-
Chapter 11: Goodness As Battleground
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
220 Goodness As Battleground 11 What’s good? And who gets to decide? Can capitalism ever be good? How about globalization? A transnational corporation? An employer? How about us? These were the questions that growled and rumbled beneath the Seattle protests, and my colleagues were not of one mind about the answers. “People who go into corporate management didn’t sign up to be civil servants,” notes Liz Butler, who works at ForestEthics. “But increasingly, the crucial decisions are being made in boardrooms , and we need them to take on that role.” In her opinion, because Starbucks claims to be a good citizen, we progressives have to hold the company to its promise. Marshall Ganz, a veteran organizer who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School, emphasizes the importance of developing alternate power structures to keep business interests in check. “Corporations do what they do,” he said, “which is to make money. If they do it responsibly, so much the better. But the real problem is that we don’t have strong enough governments or other public institutions to constrain them or provide countervailing power.” Marshall’s answer is to build other strong institutions, including unions, to keep corporations from operating freely at the citizens’ expense. It’s our duty as moral human beings to demand a better balance and organize it into being. Furthermore, he’s skeptical of business classes that focus on ethics. “Those are the rules of behavior,” he told me. “Morality, that’s about what you actually do, how you behave. It’s like St. Augustine’s difference between knowing good and loving good”—you can know what’s good and still behave badly. On one level, each of us gets to know or love good by whatever combination of faith, need, experience, voracity, and empathy guides our lives. But when a transnational corporation arbitrarily decides what’s good for us, that judgment can be invasive and global, affecting as many people, and sometimes as much money, as a small government. Furthermore, unlike a government that we ostensibly select, business allows hardly any of us a role in choosing its leaders or decision makers. Corporate social responsibility is the catchphrase for the point at which companies decide how much or little good they must attempt to be successful and profitable in the marketplace. Writing in the New York Times Magazine in 2004, journalist Michael Lewis interviewed a Berkeley professor named Kellie McElhaney, who told him, “I get very nervous when I hear people say, ‘We do it because it’s the right thing to do.’ I don’t think unprofitable corporate goodness is sustainable.” Of course, a company can still be profitable while indulging in a few selected morality-driven projects. It’s a way to adhere to Milton Friedman’s “the business of business is business” while satisfying critics and their own sense of goodness. Despite his counterculture roots, Bo Burlingham, editor-at-large for the magazine Inc., thinks that’s probably an appropriate balance for publicly traded companies. “When you go public, you basically are taking people’s money,” he said. “Along with it come certain obligations, both legal and moral, to provide what you promised, which is to do everything you can to maximize investment. If you don’t want to do that, don’t take their money.” This is why Burlingham prefers privately held companies that don’t have the same obligations and constraints. But he added, “I don’t think there’s anything in capitalism that forces people to be polluters , treat their employees badly, be harmful to community. It’s a total cop-out. You have to do what’s in interest of shareholders; well, yeah, but you don’t have to do illegal or unethical things in their name.” He pointed me toward a debate in the magazine Reason, a libertarian publication dedicated to “free minds and free markets.” The debate pits Friedman against Whole Foods’ founder John Mackey, who unlike Schultz is positively boastful about his anti-unionism while embracing organic produce and New Age management-speak. Mackey asserts: G O O D N E S S A S B AT T L E G R O U N D 221 [18.207.240.205] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:14 GMT) The most successful businesses put the customer first, ahead of the investors. In the profit-centered business, customer happiness is merely a means to an end: maximizing profits. In the customer -centered business, customer happiness is...