If it's so good for business why does he think we need a legal structure to punish companies that just hire whoever they want?
I also submit that if you think discriminating against blacks and women was good for business (a defensible claim), then you probably ought to be disagreeing with Tim Cook about whether sexual-orientation-based discrimination is good for businesses [1]. In my view, that would make the case for anti-discrimination legislation stronger, not weaker, because if both prevailing biases and good business sense favors discrimination, then we really need to act.[2]
[1] Perhaps you could believe the former but not the latter. They seem pretty parallel to me though, so I'd be curious what you thought the differences were.
[2] You could disagree with this too and simply be a lassez-faire fundamentalist, but that would render your original question kind of pointless.
Tim Cook was making the same assumption in the article when he said that workplace equality is good for business.
Also, the "barriers to entry" came from those state and local government regulations I referred to; asking the Federal government to provide a level playing field would have meant asking the Federal government to force state and local governments to remove those barriers to entry.
I am suggesting that when entering the market is already difficult (which is true of many American industries where discrimination might be a problem), a new firm being nondiscriminatory is unlikely to be a sufficient competitive advantage to displace existing firms.
It is possible for nondiscrimination to be beneficial for already existing firms but not an immediate, substantial, and sure-fire competitive advantage.
With a level playing field, I don't think entry into the market is as difficult as you claim for many areas of businesses. The discrimination that the civil rights movement protested against wasn't discrimination about who could build new semiconductor chip fabs: it was about who could ride at the front of the bus, or who could stay at which hotels. In a free market these would be easy businesses to get into; the main barriers to entry are government regulations.
The ENDA isn't about accommodation discrimination (buses, hotels, etc.), though, it's about employment discrimination. Discriminating against potential customers is obviously bad business, and the competitive benefit for not discriminating might be decisive. Even so, government action was effective in almost entirely eliminating that form of discrimination (to the extent that when it occurs, it's seen as a throwback and an outrage).
The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation. The initial capital outlay is substantial, and established firms would be likely to have lucrative exclusive contracts with businesses. Potential riders would take a long time to trust a new bus service, and it would have to operate at a considerable loss for quite some time to build up a reputation.
After government action had enabled it in the first place. Jim Crow laws didn't just prevent blacks from riding at the front of the bus: it prevented blacks from starting their own bus companies.
The barriers to entry for operating a bus service would be enormous even without government regulation.
If all the bus services in town discriminate against blacks by making them ride at the back of the bus, but there's no government regulation, a new bus service, even if it's just a single bus, that does not impose that restriction has an immediate customer base: all the blacks that don't want to ride at the back of the bus. (We're assuming that this is a substantial number, which seems historically accurate.) Similar remarks apply to any other product or service where discrimination exists. I find it extremely implausible that, in the absence of government regulation, there would not have been many, many entrepreneurs willing to take advantage of such opportunities, or people to fund them.
How would you know?
Purely competitive markets are a mathematical abstraction
So are government regulations that magically apply just the "right" correction for a "market failure".
And yet he supports a law to force everyone to adopt those policies. It's like he doesn't actually believe "workplace equality" is good for business and would like to use the government to level the playing field he tilted against himself. If he really believed the policy was good for the bottom line, from a financial perspective he'd be overjoyed to compete against companies that don't have a similar policy.
The most likely explanation here, IMO, is Apple's policy actually hurts the bottom line a tiny bit, but the PR value outweighs the problems. But note if this is the case the law he's pushing will be a net (small) negative for other companies.
It's like telling US Sugar that it'd be a net gain for them to lose their tariff protections.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/25/news/fortune500/walmart_wage...
My source is the (then) CEO of Walmart.
All that aside, you may be right that it was a chiefly PR stunt and perhaps Walmart is in fact a poor example.
I was enjoying this discussion until your edit.
I'd venture that most well run and dominant companies pay more than their competitors. This is likely (speculation ahead) because these companies know that they must obtain and retain higher quality employees than do their competition.
Even for Walmart, their employees are the most important asset. From top to bottom. People like you and me (I'm assuming you've never worked there - I haven't) aren't aware, but supposedly Walmart really does treat their workers well. All in relative terms of course... And based upon pure hearsay of course.
Finally, regarding whether or not it was a publicity stunt: Maybe I'm jaded, but I consider everything that a corporate employee says publicly and in official capacity to be a publicity stunt, almost by definition.
Let's take an example. Southern Baptists, or any group you like, want to grow their numbers. Lets say they succeed and gain a majority of followers in the US. All of a sudden it can be a boost to business to comport with whatever discriminatory practices are popular with the majority. The invisible hand moveth.
If you really believe this, then your response should not be to ask the government to pass laws forcing such companies to be "rational". Your response should be to start a "rational" company that out-competes them, by hiring all the talented people that can't get jobs at the bigoted company, and thereby drive the bigoted company out of business.
I find it depressing that I have to bundle this industry into the same basket as other companies and industries that other women complain about on the female-dominated forums I frequent. Meritocracy? hahahahahahahaha
Have you considered not doing business with companies whose hiring or employment practices you don't like? Or forming your own company to out-compete them?
I think the answer here is that the advantages it confers aren't sufficient to allow an upstart to overcome its disadvantage--namely, market position. Having more rational hiring practices is not a trump card. Lots of poorly run companies beat well-run ones all the time, but it doesn't mean they wouldn't be more successful as better-run companies.
I'll also note that there are a number of confounding factors that make non-discrimination more attractive when enforced corrosively. For example, let's say you're an industry with widespread discrimination against gay people. Gay people leave the industry, and are thus not readily available to those willing to hire them. And perhaps they're typically less experienced because of that discrimination, so that makes it less useful to hire them. A sort of tragedy of the commons in the labor market. It's still irrational to discriminate, just less so, and perhaps the disadvantages of doing so fit under the noise floor. But with legislation, the feedback loop works the other way, and it makes a lot more sense to hire from this now larger and more experienced labor pool. Could increase the overall output a lot more than having one company float to the top through marginally better hiring.
It absolutely was, because at that time in much of the country if you hired a black guy all his coworkers would refuse to work with him. White people would refuse to patronize your business.
They were prevented from doing so by government regulations--state and local government regulations.
additionally, the ability of consumers to have in depth knowledge of every political stance of every business in the production chain of every product they buy means that the free market is ill-equipped to encourage good employment behavior.