The biggest business con of 2019: fleecing workers while bosses get rich

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/29/boeing-amazon-business-ethics-robert-reich

Robert Reich
Sun 29 Dec 2019 04.00 EST
Last modified on Sun 29 Dec 2019 04.29 EST

Until his ouster, Muilenburg was a director of the Business Roundtable, an association of 192 CEOs of America’s largest corporations. With great fanfare last August, it announced a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” (emphasis in the original) and not just their shareholders.

The Roundtable’s commitment came in response to growing public distrust of big corporations, and proposals from several Democratic candidates to rein them in

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Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, is another member of the Business Roundtable. Just weeks after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, Whole Foods, an Amazon subsidiary, 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 $110bn – makes in two hours. (Bezos’s nearly completed DC mansion will have 2 elevators, 25 bathrooms, 11 bedrooms, and a movie theater.)

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Instead of a holiday bonus this year, Walmart offered its employees a 15% store discount. Oh, and did I say? Walmart saved $2.2bn this year from the Trump tax cut.

The tax cut itself was a product of the 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.

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Americans know this. In the most recent Pew survey, a record 73% of US adults (including 62% of Republicans, and 71% of Republicans earning less than $30,000 a year) said they believed major corporations had too much power. And 65% believed they made too much profit

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