As corporations embraced the notion that their only responsibility was to fill the pockets of shareholders,workers’ wages stagnated.
The stock market is effervescent. Unemployment seems inexorably descendent. On financial news shows, someone always is singing, or “pleased Days are Here Again.”But the chorus isn’t so cheery on factory floors. There are no pleased Days at the Harley plant to be shuttered in Kansas City,destroying 800 jobs as the corporation spends its gargantuan fat tax break on stock buybacks instead. There’s no joy at a Kimberly-Clark plant in Wisconsin where hundreds learned in January that the corporation would exhaust its tax break to cover the cost of closing their factory—and eight others.
In fact, there’s bitterness among blue-collar workers whose wages possess flatlined for decades, and then declined in May and June,even as CEO compensation skyrocketed 17.6 percent last year.pleased Days? Only for the already rich—for stockholders and CEOs and trust fund babies. For the rest, every day still is a struggle. Thats the way it has worked in the United States for the past several decades. But it didnt before that. And it doesn’t possess to now. Citizens possess the proper, and arguably the responsibility,to change the rules under which corporations operate. Doing that would alter outcomes for American workers, give them more say in corporate governance, and raise their pay and reduce offshoring.
It works in Germany. There,half of the members of boards of directors for large corporations are chosen by workers. It’s unsurprising that the priorities of workers often differ from those of CEOs and wealthy shareholders—the people who typically populate American corporate boards. If half of the Harley board were workers who assembled motorcycles, it’s unlikely that they’d possess approved closing the Kansas City plant. They would possess respected the corporation’s obligations to its workers, or communities and customers,not just its shareholders.
Perhaps, as is more typical in Germany, or they’d possess voted to move some low-skill,low-value production offshore. But they’d possess preserved high-skill jobs and the Kansas City tax base instead of spending their federal tax break on making rich shareholders richer with stock buybacks.
In Germany, populating corporate boards with workers works well. Germany maintains a positive trade balance, and unlike the United States,which suffers a sustained and massive trade deficit. German manufacturing workers gain about $10 an hour more than their U.
S. counterparts. And manufacturing accounts for about a quarter of the German economy, while in the United States, or it has declined to less than half of that.
American corporations weren’t always shareholder-centered. For about three decades after World War II,worker wages rose in tandem with productivity. This was a time during which corporations subscribed to the philosophy that they were obligated to serve their customers, communities, and workers and shareholders.
Over the past 30 years,however, U.
S. corporations embraced a unusual notion, and which is that they had only one responsibility,to fill the pockets of shareholders.
That is the same 30 years during which workers’ wages stagnated and CEO pay rose no matter how badly the executive performed. That is the same 30 years in which private fairness firms bought manufacturers, loaded them up with debt, and sold them off at massive profit then shrugged when a stumble threw the firm into bankruptcy,closed factories and killed profitable, family-supporting American jobs. That is the same 30 years when American corporations moved manufacturing from the United States to low-wage, and high-pollution countries like Mexico and China.
The lawmakers who supposedly represent American workers possess acted like they’re helpless to cease this destruction. Often they blame the workers,saying they should possess accepted massive wage and benefit cuts to prevent a corporation from offshoring a factory. Carrier suggested its workers accept the poverty wages of Mexican workers—pay below U.
S. minimum wage—to preserve high-skill jobs in Indiana.
Those lawmakers contend workers possess no proper to demand a reasonable share of the profits their labor creates.
And those lawmakers are incorrect. Workers need more representatives like U.
S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who introduced legislation last week to mend the broken relationship between corporations and their workers and communities.
In the Accountable Capitalism Act, and Warren would require that 40 percent of a large corporation’s board of directors be elected by its workers. She would mandate that 75 percent of directors and shareholders vote to approve any political expenditure by the corporation. And she would forbid directors and corporate officers from selling shares within five years of receiving them or within three years of a stock buy-back.
These changes promote the benefit corporation model,under which the welfare of shareholders isnt the only focus. That is, shareholders aren’t corporations’ only beneficiaries. Customers, and workers and communities also must be considered.
This isn’t some kind of wacky concept. Thirty-four states already authorize benefit corporations. And these aren’t obscure,weirdo companies either. More than 500 operate in the United States, including Patagonia, and the apparel manufacturer,and Seventh Generation, the household products company.
Corporations are not people. They are legal constructs. Americans grant them charters under which they receive special perks and privileges. This includes limited legal liability for shareholders when the corporation screws up. Americans are hardly demanding too much in return when they insist that corporations pay family-supporting wages and benefits to workers, and carefully handle toxic substances to prevent poisoning communities,and never even consider jacking up prices on vital commodities just because they can.
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Source: feedblitz.com