Robert Reich
Boeing recently fired CEO
Dennis Muilenburg in order “to restore confidence in the Company moving forward
as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other
stakeholders.”
Restore confidence?
Muilenburg’s successor will be David Calhoun who, as a long-standing member of
Boeing’s board of directors, allowed Muilenburg to remain CEO for more than a
year after the first 737 Max crash and after internal studies found that the
jetliner posed an unacceptable risk of accident. It caused the deaths of 346
people.
Muilenburg raked in $30
million in 2018. He could walk away from Boeing with another $60 million.
Last August, the Business
Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, of which
Muilenburg is a director – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental
commitment to all of our stakeholders” (emphasis in the original) and
not just their shareholders.
Rubbish. Corporate social
responsibility is a sham.
Another 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.
Some 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. Meanwhile, GM’s stock has performed so well that Barra
earned $22 million last year.
Another prominent Business
Roundtable CEO who made the commitment to all his stakeholders is AT&T’s
Randall Stephenson, who promised to invest in the company’s broadband network
and create
at least 7,000 new jobs with the billions the company received from
the Trump tax cut.
Instead, AT&T has cut more
than 30,000
jobs since the tax cut went into effect.
Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos,
CEO of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the
Business Roundtable commitment to all his stakeholders, 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 $110
billion – makes in two hours. (Bezos’s nearly-completed D.C. mansion will have
2 elevators, 25 bathrooms, 11 bedrooms, and a movie theater.)
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. Culp raked in $15 million last year.
The list goes on. Just in time
for the holidays, US Steel announced 1,545 layoffs at two plants in Michigan.
Last year, five US Steel executives received an average compensation package of
$4.8 million, a 53 percent increase over 2017.
Instead of a holiday bonus
this year, Walmart offered its employees a 15 percent store discount. Oh, and
did I say? Walmart saved $2.2 billion this year from the Trump tax cut.
The giant tax cut itself was a
product of the Business Roundtable’s extensive lobbying, lubricated by its
generous campaign donations. Several of its member corporations, including
Amazon and General Motors, wound up paying no federal income taxes at all last
year.
Not incidentally, the tax cut
will result in less federal money for services on which Americans and their
communities rely.
The truth is, American
corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before, in order
to further boost record profits and unprecedented CEO pay.
Americans know this. In the
most recent Pew survey, a record 73 percent of U.S. adults (including 62
percent of Republicans and 71 percent of Republicans earning less than $30,000
a year) believe major corporations have too much power. And 65 percent believe
they make too much profit.
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, making
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 Business Roundtable and
other corporations were truly socially responsible, they’d support such laws.
Don’t hold your breath.
The only way to get such laws
enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of politics.
The first step is to see
corporate social responsibility for the con it is.
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BY CONOR LYNCH
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