September 11, 2007
Robert Reich on "corporate citizenship"
As I explained in detail in an earlier post, I have never been fond of the notion of “corporate citizenship” This term is an oxymoron. A citizen is a person; and a corporation is not a person.
The costs of corporate citizenship always have to be borne by individuals: the corporation’s employees, its shareholders, or its customers. (When a corporation exerts disproportionate power in the marketplace, its suppliers and vendors are also forced at times to bear the cost of its corporate citizenship campaigns.)
This doesn’t mean, of course, that I am against either charitable giving or environmental causes. However, decisions about charitable giving should be left to individuals---not to their employers. (See my previous essay).
To cite one glaring example, corporate United Way campaigns have become employee-sponsored PR campaigns for big companies. In some large corporations, managers lean hard on employees to contribute a specific amount to the United Way---because management has decided that the employee should allocate his charitable donations in this way.
Environmental regulation is best left to government. As long as the corporation acts within the parameters set by government, it shouldn’t be concerned with “citizenship” at all. It should be concerned with earning a profit.
As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich points out in a recent NPR interview, the anthropomorphization of the corporation has exacerbated the problem of corporate lobbying in Washington. If a corporation is a quasi-human entity that can engage in charity, then perhaps it can also meddle in trade and immigration policy. (Big corporations mostly want unregulated free trade and open immigration, because these drive down labor costs.)
As Reich sums up the issue, a corporation can most effectively practice “citizenship” by staying out of the political process.
