Salesforce cancels events in Indiana over anti-LGBT law

What’s the cost of intolerance? Billions of dollars worth of business, as Indiana is about to find out.

In an interview with Re/code, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff threatened a “slow rolling of sanctions” if the state doesn’t recant on a law allowing businesses to refuse to serve the LGBT community on religious grounds without fear of legal repercussion.

Salesforce, a cloud computing company which has a market capitalization of nearly $43 billion and employs close to 3000 in Indianapolis – having just acquired email marketing company ExactTarget for $2.5 billion – has already cancelled upcoming events held in Indiana.

The move follows a letter sent Wednesday by Benioff and six other tech executives asking Indiana Governor Mike Pence to veto the controversial legislation dubbed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

“As leaders of technology companies, we not only disagree with this legislation on a personal level, but the RFRA will adversely impact our ability to recruit and retain the best and the brightest talent in the technology sector,” says the letter.

“Technology professionals are by their nature very progressive, and backward-looking legislation such as the RFRA will make the state of Indiana a less appealing place to live and work.”

Corporations can make a difference

Tima Bansal, professor of general management and director of the Cross-Enterprise Leadership Centre on Building Sustainable Value at Western University’s Ivey School of Business in London, says although taking a stand may not have a one-to-one effect or clear policy reaction, politicians are usually pretty perceptive to corporate actions in general.

“Keystone pipeline is the obvious one where government is supporting that as opposed to the other way around,” says Bandal. “But in terms of social policy – (Salesforce) is a corporation that has actually taken a position.”

She argues that not talking a stand is also in itself, a position of complicity. Take Talisman Energy, the Canadian oil company that was operating in Sudan when the war broke out in the early 2000 and divested a few years later.

“They were complicit just by the fact they were in Sudan and that there were funds that were going to finance the war,” says Bandal. “So when they pulled one could say they took a position – no they took a position either way.”

But incidents like the corporate outcry in Indiana show large multinationals are coming to terms with their social values.

“Now corporations are being seen as representing the identity of the people that are working there or governing it and so I think they’re taking much more of a social position,” she says. “And there’s evidence to show they ones who are much more congruent with social values tend to be more successful as well.”

In this case, a few other businesses have followed Salesforce’s lead.

Massive video game convention Gen Con has threatened to pull it $50 million event out of the state and the National College Athletic Association president Mark Emmert says he’s concerned about how the anti-gay legislation will impact visitors to next week’s Final Four basketball tournament.

“We will work diligently to assure student-athletes competing in, and visitors attending, next week’s Men’s Final Four in Indianapolis are not impacted negatively by this bill,” he said in a statement. “Moving forward, we intend to closely examine the implications of this bill and how it might affect future events as well as our workforce.”