What Corporations Can Do
1. Promote “Servant Leadership.” Although the bottom line is important to all corporations, there is considerable room, especially within large multinationals, for concerned leaders to adopt more humane policies. We commend their use of the “Servant Leadership” concept developed by the Greenleaf Institute.
2. Develop Codes of Conduct. Consider, for example, the case study of the garment trade of very large retailers contained in Mobilization’s book on Religion & Politics. Some companies that once refused to acknowledge their responsibility for factory conditions in other countries now have undertaken more serious internal monitoring of the factories they buy from, and several companies have begun experimenting with different forms of external monitoring using local human rights groups. Still other companies, made aware of serious violations in the factories of their suppliers, work with the contractors to improve conditions rather than exposing the local community to the trauma of plant closings and heightened unemployment.
3. Improve Employment Security. The existing economic system is taking away from workers the economic security they previously enjoyed with long-term employers and is replacing it with a new kind of job contract that weakens loyalties and shifts responsibility for staying employable primarily to the workers themselves. In an increasingly turbulent labor market, more and more employers are discriminating against older workers, workers hired on a contingent basis, and workers unwilling or unable to assume the costs of developing new job skills. Conscientious corporate leaders can resist these tendencies.
4. Value Your Stakeholders. The adversarial nature of stockholder capitalism discourages the kind of teamwork called for in “learning organizations.” A central task of modern corporations is to assemble and coordinate information flows within and among its various stakeholders. It is not enough to master the intellectual capital contained within a single corporate entity, for its success depends on much wider sources of information, including especially the corporation’s technology partners, its suppliers, its customers, and various governmental entities.
5. Seek Public/Private Partnerships. Rewarding “best-practice” behavior is something the government can do. For example, governments can encourage corporations to contribute to a portable pension plan, invest at least two percent of their payroll costs in the education and training of their employees, and subscribe to a health plan covering all employees who have been with the firm at least three months. Such companies could also offer profit sharing, employee stock ownership, or some other form of gain sharing to encourage productivity enhancement, and they could work harder at their record of compliance with safety and health standards. Moreover, they could agree to participate in national apprenticeship and school-to-work programs and demonstrate that at least half of their net R&D expenditures over some past period had been placed domestically rather than abroad.
6. Avoid Environmental Damage. Motivated in part by the desire to avoid adverse publicity, corporations today are trying harder to appear sensitive to the environmental consequences of many production processes. None wishes to be known as a polluter. Yet the costs of processing hazardous and solid waste are often high, tempting corporations to risk being caught in order to save money. Corporate leaders who care about the environment should seek ways to ameliorate the damage their operations create with the application of new technologies.
7. Recognize the Timescales Involved. Sustainability upon planet Earth requires considering effects that may occur far beyond the five-year time frame usually involved in corporate strategic planning. Many effects will not show up for thirty years or 100 years. For some actions consideration of the eons of geologic time is necessary. The first law of the Iroquois had it right: “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the next seven generations.”
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