Balls by Nancy OhanianWere you excited when the reactionary Business Roundtable announced last week that their members don’t just care about shareholders-- but they also care about customers, workers and society? That was the way, long long ago, we ran Warner Bros Records. Major decisions always went through a filter of how it would impact our artists, our employees, our customers, society and our shareholders. It felt good being part of the management team of a company with that kind of an outlook.According to L.A. Times' business columnist David Lazarus something smelled fishy when the Business Roundtable press release went out. He spoke with Colorado professor of propaganda Kenneth Osgood about it, who told him this attempt to sound like the we’re-all-in-this-together messaging that emerged from corporate America during the Great Depression and New Deal, as a raft of regulations targeted companies’ most egregious and self-serving practices, caused some skepticism. "I raised my eyebrows really high when I saw this," he told Lazarus. "It seems pretty obvious that CEOs are trying to head off growing public pressure on a number of fronts, including how much they’re paid and taxing the rich. Basically, they’re worried about undoing all the things that the Trump administration has done for them."
They emphasized that this is a big deal because past pledges placed shareholders first, with the general idea being that if shareholders are doing well, everyone is doing well.You’ve seen that sentiment before: “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”Now we’re seeing a more populist flavor of corporate propaganda. The message today is that what’s good for General Motors (and GM customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders) is good for America.“There seems to be a concern among the CEOs that they’re becoming the bad guys,” said Nicholas J. Cull, a professor of public diplomacy at USC who focuses on propaganda studies.“This suggests that the business community is expecting blowback from their policies, and they’re trying to get ahead of it,” he said.He said the latest messaging reminded him of how business leaders responded to It’s a Wonderful Life when the movie opened in 1946. Executives were aghast at the depiction of Old Man Potter, the banker, as a greedy, coldhearted villain.“They wanted people to know that they weren’t really like that,” Cull said. Ensuing propaganda focused on all the good things bankers do for society.The Business Roundtable ran the same playbook by featuring the sentiments of a number of individual CEOs along with their general statement-- a clear attempt to humanize an otherwise dry document.“This new statement better reflects the way corporations can and should operate today,” Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, was quoted as saying. “It affirms the essential role corporations can play in improving our society when CEOs are truly committed to meeting the needs of all stakeholders.”Margaret Peacock, a history professor at the University of Alabama who studies propaganda, said the Business Roundtable is indulging in “a clear and pretty heavy-handed attempt” to obscure reality.“In the marketing world, they call this ‘Everyman’ propaganda,” she said. “Sure, Alex Gorsky has a 50-foot yacht, but darn it, he cares about communities.”The most striking thing about the Roundtable’s statement is its near-total lack of specifics. Instead, the CEOs serve up vague, noncommittal pledges to do the right thing. For example:• “We will further the tradition of American companies leading the way in meeting or exceeding customer expectations.”• “Investing in our employees ... Compensating them fairly and providing important benefits.”• “Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.”When will workers receive fair compensation and important benefits? The statement doesn’t say. Nor is there any mention of reducing CEO compensation, which is Exhibit A for many people when discussing executive greed run amok....Compensation for CEOs increased by 940% from 1978 to 2018, while pay for the average worker rose by a miserable 12% over the same 40-year period, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA who specializes in how companies are run told Lazarus that "At the end of the day, businesses exist to make money," which made him think that "the Business Roundtable is telling us what we want to hear, not what CEOs actually believe. The proof, of course, is in the pudding."Pudding? Chocolate? Oh, that reminds me... I have to buy a couple of bananas so I can turn this morning's leftover shake into a frozen pudding for tomorrow. But the real pudding here, is inherent in the labor plank Bernie released for his platform last week. Now that is pudding and medicine combined into one-- and is exactly what has the Business Roundtable CEOs shaking in their Gucci loafers and their Berlutti oxfords. Liza Featherstone, reporting for Jacobin wonders why, with the best labor plank ever, unions have been reticent to endorse Bernie, let alone plutocrats and oligarchs. Bernie, she wrote, "just unveiled the most pro-union platform of any major presidential candidate in decades. At this point, any union that ends up endorsing one of his opponents in the primary over him would be enacting a straight-up Mad Tea Party scenario, as if a coalition of endangered species-- say, the giant kangaroo rat, the red wolf, and the fruit bat-- were to endorse Trump, who has been steadily weakening protections for such animals. Citing the high correlation between declining union membership and rising inequality, as well as the impact on worker safety, healthcare, and retirement security, the Sanders campaign has outlined a clear and specific way to stop the bloodletting of the American labor movement by making it much easier for workers to join unions-- and by vastly increasing unions’ negotiating power."
In the current anti-worker legal hellscape in which most Americans labor, even after employees have risked firings and endured all the intimidation and threats and successfully unionized their workplace, their boss can still refuse to bargain with them. More than half of workers who vote to form unions lack a union contract after a year, while 37 percent don’t have that first contract even after two years. Bernie’s plan would require employers to begin negotiating within ten days of receiving a request from a new union. Failure to reach a contract would force compulsory mediation, then binding arbitration. Employers who resist the process would face steep penalties.Bernie’s plan would also eliminate state-level right-to-work laws, give federal workers the right to strike, and eliminate “at-will” firing. It would also make it possible for the labor movement to establish collective bargaining agreements that cover entire industries, as they do in many European countries. Each of these measures would vastly increase the power of workers and their institutions....Let’s hope union leaders grasp the significance of Bernie’s campaign more fully in 2020 than in 2016. While the Communications Workers of America allowed a membership vote to decide their primary endorsement and became the largest union to back Bernie, SEIU and AFT leadership went with Hillary early on, and met with intense member backlash. (As a dues-paying UAW member, I’m dismayed to report that my union did endorse Clinton over Sanders, though I’m somewhat proud that they at least waited till late May, when most of the primaries were over.) This time around, they’re being more cautious, as well as more transparent about their decision-making process, though some union leaders have batted their eyelashes at Kamala Harris behind closed doors, and Joe Biden has been getting handsy with a few. With Bernie’s labor vision so much stronger and more ambitious, the member backlash could be even fiercer.SEIU, one of those unions that failed to endorse Bernie last time around, unveiled its own labor demands for the candidates on the very same day that Bernie’s labor platform was released. As Helaine Olen reported on Tuesday in the Washington Post (having obtained an advance copy of a speech announcing the demands, which SEIU president Mary Kay Henry then delivered on Wednesday in Milwaukee), SEIU is demanding that candidates support a complete overhaul of federal labor laws, including sectoral bargaining. That last point rarely, if ever, comes up in presidential campaigns, which is why it was so impressive to see it in Bernie’s platform. Now, SEIU is a practitioner of business unionism; you might remember that they opposed a grassroots movement to stop one of the world’s most anti-union companies from reaping enormous taxpayer subsidies in New York City. But surely, you might ask, the service workers’ union must end up supporting the only candidate whose agenda is exactly the same as theirs, right?It’s a naïve question, unfortunately. Unions are capable of acting in terribly self-defeating ways. But this time, if they fail to support Bernie, they’ll be rejecting the only candidate with a plan to save them.