values, but that's not actually what's going on.

For instance, a progressive value is having a diverse workforce because discrimination and prejudice are immoral. A corporate value is having a diverse workforce because it makes labor organization harder. The corporate messaging about diversity initiatives this will appear to be progressive political messaging, but really isn't. Progressives support workplace diversity to combat prejudice, while corporations support workplace diversity to exploit prejudice.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21228324/amazon-whole-foo...

It’s how we end up with the incoherent “progressive” marketing of a chocolate company that is currently being sued for using child slave labor to source the chocolate that the trans woman celebrating women’s month wants me to buy.