Nuns Who Won’t Stop Nudging
By Kevin Roose, NY Times
ASTON, Pa.—NOT long ago, an unusual visitor arrived at the sleek headquarters
of Goldman Sachs in Lower Manhattan.
It wasn’t some C.E.O., or a pol from Athens or Washington, or even a
sign-waving occupier from Zuccotti Park.
It was Sister Nora Nash of the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia.
And the slight, soft-spoken nun had a few not-so-humble suggestions for the
world’s most powerful investment bank.
Way up on the 41st floor, in a conference room overlooking the World
Trade Center site, Sister Nora and her team from the Interfaith Center on
Corporate Responsibility laid out their advice for three Goldman executives.
The Wall Street bank, they said, should protect consumers, rein in executive
pay, increase its transparency and remember the poor.
In short, Goldman should do God’s work— something that its chairman and
chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, once remarked that he did. (The joke
bombed.)
Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly
staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order
of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate
activists around.
The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over
farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells
Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert
some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for
its piety.
“We want social returns, as well as financial ones,” Sister Nora said,
strolling through the garden behind Our Lady of Angels, the convent here where
she has worked for more than half a century. She paused in front of a statue of
Our Lady of Lourdes. “When you look at the major financial institutions, you
have to realize there is greed involved.”
The Sisters of St. Francis are an unusual example of the shareholder
activism that has ripped through corporate America since the 1980s. Public
pension funds led the way, flexing their financial muscles on issues from
investment returns to workplace violence. Then, mutual fund managers charged
in, followed by rabble-rousing hedge fund managers who tried to shame companies
into replacing their C.E.O.’s, shaking up their boards—anything to bolster the
value of their investments.
The nuns have something else in mind: using the investments in their
retirement fund to become Wall Street’s moral minority.
A professorial woman with a sculpted puff of gray hair, Sister Nora grew
up in Limerick County, Ireland. She dreamed of becoming a missionary in Africa,
but in 1959, she arrived in Pennsylvania to join the Sisters of St. Francis, an
order founded in 1855 by Mother Francis Bachmann, a Bavarian immigrant with a
passion for social justice. Sister Nora took her Franciscan vows of chastity,
poverty and obedience two years later, in 1961, and has stayed put ever since.
In 1980, Sister Nora and her community formed a corporate responsibility
committee to combat what they saw as troubling developments at the businesses
in which they invested their retirement fund. A year later, in coordination
with groups like the Philadelphia Area Coalition for Responsible Investment,
they mounted their offensive. They boycotted Big Oil, took aim at Nestlé over
labor policies, and urged Big Tobacco to change its ways.
Eventually, they developed a strategy combining moral philosophy and
public shaming. Once they took aim at a company, they bought the minimum number
of shares that would allow them to submit resolutions at that company’s annual
shareholder meeting. (Securities laws require shareholders to own at least
$2,000 of stock before submitting resolutions.) That gave them a nuclear
option, in the event the company’s executives refused to meet with them.
Unsurprisingly, most companies decided they would rather let the nuns in
the door than confront religious dissenters in public.
“You’re not going to get any sympathy for cutting off a nun at your
annual meeting,” says Robert McCormick, chief policy officer of Glass, Lewis
& Company, a firm that specializes in shareholder proxy votes. With their
moral authority, he said, the Sisters of St. Francis “can really bring attention
to issues.”
Sister Nora and her cohort have gained access to some of the most
illustrious boardrooms in America. Robert J. Stevens, the chief executive of
Lockheed Martin, has lent her an ear, as has Carl-Henric Svanberg, the chairman
of BP. Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric, was so
impressed by their campaign against G.E.’s involvement in nuclear weapons
development that he took a helicopter to their convent to meet with the nuns.
He landed the helicopter in a field across the street.
The Sisters of St. Francis are hardly the only religious voices
challenging big business. They have teamed up on shareholder resolutions with
other orders, including the Sisters of Charity of St. Elizabeth and the Sisters
of St. Dominic of Caldwell, both in New Jersey. The Interfaith Center on
Corporate Responsibility, the umbrella group under which much of Sister Nora’s
activism takes place, includes Jews, Quakers, Presbyterians and nearly 300
faith-based investing groups. The Vatican, too, has weighed in with a recent
encyclical, condemning “the idolatry of the market” and calling for the
establishment of a central authority that could stave off future financial
crises.
“Companies have learned over time that the issues we’re bringing are not
frivolous,” said the Rev. Seamus P. Finn, 61, a Washington-based priest with
the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate and a board member of the Interfaith
Center. “At the end of every transaction, there are people that are either
positively or negatively impacted, and we try to explain that to them.”
Over lunch in the cafeteria downstairs, the Sisters of St. Francis
discussed the delicate dance they face in their shareholder advocacy
program—pushing corporations to change their actions, while not needling them
so much on sensitive issues like executive pay that bigwigs like Mr. Blankfein,
at Goldman Sachs, are not willing to meet with them.
“We’re not here to put corporations down,” Sister Nora said, between
bites of broccoli salad. “We’re here to improve their sense of responsibility.”
“People who have done well have a right to their earnings,” added Sister
Marijane Hresko, when the topic of executive compensation comes up. “What we’re
talking about here is excess, and how much money is enough for any human being.”
Sister Nora nodded. “I can’t exclude people like Lloyd Blankfein from my
prayers, because he’s just as much human as I am,” she said. “But we like to
move them along the spectrum.”
Goldman tries to maintain a polite relationship. “We have found our conversations
with Sister Nora Nash and other I.C.C.R. members to be very insightful and
instructive,” a spokesman said.
But change has not been speedy. Despite some successes—such as a
campaign directed at Wal-Mart that the nuns say led the company to stop selling
adult video games—the insider-heavy nature of corporate share structures means
that the Sisters of St. Francis rarely succeed in real-world terms, even when
their ideas prove popular. Most of their submissions receive less than 20
percent of the shareholder vote, and many get stuck in single digits.
“I honestly don’t know if it’s been effective or not, but they do
highlight issues other shareholders don’t,” Mr. McCormick of Glass, Lewis says.
Still, Sister Nora, who would give her age only as “late 60s,” said she
would keep pushing companies to do the right thing. “My work will never be
done,” she says. “God has his ways.”
Soon, Sister Nora will go on retreat, an annual Franciscan rite in which
nuns retire to solitude for a week of contemplation and prayer. There, she will
gather her strength, rebuild her fighting spirit and emerge ready for the next
round of resolutions and closed-door meetings.
She has even identified her next target: Family Dollar, one of the many
deep-discount chains that sell cheap imported goods to Americans who generally
do not know, or necessarily care, where those products come from. Sister Nora
wants to make sure Family Dollar’s suppliers have fair labor policies, and she
is concerned about whether its products are free of toxins.
“They just got a new president,” Sister Nora says. “I have a letter
ready to go Monday.”
