Why The Corporate Establishment Went Woke

Simple ….. Control of the Boardroom.

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Historically, Directors of the Establishment corporations have been drawn from the ranks of the leading professions - accounting and legal, with their centuries of entrenchment in the post-industrial revolution era; what we now call the ‘Big 4’ and their commercial lawyers.

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HR and marketing were viewed as 2nd tier, intellectually lightweight. Management, as a disciplined body of knowledge, was only meaningfully developed in the aftermath of WWII and initially only added as appendage to the Big 4. In Australia, these 2nd tier disciplines were somewhat resisted by the ‘sandstone universities’ until the 1970’s.

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It was in 1992 that compulsory superannuation came into being in Australia, and the ‘game’ began to change.

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38% of ASX Market capital is now owned by superannuation funds, with only 6% of Australians holding over $100,000 in shares, making the superfunds the overwhelmingly most powerful force in the Corporate Establishment.

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Being ‘workers’ funds, the largest (government employee) unions have, and exercise the greatest influence in the superannuation funds. With half the Australian workforce employed in small, privately owned business and most not being union members, their influence is negligible.

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So while the union, Left-leaning superfunds may directly appoint only a minority of representatives to the Boards of the Establishment corporations, they vote to appoint the remainder of Directors who are still drawn from those traditional Establishment accounting and legal professions. As most of these professionals do not individually have significant shareholdings in any of the Establishment corporations, they rely on the unions to support their appointment to the Boards, making the unions potentially, all powerful.

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Why are the unions overwhelmingly Left-leaning?

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Almost all their leadership studied in the Left-leaning, now burgeoning, social science faculties, and been brainwashed by their lecturers of whom around 80% are Left-leaning.

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The business and STEM faculties have been relatively small and static in number, populated by the more conservative, less out-spoken academics.

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The Left’s capacity to intimidate dissent into silence is well established; we’ve just seen it reported in the Fin Review’s (15-16 July, 2023) report on Atlassian’s Executive Directors effectively pressuring their staff to support the ‘Yes’ campaign.

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Equally importantly, today, every ASX listed company relies in part, on the support of the Left-leaning unions to support its share price/market capital valuation. ??

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Not hard to see why these once conservative professionals went woke; their CEO’s following suit at supersonic speeds.