Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” and not just their shareholders.
They said “investing in employees, delivering value
to customers, and supporting outside communities“ is now at the
forefront of their business goals — not maximizing profits.
Baloney. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.
One
Business Roundtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just
weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM’s hefty
profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers’ demands that GM
raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year
GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
Nearly
50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They
won a few wage gains but didn’t save any jobs. Barra was paid $22
million last year. How’s that for corporate social responsibility?
Another
prominent CEO who made the phony Business Roundtable commitment was
AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, who promised to use the billions in
savings from the Trump tax cut to invest in the company’s broadband
network and create at least 7,000 new jobs.
Instead, even before
the coronavirus pandemic, AT&T cut more than 23,000 jobs and
demanded that employees train lower-wage foreign workers to replace
them.
Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and its Whole
Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the Business Roundtable
commitment, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits
for its entire part-time workforce.
The annual saving to Amazon
from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos – whose net worth is
$117 billion – makes in a few hours. Bezos’ wealth grows so quickly,
this number has gone up since you started watching this video.
GE’s
CEO Larry Culp is also a member of the Business Roundtable. Two months
after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, General Electric
froze the pensions of 20,000 workers in order to cut costs. So much for
investing in employees.
Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of
Boeing, also committed to the phony Business Roundtable pledge. Shortly
after making the commitment to “deliver value to customers,” Muilenburg
was fired for failing to act to address the safety problems that caused
the 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people. After the crashes, he
didn’t issue a meaningful apology or even express remorse to the
victims’ families and downplayed the severity of the fallout to
investors, regulators, airlines, and the public. He was rewarded with a
$62 million farewell gift from Boeing on his way out.
Oh, and the
chairman of the Business Roundtable is Jamie Dimon, CEO of Wall
Street’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. Dimon lobbied Congress personally
and intensively for the biggest corporate tax cut in history, and got
the Business Roundtable to join him. JPMorgan raked in $3.7 billion from
the tax cut. Dimon alone made $31 million in 2018.
That tax cut
increased the federal debt by almost $2 trillion. This was before
Congress spent almost $3 trillion fighting the pandemic – and delivering
a hefty portion as bailouts to the biggest corporations, many of whom
signed the Business Roundtable pledge.
As usual, almost nothing has trickled down to America’s working class and poor.
The
truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities
as never before in order to further boost runaway profits and
unprecedented CEO pay. And not even a tragic pandemic is changing that.
Americans know this. A record 76 percent of U.S. adults believe major corporations have too much power.
The
only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws
requiring them to be – for example, giving workers a bigger voice in
corporate decision making, requiring that corporations pay severance to
communities they abandon, raising corporate taxes, busting up
monopolies, and preventing dangerous products (including faulty
airplanes) from ever reaching the light of day.
If the CEOs of
the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially
responsible, they’d support such laws, not make phony promises they
clearly have no intention of keeping. Don’t hold your breath.
The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of our politics.
The
first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the sham it
is. The next step is to emerge from this pandemic and economic crisis
more resolved than ever to rein in corporate power, and make the economy
work for all.
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