In 2017, the [Business Roundtable] group threw its support behind the first Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion tax-cut legislation, which overwhelmingly benefited corporations and the wealthy. Last year, it announced that it would spend “eight figures” lobbying to protect and extend the legislation’s business-friendly tax breaks. As for Biden’s 2022 Build Back Better initiative – which proposed modest tax increases on high earners to fund public services like education, health care, and infrastructure – the Business Roundtable voiced clear opposition
Christopher Marquis thinks the US Business Roundtable's April report should serve as a wake-up call to Democratic lawmakers.
delivering real value to workers and the environment would cost money, which would reduce shareholder dividends and executive pay – the real priorities of the Business Roundtable’s members. In fact, the compensation of CEOs who signed the stakeholder-capitalism “commitment” has continued to reflect their success in delivering shareholder value. When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, Marriott International almost immediately began furloughing most of its US workers – while paying out more than $160 million in quarterly dividends and seeking a raise for its CEO, a signatory of the 2019 statement
even from a commercial perspective, this approach is fundamentally flawed. A growing body of research shows that failure to account for social and environmental imperatives poses clear, material risks to firm operations and performance ... For example, companies with poor climate-risk management routinely face supply-chain instability, greater exposure to extreme weather events, and higher capital costs. In other words, the Business Roundtable’s opposition to environmentally-focused policies and proposals is not just hypocritical; from their own short-sighted shareholder-capitalist perspective
The new Business Roundtable Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation has received a great deal of support, as well as questions and…
