Why Coors Went Soft

By John Cloud

It should be enough to drive the Coors boys to drink. Workers at the beer company run by the Coors family, longtime funders of the political right, now attend a diversity workshop and get training on sexual harassment. Employees can choose among eight "resource councils"--groups representing gays, women and Native Americans, among others. The company sets aside a specific share of purchases each year for minority-owned firms (what conservatives like the Coorses usually call--gulp--quotas). And the brewer has sponsored everything from a marathon gay dance party in Miami to "the first corporate mammography program in the country," as the company gushes.

Coors double-teams, with both a diversity task force and a diversity management group. Among the unlikely recipients of its corporate largesse are a black-heritage festival, the Mi Casa resource center for women and even a romance novel the company commissioned in 1993 in a good-hearted but weird effort to promote literacy. (Perfect, by Judith McNaught, tells the story of a foster child who "overcomes illiteracy to find true love," as the promotional material says.) The firm contends that it was the first U.S. brewer to have rabbis certify its suds as kosher. "Coors Cares," bleats a company slogan.

What's going on? Though Coors' profits helped start the conservative Heritage Foundation and still keep right-wing causes afloat, the brewer has bottom-line reasons for behaving more like a commune than a company: its bad reputation with minorities and unions nearly devastated Coors in the early 1980s. A p.r. turnaround was urgently needed. The spending targets for minority vendors, for example, result from a "covenant" the company signed with black and Hispanic groups in 1984 in an effort to make up for a racially charged speech by William Coors, one of the brothers who has worked for the company.

But Coors Co. isn't alone. The company's socially progressive policies are part of a larger trend. Call it corporate leftism: businesses are adopting policies considered wildly liberal in the political arena. Example: only 62 state and local governments have extended benefits to the unwed partners of employees. But more than 430 U.S. firms have done so. Three out of four FORTUNE 500 firms have diversity programs to help them attract minorities and keep them happy.

Touchy-feeliness may be replacing total quality management. Nearly all companies now allow paternity as well as maternity leave, and 13% of companies even pay new dads during their time off. On-site day care is among the hottest benefits: though just 9% of companies offer child care at or near work, an additional 12% are planning to do so. Even business lingo is getting sensitized: "family-friendly" policies--benefits that help working parents find time for soccer games--often become "lifestyle-friendly" policies so as not to offend single folks.

Of course, companies aren't doing this because radicals have stormed the boardrooms. A shortage of workers is driving many of the changes. "We've not faced this sort of talent-critical, labor-critical problem...probably since wartime," says Don Hasbargen, a principal at Hewitt Associates, a consulting firm. When as many as 190,000 computer jobs go unfilled, for instance, companies can't afford to be seen as racist, sexist--or even antiunion.

But Hasbargen and others agree that the trend began before the labor market tightened and will probably continue after. "At bottom, all this is a response to changing expectations of a work force whose demographics have changed," says Donna Lenhoff, general counsel for the National Partnership for Women and Families. "Men too no longer simply accept or expect that their role will be that of breadwinner and not nurturer."

Corporate leftism has political implications. Conservatives have complained that they won the political war but lost the cultural war, thanks in part to entertainment: Newt and welfare reform are trumped by Ellen and the nation's most powerful Democrat, Steven Spielberg. The Family Research Council website intones against corporate initiatives "aimed at undermining the traditional family." Cited as culprits are domestic-partner benefits and perks that keep parents away from home--even "dinners four nights a week" in company canteens.

It would be wrong to conclude that Big Business will become the engine of social change. Nonetheless, it could be argued that in the past decade, business has done more good for liberalism than any election in the same period.