How To ‘Build Back Better’ after COVID-19
AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS SIGNED IT. So did Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, and Charlie Scharf, the CEO of Wells Fargo. Last summer these corporate chieftains and 178 others made a big fuss over affirming the Business Roundtable’s updated statement of purpose, declaring the end of shareholder primacy in favour of “stakeholder capitalism” that aims to create value for employees, suppliers, communities, and others.
What a difference a crisis makes. As America scrambled to deal with the health and economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, workers in Amazon warehouses across the U.S. staged walkouts to protest unsafe working conditions, and the company’s Whole Foods division had to walk back an initial statement asking employees to donate sick days. Walmart’s ASDA division has canceled orders from apparel manufacturers in places such as Bangladesh even if production was completed or in progress. And Wells Fargo’s deferred-mortgage-repayment program — designed to alleviate monthly payments for suddenly unemployed homeowners — still requires borrowers to repay the whole lump sum after three months.
It’s a tightrope, of course. Companies are and bankruptcies are harbingers of many to come. Some companies are just waiting to get ‘back to normal’ and using bailouts to tide them over. However, myriad signals tell us that returning to the old normal won’t be adequate or even possible. COVID-19 is revealing fractures in our economy that many in the corporate elite might not have paid attention to in the past.
