Patagonia is encouraging its employees to get out and vote early in the 2024 election.
According to the outdoor retailer, which has over 2,000 employees in the U.S., it will close its stores, warehouse and offices on Oct. 29, 2024, on national Vote Early Day so that its associates can participate in this year’s election.
Employees will receive a paid day off and have the entire day to vote early and volunteer, Patagonia said. The company is calling it “Vote Early and Volunteer Day.”
As for the volunteering aspect of the day, Patagonia is partnering with the League of Conservation Voters this year to provide opportunities for its employees and the community to volunteer to knock on voters’ doors and write letters to low-propensity voters, as well as call and text voters to encourage them to vote, and to provide voters with resources to learn where the candidates stand on environmental issues.
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The company is also working with Vote Early Day, Protect Our Winters and the Civic Alliance to rally the outdoor sports and business communities around the importance of voting and volunteering in this fall’s election.
“For Patagonia, voting is a priority because democratic participation creates the foundation for progress on every issue we care about,” Corley Kenna, vice president of communications and public policy at Patagonia, said in a statement. “To save our planet from the climate and nature crisis, we have to elect leaders who share our sense of urgency.”
According to the company, it has been asking its community to vote the planet since the 1970s, and it has given employees Election Day off in the United States since 2016.
The first election Patagonia engaged in was in 1978. It launched Vote the Environment in 2004 to mobilize America’s outdoor sports community to vote. The company closed its stores, offices and warehouse on Election Day for the first time in 2016, and in 2018, it launched Time to Vote with Levi Strauss & Co. and PayPal. To this day, Time to Vote includes more than 2,000 companies that have pledged that workers won’t have to choose between voting and earning a paycheck.
