[Graeme]

You jus gotta love this story! Mike Moore (Roger and Me), eat your heart out.

Meet the activist shareholding nun

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'P')icture the scene: you are chairing your company's annual shareholders' meeting, there is somebody raising issues you really do not want to discuss and you are desperate for her to sit down and be quiet.

Oh yes, and she's a nun.

Sister Susan Mika is one of a group of religious activist shareholders who were raising corporate governance issues with companies before many had even heard of the concept.


Ten years ago, Sister Susan turned up at the Alcoa general meeting to raise the issue of how workers at plants in Mexico were being treated.

"We took workers to the annual meeting in Pittsburgh and the workers presented their information to the shareholders," she says.

"The chief executive was Paul O'Neill [later US Treasury Secretary] and he agreed to meet with us.

"He went down to the factories in Mexico himself and he made significant changes in those factories."

Mr O'Neill raised wages at the plant the following day, dismissed the chief executive of that division of the company and removed rules that required staff to ask supervisors for keys and toilet paper if they wanted to use the lavatories.

"Some of these things sound like very small things but they're very big when you're the worker that has to endure this every day," Sister Susan says.


Putting up resolutions at annual meetings is not their only weapon, though.

"Another is dialogue, another might be attending the annual meetings of the companies and speaking to the shareholders and the board of directors, and sometimes letter writing," Sister Susan says.

"So we use a variety of strategies with companies depending on what's working."

Other religious groups have tried even more innovative ways to put pressure on businesses.

The Evangelical Environmental Network ran a campaign against gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles under the slogan "what would Jesus drive?".