{"id":151037,"date":"2020-01-06T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2020-01-06T12:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=151037"},"modified":"2020-01-03T08:37:38","modified_gmt":"2020-01-03T08:37:38","slug":"the-sham-of-corporate-social-responsibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/01\/the-sham-of-corporate-social-responsibility\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sham of Corporate Social Responsibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

31 Dec 2019 – <\/em>Boeing recently fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg in order \u201cto restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.\u201d<\/p>\n

Restore confidence? Muilenburg\u2019s successor will be David Calhoun who, as a long-standing member of Boeing\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Muilenburg raked in $30 million in 2018. He could walk away from Boeing with another $60 million.<\/p>\n

Last August, the Business Roundtable \u2013 an association of CEOs of America\u2019s biggest corporations, of which Muilenburg is a director \u2013 announced with great fanfare a \u201cfundamental commitment to all <\/em>of our stakeholders\u201d (emphasis in the original) and not just their shareholders.<\/p>\n

Rubbish. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.<\/p>\n

Another Business Roundtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM\u2019s hefty profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers\u2019 demands that GM raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.<\/p>\n

Some 50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They won a few wage gains but didn\u2019t save any jobs. Meanwhile, GM\u2019s stock has performed so well that Barra earned $22 million last year.<\/p>\n

Another prominent Business Roundtable CEO who made the commitment to all his stakeholders is AT&T\u2019s Randall Stephenson, who promised to invest in the company\u2019s broadband network and create at least 7,000 new jobs<\/a> with the billions the company received from the Trump tax cut.<\/p>\n

Instead, AT&T has cut more than 30,000 jobs since the tax cut went into effect<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The annual saving to Amazon from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos \u2013 whose net worth is $110 billion \u2013 makes in two hours. (Bezos\u2019s nearly-completed D.C. mansion will have 2 elevators, 25 bathrooms, 11 bedrooms, and a movie theater.)<\/p>\n

GE\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The giant tax cut itself was a product of the Business Roundtable\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Not incidentally, the tax cut will result in less federal money for services on which Americans and their communities rely.<\/p>\n

The truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before, in order to further boost record profits and unprecedented CEO pay.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws requiring them to be \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

If the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially responsible, they\u2019d support such laws. Don\u2019t hold your breath.<\/p>\n

The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of politics.<\/p>\n

The first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the con it is.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Robert B. Reich, Chancellor\u2019s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. <\/em>Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers <\/em>Aftershock and <\/em>The Work of Nations. His latest, <\/em>Beyond Outrage, is now out in paperback. He is also a founding editor of the <\/em>American Prospect magazine and chairman of <\/em>Common Cause.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 robertreich.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

31 Dec 2019 – Boeing recently fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg in order \u201cto restore confidence in the Company moving forward.\u201d Restore confidence? Muilenburg\u2019s successor will be David Calhoun, who allowed Muilenburg to remain CEO after the first 737 Max crash and 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":151038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[232,120,463,1131,1442,109,287,1059],"class_list":["post-151037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-capitalism","tag-capitalism","tag-conflict","tag-corporate-empires","tag-mnc","tag-multinational-corporations","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-transnational-corporations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=151037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}