this is bbc news. we will have the headlines and all the main news stories for you at the top of the hour, straight after this programme. hello, everybody. a very warm welcome to talking business weekly with me, aaron heslehurst. let's go and take a look at what is on the show. taking a stand or taking a profit? from climate change to racism, gay rights and the war in ukraine, just why do companies feel they need to get involved in the big social issues of the day? a number of big american companies have spoken out on abortion and offered to help staff with travel costs, but is it worth their while or should theyjust be sticking to making money for their shareholders?

from wall street banks to health care giants, this expert right there works with them all and will tell me how companies decide to speak up or when they should decide to just shut up. the online review platform yelp is one of america's most outspoken firms. its diversity chief will tell me why it feels the need to have its say on anything from trans rights to abortion. and in an era of increasing political division round the world, this man who helps some of the biggest businesses on the planet craft their messages will tell us why it is up to private companies to lead the way in shaping our society.

wherever you'rejoining me from around the world, once again, a big hello and a warm welcome to the show. you know, when you buy something in the shops or choose a service from a particular company, how much do you think about their social mission? you know, what role the company plays in society beyond making money for its shareholders? the recent us supreme court decision which outlawed abortion for millions of americans prompted some of the country's biggest companies to speak out against the decision, big names such as disney, jpmorgan and facebook owner meta have told staff they will cover employee travel expenses for abortions. on other subjects, companies are facing tricky balancing acts such as unilever�*s recent deal to continue selling ben & jerry's ice cream across israel, the west bank and east jerusalem. and sometimes, they are giving in to government demands, such as amazon restricting lgbtq search results in the united arab emirates. the company says it has to follow the law where it operates, but remains committed to diversity and inclusion.

and there are plenty of other issues. where big could companies are having their say, but in doing so, it is not without risk, so why do they do it? well, a global survey by marketing giants edelman found that businesses were seen as one of the most effective agents for positive change, scoring higher than governments and the media. climate change, yes, it is the issue in which most people want businesses to do more for the benefit of society. then economic inequality, workforce reskilling and access to health care. however, overall, people still have their doubts about the role businesses play in society. in fact, 52% say capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world. so, i have come here, yes, europe's busiest shopping hub, it is oxford street here in london, to find out what attracts people to spend their money with particular companies. let's go and find out. race, diversity, climate change, does it have an impact

on whether or not you would spend your money with a particular company? absolutely. i mean, i am a sucker to brands, so of course they are always brand—building. and they get your money. yes, of course. so i am willing to pay more if i really have the feeling a company is doing something good. if they are not socially responsible, you know, i will think twice before investing, because every penny anyone spends with the company, you are actually adding to their profitability and you're adding to their standards. i think consumers are already aware of the impacts - and i think businesses should take more responsibility- when it comes - to climate change. i do not really look into it, to be fair. as so much goes on, it seems pretty pointless. does the company's moral and ethics values, does it actually have an impact on whether you spend your money with them or not? it does to some extent, absolutely, but i also think it is really hard at the moment to know which companies are telling the truth or not, there is a lot

of brainwashing around. more transparency would be great. does a company's corporate and moral values... does that have an impact on whether or not you spend your money with them? absolutely. if they are scandalous - or treating their employees wrong or have a wrong sense of morals in any subject, - yes, absolutely, that _ would impact how i would spend. one of your biggest issues would be? gosh, women's rights, i suppose~ _ for a company, when reputation matters so much, picking the right causes to publicly support, that can be difficult. sometimes the backing of shareholders is crucial and there are a growing number of investors who push companies to take certain positions, like norway's biggest pension fund which controls around $65 billion of assets and has stakes in about companies around the world. we do understand that the company's main objective

is to make sure they run their business activity, but at the same time they also can make sure it does not cause any harm on people or environmental, any other fundamental breaches on some of the norms which we have agreed to respect as a society. and that is why the companies also need to take that into account, not necessarily just the financial performance. and the other thing is that the financial performance will also be influenced if you are doing quite bad on the social issues. and in a world where social media amplifies voices and, as we know, there is a shortage of workers, the view of staff also needs to be taken into account. here is the boss of the world's biggest employment agency. workers are looking first and foremost for i would say a happy or pleasant work environment and that consists of a number of things, that is their colleagues, the work they are doing, the values of the company and whether they are aligned

with their own values, so happiness in the workplace is really important. let's dig into why companies choose to speak out in a world which is increasingly polarised. as the saying goes, you cannot please all of the people all of the time, so why bother at all? paul argenti is a professor of corporate communications at the prestigious dartmouth university in the us and also works with companies ranging from banks such as goldman sachs and ing to japan's corporate giant, mitsui. paul argenti, thank you so much for your time. really much appreciated. paul, let's start with this, is it fair to say companies are increasingly getting involved in taking a public stance on social issues? yes, they are indeed and i think this has been going on for at least the last four or five years and as issue after issue has come forward, more and more involvement from companies has happened at the same time. and paul, why do they feel the need to get involved from everything from abortion

rights to forced labour and climate change? i think a lot of it is pressure from antagonists of all kinds, whether it is ngos attacking companies or employees who feel strongly and passionately about issues that are coming forward, but there has also been an increase in the role of what businesses will do in society, particularly in the united states, and i think people look to companies for answers that government used to respond to in the past. and paul, i am wondering, how do they pick what to support or not? does it have to be aligned to their line of business or is that separation just not always possible? i would say that what companies actually do is completely random depending upon their own experience. what they should do is tie it very much overall to the strategy of the business or the core values that they espoused and i would say a way of thinking about that would be helpful, a framework, which is one of the things i've developed to help companies with.

paul, tell us a little bit about that framework you've developed. my idea was that companies need to think ahead of time about whether they would respond to particular kinds of issues and come up with a way of thinking about it that is not ad hoc, which is the way most companies look at this. so in my view it would look at is this connected in some way to the overall strategy of the business or the core context of what they do? examples of that would be you are in a health care business, you are providing health care services, and you want to weigh in to the roe v wade situation and give some advice. so, strategically it should be connected. the second thing i look for is can you actually do something about this incident or issue? the last piece of it is how are your constituencies going to respond? will most be positive about your decision or will a significant and important constituent weigh in against you and it might cause you more harm than good?

touching on that a bit more, what is the business logic behind getting behind a particular cause or position? and the considerations, what considerations does a company need to make? i think it has to be something that is pretty central to the overall organisation or is something that the leaders in the organisation feel passionate about. i will give you an example, like tim cook weighed in on climate change very strongly in a shareholders meeting and shareholders who were saying we do not want to own the stock of a company that is so passionate about this, and tim cook said if you do not support this, you can get out of our stock. that is a very, very bold move by a company as an example. and paul, which stakeholders are considered and consulted, and how do companies balance off competing interest? because speaking up might not always be the most profitable option for shareholders. no, it might not, and i think

one of the things to think about is who are your key constituencies? let's start with shareholders and then we think about our employees and our customers, the communities in which we operate, the suppliers. you have to kind of weigh the situation against those different constituencies and which ones are the most important. for instance, if you are making a decision that might offend your biggest shareholder, you would think about that really carefully before you dived in and just jumped on that. it would probably not be a great idea to do so. the other thing we have not talked about is that sometimes it is bestjust to say absolutely nothing. like, you cannot win in this situation, you have no stake in the game, you are not planning to do anything about it and all of your constituencies are going to be against it. it does feel like us companies perhaps are those who find themselves most often under pressure to intervene, but i'm wondering how much is this phenomenon spreading to other parts of the world?

i think it is spreading to other parts of the world. it could be, if we think about even a year ago, a company like softbank protesting against the olympics injapan is a way for that company to weigh in on a very important issue for what was going on there, but what we see primarily is companies that are working in the united states, global companies that are getting some of this heat here in the united states, but that is likely to spread and you can see it with the war in ukraine and some of the responses in the uk to companies' participation in russia and all of that. i think bp is an example of that and you're going to see more and more companies throughout the world having to deal with these issues. how much complication do you see, such as when a company operates in different markets where you might have competing sensibilities? this raises an issue. it is like playing chess in four dimensions. if you are a global company today are you are doing

business in the us, russia, china and turkey and qatar, say, each of those represents challenges for the business and again you have to think ahead of time of what are the repercussions of our actions in each of those markets with each of our key constituencies and do we really want to wade into those waters depending on how challenging it is? i have seen companies not really think that through ahead of time get into trouble as a result of it. if you go back to the middle of the 20th century, companies did not have to think about these things, so it is very new for many of them, even though it has been around for 50 years, companies are still trying to think about some of these challenges. professor paul argenti, a real pleasure having you on the show. thank you for your time and i will talk to you soon. thank you, pleasure to be with you, aaron. one company that has been pretty vocal on the abortion debate in the united states is the online business review platform yelp. the san francisco—based company, which operates in 32 countries, focuses

on connecting customers with local businesses. it was one of the first in the us to offer to pay the cost if its staff travelled out of their own state for an abortion and it has been vocal on plenty of other social issues as well. to find out why, i have been speaking to its chief diversity officer. miriam warren, a real pleasure having you on my show, thanks for your time. miriam, can we start with this, why have you as a company felt the need to be so vocal and ahead of the curve on the abortion debate in the us? certainly when we started to see where this was headed, ie looking at the state of texas last year as they were starting to put forth a very restrictive abortion ban then known as sb 8, we started to recognise that with employees spread across all 50 states here in the us, we would have to really enact some sort of benefit that would allow for them to be able to get the same standard of care regardless of the state

they lived in and so not only did we want to protect and safeguard our own employees by creating a travel reimbursement to allow them to get abortion care in another state if the state that they lived in had banned it, we also recognise that our employees, our consumers and our customers were looking for us to be vocal on this issue and the reason for that, aaron, is because the vast majority of americans agree that abortion access should be safe and legal and for 50 years in america, we have enjoyed the political, legal and moral safeguards that allow for abortion to be a choice between a person and their doctor, and after the reversal of roe versus wade several weeks ago, we have recognised the need to become even more vocal on this issue and from that we hear very frequently not only from our employees with notes of gratitude but also from people around the country and now even the world on this stance.

but miriam, some will say this is not necessarily profitable because it will cost you money for the travel of your staff if they want an abortion, so what prompted you to do it? is it because your staff or your customers want you to? in the us, health is incredibly expensive because it is privatised. it is not only for our employees, but it is also for their dependants or their spouses who are covered under our insurance plan and yes, i think it is also the reason why we speak out on this issue is because it affects so many people. sometimes people think about abortion as simply a women's issue, but i would say this is a human rights issue. when you look at the progress made over the last 50 years in civic life, in women's careers, in the way that they are certainly not sitting on enough corporate

boards, but many more corporate boards than we had seen in the past, is because they have been able to decide whether and whento have children. you operate in more than 30 countries from asia, to latin america. what other issues around the world have you felt compelled to take a stance on and why? i think fundamentally we have taken stances on issues that are issues of human rights and so some of the most sort of biggest stances we have taken most recently have certainly been related to the proliferation of anti—lgbt and specifically anti—transgender youth laws that have been coming about in the us and and in similar states where you have seen abortion bans, places like texas and also in florida. one of the reasons we take a stance on that is because members of the lgbtq community are our friends, our colleagues, our customers, our consumers, and if we do not take a stance with the massive platform we have available to us, it is really an incredibly missed

opportunity on a moral level, on a social level, and also because our employers are saying, hey, we not only want you to have values that are maybe posted on a wiki somewhere or on a wall, we want you to live into those values and part of those values are we care about all people regardless of their gender identity or their sexual orientation. but there must be times when you speak out about an issue in one country, perhaps trans rights in the united states, which does not go down so well in another country, which has let's say a less liberal position. how do you balance that? i think it is always a balance and whether you are looking at anti—lgbto laws in the us, or you're considering things like, again in the us, gun violence prevention, which is a topic our ceo has been very vocal about. i think the fundamental thing that we are faced with is really how would

we protect human rights in all of the places where our employees are living and the vast majority of our employees are in north america and also in the uk and germany, and so while these topics may not be presenting themselves in quite the same way in different countries, certainly our employee population overall is happy and heartened by the fact we are speaking out on these issues, as difficult as they may be in some cases. miriam, let's talk about the cynics and the critics. because many of them will argue that companies like yourselves, you jump on board with these social issues because it is just good for business, whether you believe in them or not. is that fair or how do you show that that is not the case? i would certainly say this is not a bandwagon situation and it is certainly not lip service. in order to be as vocal

as we have been about this issue, frankly many corporate actors are silent, and potentially attempting to remain neutral on a decision that frankly i think neutrality is not going to be looked on favourably, particularly from a historic—looking lens. and you would believe that this kind of corporate activism, it is here and it is going to stay, and it is going to grow? i definitely do not think corporate activism is going away, but i certainly think that in a country like the united states, where the government does not offer things like the rest of the wealthy world such as paid parental leave, paid sick leave, substantially—subsidised childcare, then it is a comment on employers to answer the call for these necessary items. and as a result, you are going to see companies not only picking up the slack where government does not, but you are also seeing them speak out about what that means. miriam warren, chief diversity officer at yelp, wonderful to have you on my show.

thanks forjoining me, i will talk to you soon. thank you, aaron. you know, from racism to gender equality, climate change, and forced labour, there are so many worthwhile issues out there that as a company it is not always easy to work out which are the right or most effective causes to back. well, more than 220 of the world's biggest companies, from apple to coca—cola and hsbc, to disney, they are all members of an organisation called chief executives for corporate purpose. it helps them work out what they speak out on and how they should do so and i have been speaking to its big boss. daryl brewster, my friend, a real pleasure having you on my show. and daryl, can we start with this, byjust explaining in a bit more detail how you work with companies and what you help them to achieve? we are founded by paul newman, the actor, salad dressing maker, and other leading ceos about a quarter of a century ago. and we work with companies

to empower them on what we call their purpose journeys. these are the things that ceos did not learn about in business school, or often on their way to the top, but are increasingly important in today's world, things like engagement with your community, sustainable business climate issues, working on diversity, equity, inclusion, engaging your employees and helping to tell your story. you mentioned of course a very famous actor paul newman was amongst others who set up the organisation. why did they feel there was a need for something like this? i think if you go back to the late 90s, last century, this was the day of greed is good, business has one and only responsibility according to milton friedman and that was to increase profit, and i think while that is an important aspect of what companies are here to do, companies realise that to increase profit over time, they need to be good citizens of the world. and this was the time of the tech bubble and other eras and it has really gained tremendous momentum over the last quarter of a century

and today, 69 of the world's largest 100 economic units are corporations, the others are countries, so these are big companies, many of which have a global profile that we think really can be a positive force for the world and companies are more and more understanding that to drive sustainable, long—term success they need to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. and daryl, according to the edelman survey that i mentioned at the start of my show, on a global basis the public regard business as the most effective proponent of positive change, why do you think that is? i think what people see around the globe is that businesses are competent, they can get stuff done, they are adaptable, they can change and adjust as time moves on and i think the other term i like is they are increasingly viewed as ethical. businesses are not perfect, let's remember that,

but relative to other major institutions like government and media even, except for the bbc of course, but except for that, it is just being a trusted effort and frankly if i do not like what a company is doing, i do not have to wait for four to six years for another election, i can go change my purchase behaviour right now. and daryl, we know you have been a chief executive officer yourself, running krispy kreme doughnuts, so i want to know, what are the biggest challenges ceos face when deciding to speak out on an issue whilst of course still running their company both effectively and profitably? i used to run nabisco before krispy kreme. i remember one time, oreos is our great global brand, and we were talking about some of the key public issues and one of our directors said just shut up and make the oreos. that is not the opportunity any more. companies need to think through those issues that are relevant to them, how they will respond and maybe even take action before these become major issues. but daryl, i am wondering, when companies are struggling with basics such as surging inflation, this cost of living crisis all around the world, they are worried aboutjust not having enough staff,

do you think we could see less involvement of companies in certain social issues? yes, i think it will adjust based on the times. again, if i go back a decade ago when i was a ceo, very few ceos ever spoke out. i think as issues hit, the murder of george floyd, socialjustice issues, climate issues etc, we saw a real surge in how companies were speaking out. today we really counselled companies to be thoughtful about that approach. you take an example on a global basis of the difference of how companies responded to apartheid in south africa which took literally decades for companies to reach mass relative to ukraine, where in a matter of days, over a thousand companies who had businesses in russia and ukraine had already stepped up on this issue. the speed at which that happened really accelerated over the last decade. daryl, let me end on this, because when society only seems

to be becoming more and more polarised, does that place more responsibility on big business to take a leadership role on some of these issues? yes, aaron, i think it does. i think business�* role is to really kind of step up. we have extremists in so many countries around the globe on both sides of areas, but i think business has an opportunity, if not to find common ground, but to find a higher ground that society can move towards. daryl brewster, the big boss of chief executives for corporate purpose, thanks for your time, really appreciate it and i will check in with you soon. great, thank you, aaron, appreciated. well, that is it for this week's show, i hope you enjoyed it. don't forget you can keep up with all the latest on the global economy on the bbc news website and the smartphone app. you can also follow me on twitter. tweet me, i will tweet you back. thanks for watching, i'll see you soon. bye— bye. hello there. it's still very warm out there. the heat is still in place,

and it follows the warmest day of the year so far in wales, with the temperature 29 degrees. for much of england, though, it was even hotter than that, with 32 in northolt west of london. that was monday's temperatures. tuesday's temperatures, well, they look a little bit different. cooling off by a few degrees across many parts of the country. changes coming down from the north—west, where we've got thicker cloud in scotland and northern ireland, bringing with it some patchy rain. that patchy rain will peter out for the most part as it runs southwards, bringing a few showers into england and wales, most places dry. a lot more cloud, some of it quite thin, so some hazy sunshine and we'll see sunshine returning to scotland and northern ireland after the damp start. together with cooler and fresher air that's moving southwards, so the really hot weather again, over 30 degrees, is this time confined more to the south—east of england and east anglia. still warm across some other parts of england, mind you, but those temperatures are dropping away a little. and it will be a cooler night ahead for many tuesday night, but still very warm as we head into wednesday in the south—east of england.

and we could see one or two showers coming from this cloud here in southernmost parts of england. the odd shower maybe for northern ireland, more especially into scotland, but for large parts of the country, it's still going to be dry, still going to be lots of sunshine. but it's just tending to cool down just a little. those temperatures continuing to drop, though still very warm in the south—east, temperatures 28 degrees here. now, we've got this weak weather front that's moving southwards bringing that cooler air behind it and bringing one or two showers into southern england on wednesday. that's gone by thursday. this area of high pressure building back in from the atlantic, and around it we've got these west to north—westerly breezes bringing in cooler and fresher air, bringing in more cloud to scotland and northern ireland and the odd shower. some of the cloud spilling down into england and wales, probably going to be dry here with some spells of sunshine, and those temperatures probably not changing too much really on thursday. again, still quite warm towards the south—east at 28 degrees, but in general, it is cooling down through the rest of this week after that heat for the start of the week.

and we're keeping that cooler air for scotland and northern ireland into the weekend, but not so for england and wales. the heat is going to build again, and we've got this extreme heat warning from the met office for sunday, could be extended into monday. difficult to put a number on it, but we could be challenging the all—time uk temperature record.

welcome to bbc news — i'm david eades. our top stories: japan prepares for the funeral of shinzo abe, assassinated last week. he had been the longest serving prime minister in the country's history. sri lanka's president confirms he will step down on wednesday but who will take over? there'll be a new british prime minister by september — it points to many weeks of fierce campaigning for the main candidates. the first round of voting will be on wednesday. we expect a 20 supporters for each candidate. on the first ballot, any candidate to proceed must have won at least 30 votes.

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