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.
While the Business Roundtable’s CEOs like to pay lip service to voluntary corporate-responsibility initiatives, they have strenuously objected to public policies that would require them to follow through
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…
