During the height of the Great Recession, big business took a hefty beating from a lot of people. Some of it was justly deserved. Many complained of CEO pay, the rise of Wall Street, and the investor class incomes versus the staganant wages of the middle and working classes were a couple of pain points in the economic and political wars that were fought at the end of the Bush administration and throughout the Obama years.

Now that the economy has regained some of its footing, corporate America is championing a few social causes that are putting them in a better light. I wanted to highlight a few.....

The Indiana RFRA:

....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.

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.

Walmart Is Finally Giving a Raise to a Half-Million Employees

Walmart said Thursday that it will raise wages for roughly a half-million full-time and part-time employees at its U.S. stores and Sam’s Clubs over the coming year. By April, Walmart employees will make a minimum of $9 an hour—$1.75 above the federal minimum wage. And by Feb. 1, 2016, that hourly rate will climb to at least $10 for all current employees. The increased pay combined with new worker training initiatives will be a billion-dollar investment for Walmart in the current fiscal year.

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon announced the pay increase in a letter and pre-recorded video released early Thursday morning. The retailer says it is also working to improve its sick-leave policy and benefits, give employees more control over their schedules, and make it easier for employees to advance within the company. “We’re pursuing comprehensive changes to our hiring, training, compensation, and scheduling programs, as well as to our store structure, and these changes will be sustainable over the long term,” McMillon wrote. Walmart has said that its hourly workers make, on average, $11.83 per hour with most of the minimum-wage earners in entry-level positions.

Walmart's move to increase wages forced their competitors to do the same

Finally, this went underreported but a few weeks ago, Microsoft did something huge for contract workers in thier organization by demanding that most of their contractors provide 15 days of paid time off to all of thier employees.

Although people do many jobs at Microsoft’s sprawling campus in Redmond, Wash., there are fundamentally two types of workers.

The first type is an employee, entitled to the generous pay and benefits Microsoft has long offered: paid parental leave, a 401(k) match, tuition assistance, discounted stock purchases, the list goes on.

The second is a contractor, employed by one of Microsoft's 2,000 suppliers. Many of them do tasks similar to those of the employees -- and pass by them on the winding walkways -- but often receive none of the perks that come with that staff badge.

The difference is part of an increasingly obvious divide between the haves and have-nots in the tech sector. Now Microsoft is taking one small step toward narrowing that gap: requiring all its vendors with more than 50 workers to offer those detailed to Microsoft contracts no fewer than 15 days of paid leave.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that’s the average number of days that entry-level private-sector employees receive — Microsoft employees start at 15 days of paid vacation, and 80 hours of sick leave. But it can be a rarity for those on contracts, since the United States doesn’t require employers to offer any paid leave, and only about half of employees have access to it. In a blog post announcing the move, Microsoft said it recognizes that the mandate will require paying more for the contracts it signs, and pledged to work with suppliers to figure out exactly how much.