Last week, activists descended on Gap’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Their ask? That Gap, the clothing manufacturing and retail giant, cease funding the anti-climate, anti-woman U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The protest was hosted by a diverse group of organizations, including 350 Bay Area, the Center for Biological Diversity, Corporate Accountability International, CREDO, Daily Kos, Earthworks, Greenpeace, MoveOn Contra Costa, Public Citizen, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club and the Sunflower Alliance. Gayle McLaughlin, Richmond, CA, progressive City Council member and former mayor, also urged the GAP to stop funding the Chamber.
San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin was the first to speak. He urged Gap to consider its hometown of San Francisco’s commitment to the environment, by cutting off its funding to the Chamber, noting that several large Bay Area companies have already dropped out of the trade association because of a disconnect between their values and that of the Chamber. Peskin remarked to the protest participants, “Gap has San Francisco values, and if you share those values, you cannot be a member of the United States Chamber of Commerce.”
Brandy Doyle of CREDO Action added, “Funding the Chamber means supporting [its] agenda, and Gap can’t claim to support climate action or claim to support reducing emissions when they’re funding the largest lobbying organization in the U.S that’s using that money to spread climate change denial and push us out of the Paris Agreement….if you’re with us and you’re with the planet, you can’t give money to a right-wing extremist group like the Chamber.”
And, when calling out the *gap* between Gap supporting equal pay for women while funding the Chamber, Rico Sisney of Green Peace Bay Area chapter said, “[The Chamber] has been fighting the advancement of women since the 70s, they opposed an amendment to the Civil Rights Act that would ban discrimination against pregnant women, they also opposed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act because they say that pregnancy is a voluntary act.”
As we’ve mentioned before, the protest comes on the heels of Art Peck receiving a letter from more than 50 groups in more than a dozen countries asking Gap to stop funding a trade association that works against the environmental and gender-equality policies Gap claims to support.
The Chamber, the nation’s largest lobbying group, has a long and ongoing opposition to legislation to reduce work place discrimination against women. It also has been at the forefront of the opposition to both the Clean Power Plan and the Paris Agreement. Over the past two decades, the Chamber has spent almost $1.4 billion in lobbying, often against environmental laws and regulations; it has also spent more than $150 million in dark money on congressional races, almost exclusively in support of anti-climate candidates.
In addition to the coalition letter to Peck, almost 200,000 consumers signed petitions organized by CREDO Action, Corporate Accountability International, Daily Kos, Public Citizen and Sierra Club asking Gap to stop funding the Chamber and its reactionary agenda. The massive public support for these petitions should signal to Gap that its funding of the Chamber is not in line with its customers’ values. At the conclusion of the protest, we were unsurprisingly denied access to Mr. Peck for petition delivery so in his stead we hand-delivered the signatures to aGap employee who came outside to accept them.
In the wake of this protest, Chamber Watch and our allies will continue to ramp up the pressure on Gap to do the right thing and decide that honoring San Francisco values, require it to stop funding the anti-climate, anti-woman U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Want to see the protest? Check out our Facebook Live here.
Chamber Watch is a project of Public Citizen. If you’d like to learn more about the Chamber, you can always visit us on www.chamberofcommercewatch.org or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.