Verizon Communications announced this week that it was elevating board member Dan Schulman (pictured above), former president and CEO of PayPal, to be its lead independent director. The role calls for this member to exercise greater oversight and direction for the rest of the governance team, in companies where the chair is the same person who also serves as CEO.
Hans Vestberg/PHOTO: TechCrunch (CC)
In Verizon’s case, Hans Vestberg is Chairman and CEO.
Schulman is a poor choice for this leadership role, and shouldn’t even be on Verizon’s board.
His biggest claim to fame (or more appropriately, shame) is his failed tenure atop PayPal’s corporate executive ladder. In February 2023 it was announced he would retire from the company at the end of the year, but he departed early as the stock price cratered. As Luke Perlot, NLPC’s associate director for its Corporate Integrity Project, wrote in September 2023:
[Schulman will] step down earlier than planned after [PayPal]’s shares plummeted over 75 percent in just two years. The company had announced in February that he intended to stay on until December 31, but now Schulman’s successor, Alex Chriss, will assume the role on September 27.
While PayPal’s share price was in free fall, Schulman allowed Orwellian schemes like the penalization of users $2,500 for spreading “misinformation.” After intense backlash, PayPal ditched the initiative, but the stock had already dropped 6 percent in one day. While most of the tech market rallied in the first half of 2022, PayPal’s stock price continued to fall. The firm has since claimed the policy of fining users for misinformation was an error.
The campaign was just one of Schulman’s efforts that led PayPal to adopt woke social policies.
In 2016, the firm scrapped plans for a new operations center in Charlotte that would have employed 400, after North Carolina unveiled a bill that would protect women’s safety by preventing transgender individuals from using the bathroom of their choice.
Also, according to USA Today, “on his watch, PayPal committed $535 million to support black-owned businesses and to fight economic inequality, part of Schulman’s goal to close the racial wealth gap.” These affirmative action-type policies are themselves unfair and earlier this year the Supreme Court struck down similar programs in higher education. In reality they merely expand racial divides.
Indeed, Schulman legitimately could be considered the face of everything “woke” in Corporate America, against which there is a severe backlash currently. For example, the influence he wielded as part of the broad boycott against the State of North Carolina over the “bathroom bill” particularly has not aged well, in light of the growing rejection of transgender ideology. He said at the time that “the new law perpetuates discrimination and it violates the values and principles that are at the core of PayPal’s mission and culture.”
According to a 2008 piece he wrote for the New York Times article, Schulman stated, “I was born with social activism in my DNA. My grandfather was a union organizer in the garment district in New York City. My mother took me to a civil rights demonstration in Washington in my stroller.”
Unsurprisingly, Schulman has done nothing to help redirect or even adjust Verizon’s own woke initiatives. As Corporate Integrity Project director Paul Chesser said at the company’s annual meeting in 2022, in support of a proposal seeking greater transparency about Verizon’s charitable contributions:
Verizon Chairman and CEO Hans Vestberg was no exception to these “white-guilt” donations in 2020, as he virtue-signaled his commitment to “diversity and inclusion” by committing $10-million dollars of company resources to so-called social justice organizations.
Among those donations were undisclosed amounts given to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow-Push Coalition, and to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network.
I can’t think of two more divisive race-baiters in American history than Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Considering these donations, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that last year Verizon imposed Critical Race Theory training on its employees, where they were told that American police are designed to maintain a “two-tier society,” and that they protect the “wealth gap” between whites and blacks.
And one instructor in the program explicitly advocated for “defunding the police.”
Last year NLPC called for Schulman’s resignation from Verizon’s board, and our request stands, as he is among those most responsible for the cultural toxicity that has infected the United States and other parts of the world the last several years.
Final note: While PayPal’s share price has not recovered to the COVID-era highs it once enjoyed, it has recovered noticeably since Schulman left the picture. Corporate America needs to stop rewarding failure.
