Vice President Dick Cheney is joined by his openly gay daughter Mary,
at right, and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, left, as they
attended church services last September. Mary Cheney,
37, is pregnant and the couple is expecting the baby late this spring. AP Photo: J. Scott Applewhite.
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By KERRY ELEVELD
Friday, March 02, 2007
If Mary Cheney were to follow in her father’s footsteps and become CEO of Halliburton today, she could no longer be fired because her life partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, is a woman.
In a little noticed move last month, Halliburton amended three of its corporate governance policies to protect gays and lesbians from being discriminated against, harassed, or fired simply on the basis of their sexual orientation. The policy change also includes shareholders, members of the Board of Directors, customers and suppliers of the company.
Mary Cheney is the openly gay daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, who served as CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. Last fall, The Washington Post reported that Mary Cheney is pregnant and due to give birth later this spring.
The policy change came in response to a shareholder resolution filed by the Boston-based investment firm Trillium Asset Management Corporation on behalf of its clients who own Halliburton stock.
“Because the struggle for gay marriage is so prominent, it’s easy for most people to forget that in 33 states, it’s still perfectly legal to fire someone simply for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered,” said Shelley Alpern, vice president of Trillium Asset, which specializes in socially responsible investing.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, a national gay lobby group, 86 percent of Fortune 500 companies and 98 percent of Fortune 100 companies have adopted sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies. Halliburton’s competitors, Baker Hughes and Bechtel, both have such policies.
The shareholder resolution Trillium filed last fall would have gone to vote with Halliburton shareholders this spring. But on February 15 Halliburton’s Board of Directors decided to amend its policies without putting the issue to a shareholder vote.
Alpern said that was a distinct change of heart from last year when Trillium filed the same shareholder resolution and Halliburton fought it tooth and nail.
“Halliburton was able to have the SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] give it permission to basically exclude it [from a vote],” Alpern said. “It was a technicality. We put the wrong date on one of the documents.” Alpern said Trillium resolved to refile the resolution the following year.
This time around, Halliburton responded within about a week of receiving the resolution. “They said they would be looking into it, and then I got call saying that they were very close to implementing it,” Alpern said.
Whether the policy shift this year was affected by the highly publicized pregnancy of Mary Cheney was not evident. In a written statement, a company spokesperson said, “Halliburton is committed to creating a workforce that reflects the diverse population of the communities in which the company operates, as well as to providing equal employment opportunity to all qualified individuals both in the company’s hiring and promotional practices.” She did not indicate if the company was considering offering domestic partner benefits to its employees.
But Alpern was bullish about prospects for the most recent filing from the start. “I felt pretty confident going in,” she said.
Although Halliburton resisted the change last year, Alpern said it’s very common for companies to capitulate without sending a resolution to vote. “Some companies may not totally believe in what you’re asking for, but they don’t want any controversy on their proxy ballot,” she said.
Alpern said that Halliburton indicated they had read the proposal and decided it was a good thing for the company, so a shareholder vote would not be necessary.
Even when resolutions on sexual orientation policies do go to vote, they usually draw percentages in the 20s and 30s for the policies—which compares favorably on the scale of social issue resolutions.
“It doesn’t look like a mandate, but for shareholder resolutions, 20s and 30s is extremely respectable and it’s in the upper end of any category of social or environmental vote,” Alpern said, ticking off a gamut of social issues from climate change to human rights and sweatshop resolutions.
Cracker Barrel’s sexual orientation resolution famously drew a 58 percent vote in 2002 after the company had been beating back the resolutions every year since 1991. Though shareholder votes are nonbinding, Cracker Barrel’s board met immediately after the vote that day and decided to change its policy.
Trillium collaborates with about a dozen social investment firms that have similar investment philosophies to file resolutions on sexual orientation, including the New York State and New York City pension funds. Together, she estimated, the network has filed nearly 75 shareholder resolutions since 1991; about 70 of those companies have complied.
The most famous holdout on implementing a sexual orientation nondiscrimination policy to date is ExxonMobil, which has been facing resolution votes ever since about 1998, when Exxon merged with Mobil. Last year, 35 percent of shareholders cast their votes in favor of the resolution.
“Year after year, that number grows,” said New York City Comptroller Bill Thompson, who along with Trillium filed a resolution on behalf of the New York City Pension Fund network. The city pension fund owns ExxonMobil shares valued at about $1.4 billion. “At some point, it becomes difficult to believe that the board of a company and the management would ignore that type of expression of their shareholders,” said Thompson.
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