The Future Of Driving, In One Provocative Chart

In the future, only rich people will own cars and only robots will drive them.

That’s the takeaway from a new research note from Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas. Like Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, he predicts that improvements in self-driving technology will eventually lead to bans on human driving on most roads.

Ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, which have already been widely adopted in major urban centers, have paved the way for cities, and eventually suburbs, to adopt mega-fleets of public vehicles that will taxi passengers around. This will dramatically lower the cost per ride to about 25 cents per mile, which is roughly one-tenth of what a traditional taxi costs, Jonas said. He provides no clear timeline for when this might occur.

By contrast, wealthy people -- at least in the near-term -- will own self-driving vehicles, a fact on which Mercedes-Benz and Tesla seem to be banking.

Again, Jonas provides no clear timeline. But an increasing number of luxury carmakers are already adding autonomous features to their vehicles. In October, Tesla's Musk estimated that fully driverless cars will be on the road by 2023.

Here’s how the chart breaks down:

• Quadrant 1: Today, most drivers own or lease their own vehicles, which they drive themselves. Autonomous driving technology is only beginning to emerge.
• Quadrant 2: Over the past few years, ride-hailing services such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar have alleviated the need to own a car in many major cities, making a driver much more accessible. Jonas said this is a logical step toward the so-called mega-fleets of public, autonomous cars.
• Quadrant 3: Over the next decade, rich people will likely swap out the cars they drive for cars that drive themselves. Already, Tesla is planning to roll out a version of its Model S sedan that has limited autopilot features sometime this summer. The latest version of the car, announced on Wednesday, starts at $67,500 after a Federal Tax Credit.
• Quadrant 4: This is the final evolution in the car industry and there is no clear date for when this will come to fruition. But with few exceptions, most people will be driven by cars that are either a public utility or part of a privately-owned fleet that users subscribe to use. At this point, laws will likely restrict human driving to select roads, Jonas wrote. Other forms of public transportation, such as subway systems, may become obsolete.

The CEO Who Took On Indiana's Anti-LGBT Law -- And Won

For Marc Benioff, the fight against Indiana's widely criticized "religious freedom" law was personal.

The Salesforce CEO was a leading voice in the national outcry against Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed last month. Critics argued that the original version of the RFRA would have permitted businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.

Benioff said his advocacy was an effort to help his employees and customers whom the law might have affected, something he describes as being key to his personal philosophy.

“I’m all for a healthy mind and a healthy body, but I’m also about having a healthy planet and a healthy country and taking care of others that don’t have as much,” Benioff, a habitual meditator, told The Huffington Post on Monday from his vacation home in Hawaii. “That’s my spirituality.”

On March 25, a day before Pence first signed Indiana's RFRA, Benioff became the first major business leader to speak out against the law by threatening to scale back his company's investment in the state. After the governor approved the measure, Benioff swung back even harder, posting what he called the "tweet heard 'round the world," in which he announced plans to cancel all Salesforce programs that would require customers or employees to travel to Indiana. Indeed, it was retweeted nearly 9,800 times and favorited more than 8,300 times and became part part of the national conversation.

The following week, he stepped up his campaign again, promising relocation packages to Salesforce employees in Indiana who wanted to transfer elsewhere.

“CEOs are very much the advocates of their customers and employees, as well as of the environment and local communities,” Benioff said. “The most successful CEOs today are advocates for their stakeholders, not just their shareholders.”

After a week of backlash, Pence approved a revised version of the measure, this time explicitly banning businesses from refusing service because of a person's sexual orientation or gender identity.

Benioff may have been the first major CEO to express his opposition to the legislation, but he was soon joined by others. Corporate giants and organizations from Apple to NASCAR rallied behind LGBT rights groups in Indiana to fight the law.

Still, the Salesforce chief may have been uniquely positioned to champion the cause in Indiana. For starters, San Francisco-based Salesforce became the state's largest tech employer when it acquired the marketing software firm ExactTarget in 2013.

And, Benioff has a lot of powerful friends.

The day after the law passed, he said, he emailed the people he regularly meets and dines with in San Francisco, many of whom are top tech industry executives. Among them was Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal and the chief executive of financial management site Affirm. Four days after Benioff sent the email, when he flicked on CNBC as he started his morning workout at the gym, he saw Levchin railing against Indiana’s law.

“I was completely blown away,” Benioff said, noting that Levchin went on to organize more than 70 top executives to sign a joint statement condemning the law last week. “This is really the first time that we have started something, and the reason it got started -- the reason it was successful -- is because it was so many different CEOs banding together.”

Benioff has long practiced the "stakeholder theory," a philosophy advocated by World Economic Forum founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, among others. The ideology views shareholders as second to employees, customers, suppliers, communities, trade unions and others who are affected by a company’s commerce. Imbued with a strong sense of corporate responsibility and connected with its community, a firm that's guided by these principles might, the philosophy suggests, earn greater profits over time, translating into higher returns for investors. It’s the corporate equivalent of building good karma.

In the two weeks since Benioff began his campaign, emails have poured in from workers thanking him for stepping up. He said he's never received so much positive employee feedback in his 16-year tenure at Salesforce.

“When the economic hammer came down, that’s when things really started to change,” he said. “There’s one word that was continually used by everyone in Indiana, which was ‘historic.’ That’s something that we in San Francisco, or those of us who don’t live in Indiana, don’t have the perspective to understand, but for them this was historic.”

Benioff pledged to continue the fight by urging the Indiana legislature to add the LGBT community as a protected class under local civil rights laws in its next session.

“The conversation happened the right way,” he said. “It opens the door for another change and another change, probably in the next legislature.”

The CEO admits that not every step in this push to change the law has been graceful. He became the target of some criticism after a CNN interview last Wednesday, in which he said, "One thing that you're seeing is that there is a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs." The comment provoked pushback from those who already fear the influx of money in politics. Benioff said he misspoke as a result of his excitement over the business community’s rapid response to the situation in Indiana.

Benioff hopes business leaders can continue to push for important legislation that affects their stakeholders, and cites patent and immigration reform as specific examples.

Asked whether Indiana just happened to provide the right place and time for business leaders to unite behind a particular political cause, or whether the momentum would continue to grow, Benioff said he was unsure.

"This was so spontaneous, it happened so quickly," he said. "But CEOs do have a lot of power, like it or not, so they need to bring on a stakeholder philosophy."

Reddit Hopes Ending Salary Negotiations Will Help Women

Ellen Pao is still fighting.

Just weeks after losing a courtroom battle that highlighted tech's glaring gender problems, Pao is trying to solve some of them closer to home: at Reddit, where she is interim CEO.

In an effort to promote gender diversity, Reddit is no longer negotiating salaries with potential hires, Pao told The Wall Street Journal. It was her first interview since losing a gender-discrimination lawsuit against the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last month.

“Men negotiate harder than women do, and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate. So as part of our recruiting process we don’t negotiate with candidates,” Pao told the WSJ. “We come up with an offer that we think is fair. If you want more equity, we’ll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation."

More broadly, Reddit is trying to build a team that values diversity, and it's working with diversity expert Freada Kapor Klein to find other ways to create an inclusive environment, Pao told the WSJ.

"We ask people what they think about diversity, and we did weed people out because of that,” she said.

Numerous studies suggest a disparity between men and women who haggle with employers about pay. Not only are men typically more likely to negotiate salaries than women, women are also penalized more than men when they do negotiate.

And when the conversation does turn to money, women are more likely to be judged for their social skills than for their competence, an issue that men rarely face.

Still, it remains to be seen how Pao’s mandate will work in practice.

“If you’ve got a talented female who has another offer from a competitor, are you really going to expect that they’ll take a big salary hit to come to your firm?” asked Malia Mason, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Pao sued Kleiner in 2012, alleging that it discriminated against her because of her gender and later retaliated by firing her. A jury voted in Kleiner's favor on March 27, after a four-week trial, which delved deeply into Pao’s personal life and ultimately focused on her performance at work.

But the lawsuit against Kleiner, which was an early investor in Amazon and Google, renewed scrutiny on the overwhelming gender disparity in tech. Few women hold leadership roles at tech companies, and reports of sexual harassment and misogynistic behavior have plagued Silicon Valley for years.

Pao said she got messages of support from other women throughout the trial. One group of women in the tech industry, led by Lori Hobson, took out a full-page ad in the Palo Alto Daily Post that read, “Thanks Ellen.”

“If I have helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” Pao said after the trial.

Working Parents Should Be Very Happy About This Obscure Senate Vote

Something pretty remarkable happened late last month while the Senate was voting on the annual budget resolution. And it had very little to do with the budget.

On March 26, while individual senators were introducing amendments as part of a process known as “vote-a-rama,” Patty Murray (D-Wash.) offered up what she called a "paid sick day" proposal. Her idea is to guarantee that all Americans can take up to seven days off from work a year, with pay, in order to get better from an illness or to take care of a sick family member.

Labor unions and women’s groups love the idea. The business community pretty much detests it. That opposition helps explain why the idea has never gotten much traction in Congress, even though it's been kicked around for a long time.

Murray has taken up the leadership on the issue in the Senate, now that its previous champion, Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), has retired. But as Murray’s aides and allies tell it, the senator did not spend a lot of time trying to rally supporters or persuade wavering colleagues on this particular vote. She figured that most of her fellow Democrats would vote yes. She hoped that a handful of Republicans might do the same, so that she could claim majority support for the concept -- 51 votes, or maybe one or two more if she was really lucky.

She ended up with 61.

“We weren’t expecting to get the level of support we got," a Murray aide told The Huffington Post.

Vicki Shabo, vice president of the National Partnership for Women and Families, agreed. “There was not a big lobbying effort around this amendment,” she said. “The vote was a surprise -- but a very positive surprise.”

The breakdown of the vote was particularly interesting. In all, 14 Republicans voted to support the amendment. Conspicuous on the “ayes” list were Kelly Ayotte from New Hampshire, Mark Kirk from Illinois, Rob Portman from Ohio and several other incumbents up for reelection in states that have voted Democratic or have been up for grabs in the last two presidential elections. In fact, two such Republicans, Pat Toomey from Pennsylvania and Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, switched their votes at the last minute to join the majority.

One possible reason for the strong showing: Murray refused requests to consider the amendment on a voice vote only, according to sources familiar with what happened behind the scenes. Murray pushed for a roll call, which meant votes would be recorded -- and possible fodder in the 2016 elections. Any Republican who voted against the amendment would have to explain that vote to constituents.

This doesn’t mean paid sick leave is about to become law. The budget resolution isn’t binding legislation. It’s merely a set of instructions to congressional committees as they set out to write legislation. Amendments like Murray’s are typically vague and largely symbolic -- designed to demonstrate support for a particular idea, force adversaries to make unpopular votes, or some combination of the two.

After the vote, aides to some Republicans who voted for the bill assured reporters that their bosses were merely expressing support for the idea of paid sick leave, not any specific legislation that Murray and her allies had in mind.

But the prospect of voting against paid sick leave in the abstract obviously spooked a bunch of vulnerable Senate Republicans. That may say something about the level of political support, not just for paid sick days but also for what’s come to be known as the “working families” agenda -- an agenda that’s likely to figure prominently in the 2016 presidential campaign.

A Revolution In Family Life, Not Yet In Policy

The agenda is a reaction to a profound sociological shift in family life that’s been underway for decades.

In 1960, the majority of households with children had at least one parent at home, and the majority of women with children stayed out of the workforce. Today that’s no longer true, as more than 60 percent of households with children have no parents staying at home, and women make up nearly half the labor force. This has created new stresses and strains on families, particularly families with very young children.

These parents need time off from work, whether it's a few days to nurse a sick kid or a few months to care for a newborn. They need child care and, ideally, some kind of prekindergarten to prepare kids for school.

In pretty much every other developed country, government acts aggressively to meet these needs -- by subsidizing or directly providing early child care, for example, and by guaranteeing that parents can take time off, with pay, to care for newborns and sick relatives. That’s not the case here in the U.S., where the law requires very little, and such benefits are largely a function of whether employers offer them. That works out well enough for employees of large, generous corporations -- and not so well for everybody else.

Infographic by Alissa Scheller for The Huffington Post.

Predictably, the workers least likely to have such benefits tend to be in lower-paying industries, like fast food or retail, or those piecing together low-paying, part-time and contingent work. Paid sick days, the cause Murray is pushing, are a prime example of the kind of options these workers lack. Among people whose incomes place them into the highest quartile, 85 percent have paid sick days, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Among people in the lowest quartile, just 30 percent do.

And because responsibility for caregiving falls disproportionately to women, the inability to get paid days off or find affordable child care has forced them to make career choices -- like slowing their advancement or abandoning jobs altogether -- that reinforce gender inequality.

Efforts to bolster government programs and protections for working parents in this country have proceeded in fits and starts, thanks to a familiar set of obstacles. For one thing, initiatives typically require some combination of government regulation and spending. Those are tough to secure when either funds are scarce or Republicans, backed by corporate lobbies, have control over one branch of government -- conditions that have existed for most of the last few decades. It also hasn’t helped that, until very recently, large numbers of Americans were, at best, ambivalent about the role of women in the workplace.

The last time Congress passed a major piece of legislation with the sole purpose of helping workers balance work and family was in 1993, when the Democratic-controlled House and Senate passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, guaranteeing up to six weeks of leave for employees of large firms who needed time to care for a new baby or sick relative. It was historic legislation -- the very first bill that Bill Clinton signed as president.

Getting the law passed took a herculean political effort, spanning years, and the law has one big limitation: Because it requires companies to provide unpaid leave, not paid leave, many workers can’t afford to use it.

But political conditions change, and there are reasons to think the support for such policies may be stronger now. For one thing, the financial strain on families is greater, creating more demand for help. Child care costs may be the most vivid example. According to the Census Bureau, a working mother in 1985 could expect to pay, on average, $87 a week for child care. By 2011, that working mother could expect to pay $148 a week -- an increase of 70 percent. (Those numbers are adjusted for inflation.)

And relative to the 1980s, advocates for policies like paid leave and child care support are more likely to find lawmakers -- including men -- who understand firsthand the kind of pressure working parents face. That’s true of state legislatures and Congress and that’s true of the White House, where President Barack Obama has spoken frequently about the challenges he and Michelle faced when their kids were young and both of them had promising professional careers ahead of them.

One more factor that could help: Experts are compiling more evidence about the effect that programs like paid leave can have on businesses and the economy. Critics have long maintained that such policies would hurt employers and ultimately slow economic growth. The latest evidence suggests otherwise -- in part because such policies can improve retention and allow women, who increasingly have high skills, to stay in the workforce if they wish.

Success In The States, Struggles In Washington

Advocates for more generous child care and leave policies have already made some gains at the state and local level. Paid sick leave was on the ballot in four places last year -- three cities and one state, Massachusetts. It passed in all four. The process is taking longer at the federal level, but it's clearly underway. The White House has made work-family issues a major priority for Obama’s second term -- by issuing reports on the productivity lost when women can’t pursue career aspirations; by staging summits and other White House events on the needs of working families; and by proposing or endorsing major initiatives for universal prekindergarten, paid leave and tax credits to help parents with children.

On Capitol Hill, work-family issues have been a longtime cause for such veteran Democrats as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut. But particularly in the Senate, up-and-coming Democrats are staking their own claim to the agenda. Kirstin Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) has been waging a crusade on behalf of paid leave, and Bob Casey (D-Penn.) recently proposed a major new tax credit for families paying for child care.

“You don’t want to blow things out of proportion,” said Heather Boushey, executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “But I’ve been in D.C. since 2000 working on these issues, and it’s feeling avalanche-y. There’s a lot going on.”

The Democrats sponsoring these pieces of legislation are optimistic about the prospects for passing legislation, even with Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress. And maybe those statements aren’t quite as naive as they sound. After Obama unveiled his own version of a child care tax credit, Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell identified it as the one idea on the president’s agenda they could support.

But with Congress struggling to pass even routine legislation, and dollars for new programs in short supply, it will probably take the 2016 campaign to focus attention on these issues -- and, eventually, rally constituencies for passing laws.

Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ likely nominee, seems poised to make this case. She has a long history of advocating for these sorts of programs, going back to the 1970s and her work with the Children’s Defense Fund. And while her demurral about paid family leave in a CNN interview last summer got lots of attention, advocates say they aren’t worried and expect a strong work-family agenda to be part of her campaign.

The big unknown is how Republicans will react -- and this is why, ultimately, the Murray vote may be more significant than the garden-variety budget measure. If the Murray vote proved anything, it’s that Republicans can read the same polls as Democrats. In a 2013 HuffPost/YouGov poll, 74 percent of respondents said they would support a requirement that all employers offer paid sick leave. Republicans recognize that voters crave stronger, more generous supports for working parents, or at least like the sound of them.

Of course, opposition to these measures remains strong. As Dave Weigel of Bloomberg pointed out, every Senate Republican also running for president voted no on Murray's amendment.

If the political pressure gets intense, the GOP could simply offer up a different agenda -- one that sounds similar to what Democrats are proposing, but actually accomplishes less. An example would be the “Working Family Flexibility Act,” which is a Republican proposal for making paid sick leave more widely available. The initiative would require that employees build up overtime hours in order to get paid leave -- and then give employers discretion over when employees can take it.

Some labor advocates consider the Republican proposal nothing more than an attempt to undermine guarantees of overtime pay, on which many low- and medium-income families rely.

Could such proposals be the basis for future compromise, if not in this Congress than in a subsequent one? Are they simply an attempt to deflect criticism from voters who want action on work-family issues? It’s difficult to know. But it’s unlikely Republicans can simply avoid these issues altogether. Democrats have taken notice of the success that Murray had. They’ll be back for more.

Dave Jamieson contributed reporting.

March's Weak Jobs Report Is More Evidence The Fed Should Be Careful

The March jobs report, released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was not good. After months of very strong jobs reports, though, it was a specific kind of not good: not outright negative, and nowhere near apocalyptic, just confusingly bad.

As unclear as this month's jobs report was in terms of telling an obvious story about the U.S. economy, when it comes to raising interest rates, it will suit the Federal Reserve just fine. At its last meeting, the Fed tied its decisions on interest rates more closely to economic data, and yet also indicated it would be loathe to raise rates too early and snuff out economic growth. This jobs report lets it be true to both commitments.

The U.S. economy added 126,00 jobs in March, far less than the 247,000 economists, on average, had expected. What's worse, January and February job numbers were revised down by a total of 69,000, making this report even weaker. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.5 percent.

In the first few months of 2015, job growth seems to have slowed down from a breakneck pace in 2014. The job market has grown by a very solid 261,000 new jobs per month over the past six months, the New York Times' Neil Irwin noted. But, as Slate's Jordan Weissmann retorted, in the past three month's we've averaged just 197,000 new jobs per month.

It's still too early to say what these numbers are telling us. Has the U.S. job market finally turned the corner and left the disfigurement of the recession behind? Or is it still scarred and somewhat limping? It could be either.

Wages are also sending mixed signals. Wage growth has been remarkably and depressingly steady at a pace of about 2 percent per year for five years. It stayed remarkably and depressingly steady in March, rising 2.1 percent from a year ago.

But if you look at the past three months, annualized wage growth is an impressive 4 percent, the Peterson Institute's Justin Wolfers pointed out. And other indicators, like employer compensation costs and the number of companies that say they plan to give raises, seem to indicate wage growth is finally picking up.

So, amid all this "on the one hand, on the other hand" data, what is the Federal Reserve supposed to think about the health of the economy -- let alone the wisdom of raising interest rates, as it is widely expected to do at some point in the near future?

As University of Oregon professor Tim Duy pointed out in his excellent analysis of the Fed's most recent meeting, by removing the word "patient" from its description of how it thinks about interest-rate hikes, the Fed is saying it will let data dictate its decision. And the data from the jobs market, even before this bad jobs report, Duy noted, was saying "don't raise rates" anytime soon.

In other words, Duy says that Fed Chair Janet Yellen "[moved] the Fed both closer to and further from the first rate hike of this cycle." That's not as inscrutable as it sounds: The Fed's "closer" to the data, which could potentially improve quickly, and "further" because the data, as it is now, says don't raise rates.

And the March jobs report reinforces that stance: a data-dependent rate hike is still a ways off.

Why Corporate America Is Finally Raising Wages

Some of the country’s biggest employers are finally raising wages amid mounting pressure from protesters and a hardier job market.

McDonald’s on Wednesday became the latest major company to give workers -- albeit a fraction of its total workforce -- a pay bump that will lift average hourly pay to $9.90 from $9.01. The move, which will go into effect on July 1, follows a similar change made in February by Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer.

What, after years of stagnant wage growth for low-paid workers, is causing corporations to shell out more to their staff?

For some companies, the pay raise has been compelled by a sense of ethical leadership.

Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini raised the minimum wage at the health insurance company to $16 per hour after reading French economist Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital In The Twenty-First Century, which warns of the increasingly wide gap between rich and poor.

Other firms have been motivated by the desire to maintain market share.

“We’ve known for a really long time that if you look like a good corporate citizen, that’s good for sales,” Bob Keener, spokesman for the nonprofit Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, told The Huffington Post. “If you make a big public announcement about how you’re going to raise wages, you look like a good corporate citizen, and that’s going to increase your sales.”

Competition is also driving wages up. Call it a wage-hike domino effect. As the U.S. economy continues to add jobs, even retailers who claim to keep prices low in part by minimizing payroll expenses must increase how much they pay their workers to avoid losing them.

Since apparel giant Gap Inc. raised its minimum wage to $9 per hour last year, the company has seen a major influx in applicants, The Washington Post reported.

“When other large, low-wage employers boost their wages, McDonald’s has to be concerned about its employees moving to another employer where they can get another buck per hour,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the nonprofit National Employment Law Project. “There is undoubtedly some tightening in the labor market at the low end that is having an effect on wages.”

Plus, higher wages are good for business. Sales at McDonald’s and Walmart have languished over the past year, and boosting wages could actually be part of a strategy to help turn things around.

For every extra $1 a company spends each month in payroll, it could get back anywhere from $4 to $28 in monthly sales, according to a 2007 study by professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and elsewhere.

Companies are also facing intense pressure from protesters to pay a living wage. Workers united under such groups as the "Fight for 15," which advocates for a $15 minimum wage, have led rallies in cities across the world, including a major gathering outside McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, last May. Fight for 15 is also planning a series of strikes for later this month.

Protests for higher pay are gaining steam. This week, Seattle began the process of raising its minimum wage to $15 per hour. Los Angeles is considering bumping the minimum wage for the city’s hotel workers to $15.37 -- making it the highest in the country.

While both McDonald’s and Walmart aim for a $10 average wage by next year, that is still $5 below the wage that protesters are demanding. Critics worry that these incremental pay boosts could be an attempt to undercut a movement that is gaining serious clout.

“This is a PR and a political move meant to knock the wind out of this growing and increasingly militant movement,” Peter Dreier, a professor of urban policy at Occidental College, told HuffPost. “The companies are now competing with each other not to look like they’re the worst employer in the world.”

Big Business Is Leading The Charge On Gay Rights Now

If Indiana's so-called "religious freedom" law goes down, you can thank Corporate America for killing it.

Big Business' outsized criticism of the state’s coyly named Religious Freedom Restoration Act has galvanized fierce opposition to the law.

Under pressure from businesses -- including the state’s largest employers -- as well as human rights groups and even other states, Republican Gov. Mike Pence said on Tuesday that he would seek to amend the law to ensure that businesses can't discriminate against anyone.

Pence vehemently denied accusations that the law would allow businesses to refuse service to gay customers, but said he would nevertheless support changes to the law in order to clear the air. Neither Pence nor GOP leaders in the legislature have detailed what the amendment will say.

That the business community was able to act so swiftly and decisively against the Indiana law is a sign of just how far Corporate America has evolved on gay rights -- from practicer of "Mad Men"-era exclusion, to protector of employee rights, to outspoken advocate. Improbably, the Fortune 500 somehow have turned into one of the country's most powerful social advocates for change.

“We’re probably at a tipping point,” said Irv Schenkler, a clinical professor of management communication at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Things have certainly evolved since 2012, when no Fortune 500 companies opposed North Carolina’s proposed law banning same-sex marriage.

After Indiana’s law passed on Thursday, the response from the business community was swift, loud and decisive.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was among the first to denounce the law on Friday. His cloud computing company followed up by halting company travel to the state, and put the kibosh on events planned there. Other tech companies followed, with some eventually pulling out of a conference in Indianapolis in May.

Today we are canceling all programs that require our customers/employees to travel to Indiana to face discrimination. http://t.co/SvTwyCHxvE

— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 26, 2015

On Sunday, Apple CEO Tim Cook published a piece in The Washington Post sharply criticizing the law. A spokesman from the Human Rights Campaign told The Huffington Post that Cook’s op-ed was “a clarion call” for the opposition movement.

After Arkansas passed its own religious freedom law on Tuesday, the backlash extended to that state. Walmart, which is headquartered there, has already come out against the law and is asking Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) to veto it.

In a statement the company said the legislation "threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold."

The hits kept on coming. “The legislation in Indiana (and there are some bills being considered in other states) is not just pure idiocy from a business perspective, and it is that,” Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson told a group in New York, as he accepted an award from a gay rights group for his company’s work on equality. “The notion that you can tell businesses somehow that they are free to discriminate against people based on who they are is madness.”

By Tuesday, a long list of companies were on the record against Indiana’s law, including Nike, The Gap, Levi Strauss and PayPal. Big Pharma companies Eli Lilly and Co. and Roche Diagnostics are opposed, as is insurer Anthem. Angie’s List announced it would halt a planned expansion in the state.

Corporate America’s transformation on gay rights happened slowly, beginning in board rooms and trickling down to workers -- who now get better rights and protections from their employers than they do from their government. Eighty-nine percent of Fortune 500 companies have policies that specifically prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, according to a recent report from the Human Rights Campaign.

In contrast, there is no federal law prohibiting discrimination.

But it was the U.S. Supreme Court that truly forced companies out of the closet as gay rights supporters. A stunning 379 businesses, including many of the most respected companies in the U.S., signed onto an amicus brief at the court in support of gay marriage in a case to be argued next month that could make it legal nationwide.

In 2013, about 200 companies signed onto a brief urging that the high court overturn the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act that denies federal rights and benefits (like filing joint tax returns and inheriting money) to gay couples. It was overturned.

“Over the past couple of years, business support for LGBT equality has left the boardroom and entered the public square,” said the HRC spokesman.

Several factors drove the change. First, there’s the public’s increasing support of gay marriage, in particular the support of the coveted millennial generation.

In a Pew survey released Tuesday, 62 percent of Americans ages 18-29 said they’d oppose a law like Indiana’s that would allow, say, a wedding business like a photographer or a florist to decline services to a same-sex couple. For the general population, the percentage was 49 percent.

Companies also want to attract and recruit good people -- and that means having a diverse workforce. “Let's say you’re a tech company in the Bay Area or anywhere. It’s hard enough to find programmers,” says Susan McPherson, who runs a consulting company focused on corporate social responsibility in New York. “If you limit them to be only heterosexual, you lose out. As much as I would like to think it’s altruistic [to support gay rights]. It’s about good business.”

McPherson also notes that tech companies aren’t going to want to move to states where the rights of their workers aren’t protected. It’s hard to attract workers to hostile territory. LGBT shoppers also have extraordinary purchasing power, she said. “Are you really going to alienate them as your consumers?”

The HRC spokesman notes that increasing numbers of LGBTQ Americans are coming out of the closet -- including Apple CEO Tim Cook, the first Fortune 100 CEO to reveal he was gay. (That was another Cook move that galvanized corporate support around gay rights.)

But perhaps The New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz summed up the opposition to Indiana’s law best: “Indiana Governor Stunned By How Many People Seem to Have Gay Friends.”

-- Noah Michelson contributed reporting.

This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Walmart is now asking Gov. Asa Hutchison to veto Arkansas' religious freedom law, and to include Nike in the list of companies officially opposed to Indiana's law.