New York, USA - All campaigners claim to have right on their side, but one New Jersey-based adversary of corporate America can go one better: God's in her corner. Sister Patricia Daly, a Dominican nun, has made it her near-30-year mission to persuade, cajole and sometimes threaten US businesses into doing the right thing.
But this is no one-nun campaign. She is merely the most visible face of a network of faith-based organizations that have pooled US$110 billion of funds and flexed their financial muscles by investing in companies and then tabling resolutions to push their case at annual shareholder meetings.
Sister Patricia, a feisty Brooklyn-born New Yorker with a penchant for comfy cardigans, is the executive director of the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, which brings together Catholic institutions from across the New York metropolitan area.
The coalition is in turn part of the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), which includes Jewish and Protestant bodies among 275 faith-based institutional investors. The investors have a combined portfolio that dwarfs those of many a European fund manager.
Recently ICCR scored a victory that has been a long time coming, as many of the US' largest carmakers -- including Ford and GM -- finally agreed to exert pressure on their suppliers to improve working conditions. The move was the result of years of lobbying by sister Patricia and her colleagues.
Religious investing is a growing industry in the US, packed as it is with evangelical churches. Money managers such as the Timothy Fund and Pro Vita Advisers engage in what has become known as morally responsible investing, basing investment decisions on right-wing fundamentalist tenets.
They take money from churches or more usually individual believers and invest it in companies that agree with their position on certain "moral" issues. They exclude businesses they reckon are "polluting America" through actions such as backing planned parenthood or supporting gay and lesbian groups.
Sister Patricia and her network, in contrast, are engaged in socially responsible investing, which owes its origins more to socially aware college campuses of the 1960s and 1970s than to the sort of "charismatic" hellfire and damnation preaching spawned by the 1980s tele-evangelist movement.
"I see myself as being faithful to the gospel and the gospel needs to be preached in the context of the economic and political environment of today, not just in families, local neighborhoods and communities," she said.
At Catholic school in the politically charged 1960s and early 1970s there was much debate about how religion related to the outside world.
`Context of religion'
"Our religion class was the primary place where we dealt with issues like the Vietnam war, poverty in the world and violence in the city -- it was really in the context of religion that we had most of those discussions," she said.
After study at Connecticut's Sacred Heart University she joined the sisters of Saint Dominic of Caldwell, New Jersey, in 1976.
The following year she heard a talk given by a visiting priest who was involved in the one-year-old Tri-state coalition.
Her congregation joined up and with no previous training or interest in business she started filing shareholder resolutions about South Africa and labor issues while teaching at local high schools.
"My background was scripture and I was about to start teaching Christian morality, religion and justice so in those classes I started working on not just theoretical discussions like `what does it mean to be a Christian' but `in terms of the business community, how do we live out the Christian commitment that we have made'. You don't just leave that at home when you go to work," she said.
After time in the 1980s working with the Christian Brothers Investment Services, a Catholic-based socially responsible investor representing everything from dioceses to hospitals, she joined the Tri-state coalition.
Better rights
Whereas others in the religious investment community may lobby against rights for homosexuals, Sister Patricia has been demanding better rights for all workers. She has challenged top executives to explain how they will meet the threat posed by global warming. ICCR members sponsor more than 100 shareholder resolutions on social and environmental issues each year.
The list of corporations on the receiving end of 50-year-old Sister Patricia's crusading zeal reads like a Who's Who of the Fortune 500 and includes General Motors, Ford, ExxonMobil and General Electric (GE).
It cannot hurt in the fight for credibility to have signatories such as the Episcopal Church pension fund and the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother at the bottom of a resolution, but Sister Patricia has never, as she puts it, "used the God card."
She does not demand executives change their ways lest they be doomed to eternal damnation, nor says a particular course of action is what Jesus would do.
Instead the network's campaigns have been based on the realization that doing the right thing tends to pay better financial returns than doing the wrong thing.
"We would never be able to get almost 28 percent of the vote at a company like GE if we were just asking the company to do the right thing," she said. "We have got to make a business case and quite frankly we are investors. My congregation needs these companies to perform. We are underfinanced in terms of our retirement and we need to have these companies succeed."
Her network has, however, strayed into areas that secular investors may consider "moral" campaigning, for instance against the militarization of society through violent video games. Sister Patricia is adamant that faith-based groups are not arguing for a ban on games, but only that the ratings system be properly policed by US retailers.
"It is not censorship," she said. "These video games are rated but too many kids can go into stores and buy them."
Boycotting companies
But what about boycotting companies that, say, make contraceptives? Sister Patricia believes there are enough issues to tackle without entering into these sorts of areas.
"Obviously we have had a long history of trying to figure out what we are going to campaign on. We agree to work on what we can work on as an interfaith community. Those are all legitimate concerns for people -- they are just not going to be part of our agenda," she said.
The Dominican order is approaching its 800th anniversary. Saint Dominic founded the order to counteract the Cathars, an heretical sect that rejected Papal authority and renounced worldly pleasures. Sister Patricia sees a distant parallel with her work.
"Today we are dealing with the continuing untruths, the new heresies of our day," she said, such as companies that still do not believe in global warming or mistreat their workers. "We were founded to preach the truth and we will."
One of Sister Patricia's longest running conflicts has been with GE over its polluting of a 322km stretch of New York state's Hudson river with toxic polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB).
GE used the chemical -- while it was banned in 1976 -- in the manufacture of transformers. GE had discharged an estimated 590,000kg of the chemical into the river.
The site is one of the US' largest government-acknowledged hazardous waste sites.
Two years ago GE promised to dredge the river and the coalition called for the company to reveal what it has spent on public relations, legal manoeuverings and scientific investigations before accepting defeat.
In January last year, GE finally admitted that the bill for the past 15 years had reached US$800 million.