Are large corporations evil?

ihttp://www.sleeve-notes.com/ilm/corporation.jpg

Do you think they are ALL EVIL? Well, DO YOU??

Large private bureaucracies totally unaccountable to anything other than their shareholders' desire for maximum profit, yet having all the rights and privileges of an individual citizen? Evil to the core.

(And yes, I realize how kneejerk lefty-sloganistic that sounds, but that make it any less true, guys.)

yes.

So are large, privately held corporations less evil?

Well, I don't think they're necessarily evil. But very large organizations of any kind do tend to distribute and bureaucratize, and thus minimize, moral responsibility for their actions. And there's a dominant meme in American business culture that insists the highest reasonable good will "naturally" be obtained as the result of unhindered free market interations, which further distances businesses from the responsibility for moral decision making (especially when it might be expensive and unprofitable). I.e., if any harm is done, it's not the businesses fault, but the market's, and long-term results can only improve.

None of this is necessarily evil, either, but it provides business with very little reason to say "no" when economic pressure seems to encourage decisions that could or even will cause harm. So, not so much evil as amoral, which is arguably worse.

Privately held large corporations distribute/displace less responsibility than publically held ones, so they may be less evil, but absent an explicit, corporate-wide commitment to non-evil, I suspect it makes little difference. Small, privately-held corporations stand the best chance of resisting economic pressure to do harm.

TRICK QUESTION!
http://www.historycommons.org/events-images/636_carlyle_group_logo_2050081722-8653.jpg

I like working for a large corporation.

Hey, here's something I've always wondered about -- maybe someone who knows some law could explain it to me. We treat corporations like individual entities in a lot of ways (taxation, free speech rights, etc.), but how does this apply criminally? Obviously the government regulates and fines for certain types of corporate malfeasance (say, over-polluting). But is there a clear line between the kinds of acts that individuals (i.e., a handful of executives) would get criminally indicted for and acts so systemic there's a larger corporate responsibility? I mean, it seems to me you'd have much higher across-the-board corporate responsibility if there were a sense that systemic wrongdoing put the entire entity at risk. (There'd be a much bigger call for whistle-blowing, anyway.)

I might be asking an obvious question here: the state does have the ability to legislate in that direction, surely?

I think the state does have the ability to legislate in that direction, but is loathe to. Enormous punitive fines could be levied, all personnel with knowledge of wrongdoing could be charged with fraud (or whatever), business could simply be dismantled (as in antitrust cases). I think we simply value "business" to much as a principle to follow through on this, no matter how egregious and widespread the wrongdoing.

Also troublesome is that you cannot toss a corporation in the clink.

LIMITED PARTNERSHIPS are the REAL devil.

I like studying the food and beverage companies, because they are often older companies. It's a great way of studying history - marketing campaigns, demographics, graphic arts, economics.

Large corporations, because of their vast control of and appetite for resources and their ability to insulate decision makers from the details of implementation, are particularly adaptable and flexible when it comes to doing evil. They often farm it out to sub-contractors, such as the corrupt government in a poor country or "security" firms like Blackwater, but are sometimes known to handle it in-house.

So, although not every large corporation is necessarily evil, every large corporation has a short easy path to get there and plenty of reasons to take that path.

So, yeah, I am basically falling in line with contenderizer's view.

what is "evil"

aimless' post just reads like a description of people, not "large corporations"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal-agent_problem

ya I've just started working for a large corporation for the first time, started about two months ago. and i suppose it is a v bureaucratic place -- lots of "if you have a problem with any of these facilities please contact management as soon as possible" signs plastered around the traps for example -- but i'm enjoying it.

the only evil i've personally encountered so far is that i had to accrue for a dude's redundancy payment and the notation i had to use was something like 'accrue for employee's redundancy, employee is not yet aware of redundancy', it was kind of sad.

i'm an accountant btw

Tombot, only certain parts of my description would fit ordinary people, although as you track individuals farther up the wealth curve, the better they fit. In particular, I am thinking of two factors: the amount of resources controlled, and the insulation between the decision-maker and the implementation.

Ordinary schlubs just can't consume as much as a Fortune 500 company or command the same revenue stream, and when they decide to act, they either act directly as their own agents, or they use agents that are only tenuously or remotely under their control, e.g. Fortune 500 companies.

Although I can write to Exxon-Mobil and direct them to stop underwriting the corruption of the Nigerian government, do they listen to me and do as I bid them? No. But the CEO of Exxon-Mobil presumably is not hampered by the same heedless attitude among his agents.

I would quickly agree that the path to evil is short for any human, but the corrupting influence of power is both a truism and a truth. Large corporations allow large concentrations of power, and therefore approach the preconditions of evil more closely than the vast majority of people.

Hey guyz, my question from upthread is addressed here!

http://www.slate.com/id/2209771/

The short answer would appear to be that every corporation that could potentially be indicted just makes a deal to pay a fine.

(This seems like a poor way to deter crime, since it's pretty easy to weigh the potential profit of the illegal act against what you think you might wind up paying for it.)

Companies have agreed to all kinds of novel conditions to get a deferral in recent years, such as creating 1,600 jobs in Oklahoma or installing slot machines at New York racetracks. Sometimes, the terms of deferred prosecutions seem to be heavily influenced by the personal inclinations of prosecutors themselves. Former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie, now running for governor of New Jersey, has been among the more creative: He required Bristol Myers Squibb to endow a $1 million chair of legal ethics at his own alma mater, Seaton Hall Law School.

the nu CIO is apparently ONLY 31!1111111.

he's injecting NEWLIFEINTO IS. <<<<-wld be sweet considering the financial reporting system has been around since 1974 no lie

For much of Jeff Immelt’s 16-year run atop one of the world’s largest conglomerates, an empty business jet followed his GE-owned plane on some trips to destinations around the world, according to people familiar with the matter. The two jets sometimes parked far apart so they wouldn’t attract attention, and flight crews were told to not openly discuss the empty plane, the people said.

The second plane was a spare in case Mr. Immelt’s jet had mechanical problems. A GE spokeswoman said that “two planes were used on limited occasions for business-critical or security purposes.” Mr. Immelt didn’t respond to requests for comment.

eat the rich

if i had to guess at flavour i'd probably say gamey overtones with a hint of ham

maybe best served with a soy-chilli glaze but i'm happy to experiment a bit

http://cdn1.bostonmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/04/jeff-immelt-ge.jpg

Including dividends, GE's stock gained 8.2% with Mr. Immelt at the helm, compared with a 213% rise in the S&P 500.

eat the rich

― midas / medusa cage match (bizarro gazzara)

problem is that it doing so usually involves eating a piece of shit. catch 22

not if they have processed properly at an accredited Soylent Green plant, they should taste fine:p

No need to eat the rich, just cut off their heads and display them in the town square.

what is the cut-off for being rich

It is a mystery, but I still know that rich people exist.

if you have to ask...

i just feel like nobody would begrudge somebody that made just a little more than them (for being "rich") and so by induction we could argue all the way up the chain that nobody's really evil, no matter how rich

i'm comfortable calling people who fly in private jets -- let alone having a spare come along just in case -- rich

i just feel like nobody would begrudge somebody that made just a little more than them (for being "rich") and so by induction we could argue all the way up the chain that nobody's really evil, no matter how rich

the sorites paradox does not disprove the existence of heaps.

what is the cut-off for being rich

i'd say - generously i think - making a million dollars a year makes u rich

the real question is what moral bar does a mil-a-year earner have to clear to keep them off my dinner plate

Immelt earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, graduating in 1982. He described business school as "one of the most intense times of your life."

stop joking around guys, the opportunity for a few thousand people to be unlimitedly rich is well worth the cost of a few billion being permanently poor

i submit that if those few thousand were to give up all their liquid assets the few billion would still be poor

^ correctly identifying that the problem is not capitalists but capitalism.

only one way to know for sure xp

this is not necessary, a salary cap will do

― a serious and fascinating fartist (Simon H.), Thursday, 19 October 2017 15:25 (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Cue debate around the angle at which to tip the cap

Anyway nobody should earn more than X amount a year def but also nobody should have kids

large corporations don’t kill people, people kill people.

corporations are people, my friend

SMALL IS NOT BEAUTIFUL Forget the romantic view of small business: for employees, big firms are less nasty places to work Doug Henwood

Everybody loves small business. Well, maybe Fortune 500 CEOs and the investment bankers who serve them don’t, but practically everyone else does. Across the political spectrum, it’s celebrated for its authenticity, pluck, and copious powers of job creation. On the right, the needs of small business are used to counter proposed regulations or minimum wage increases, as if the virtues of small business were self-evident. On parts of the left, small business is positioned as local and human-scaled, in contrast with globe-striding behemoths.

This is a mass infatuation badly in need of some fact-checking.

Small business creates jobs, yes, but it also destroys them in large numbers, since small firms go under so frequently.

Small business pays less, innovates less, and does more physical damage to nature and workers than the big guys.

You often hear it said that small business creates most new jobs. That’s a half-truth. Most people work for firms employing under 500 workers, the semi-official definition of a small business, so it’s not surprising that such firms should be responsible for the bulk of job growth. The real question is whether small business creates more than its share of new jobs. And there the answer is no.

Firms employing fewer than 500 people accounted for 78% of U.S. workers in 1980, 80% in 1990 and 80% in 1996 — in other words, the share was essentially unchanged over nearly two decades.

Some people might think that businesses with hundreds of employees aren’t so small, but the numbers for really small operations are quite underwhelming: firms employing fewer than 20 people accounted for 26% of workers in 1980, 26% in 1990 and 26% in 1996 (that repetition is no typo). If small firms, no matter how defined, were really the prodigious job machines they’re supposed to be (and if big firms were as relentlessly downsizing as the headlines would lead you to believe), then their share of total employment should have increased dramatically over the course of 16 years.

That underwhelming performance of really small business is worth a bit more attention because, despite these numbers, it’s still often claimed that that’s where all the real job action is. The claim is ultimately traceable to 1980s work by the consultant David Birch, who once famously said that 88% of the new U.S. jobs created in the first half of the 1980s were in firms employing fewer than 20 workers. That factoid was repeated by pundits and politicians, and has since made its way around the world. But it’s not true.

Mr. Birch came up with this nugget by playing with some computer tapes from the credit rating and business information firm Dun & Bradstreet. But a closer examination conducted some years later showed the D&B tapes to be full of errors, at odds not only with official unemployment insurance registration info, but even with the phone book. Firms were classed as being born and dying when they merely changed hands. And Mr. Birch’s methodology was pretty idiosyncratic, to put it kindly.

For example, firms that started in the very small category — fewer than 20 workers — were categorized for all time as staying there, even if they’d grown beyond the small category. Or, more wackily, if a firm with 600 employees had a bad year and canned 200 of them, this would show up as a gain of 400 jobs for the small business sector. Not that Mr. Birch ever fully disclosed his techniques, like most serious researchers would; he did, however, tell the Wall Street Journal in 1988 that his figures were “silly,” and that “I can change that number at will by changing the starting point or the interval. Anybody can make it come out any way they want.” Despite that confession, Mr. Birch is still taken seriously by the U.S. press.

More rigorous work than Mr. Birch’s shows that the job creation story is far from simple. For example, a detailed study of 40,000 U.S. manufacturing firms between 1972 and 1988 by Steven Davis, John Haltiwanger and Scott Schuh found that “large, mature plants and firms account for most newly created (and newly destroyed) jobs.”

Smaller employers generated plenty of jobs, but they also destroyed them in great quantities; new jobs were more likely to persist at larger employers than smaller. They concluded that “in a nutshell, net job creation…exhibits no strong or simple relationship to employer size.”

What about job quality? Let’s start with pay. A study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) for 1995 showed little variation in pay for professionals and managers by establishment size, with small operations (those with fewer than 500 workers) paying 1% below the national average, and larger ones (1,000 workers or more) paying 2 to 3% above average.

At finer levels of occupational classification, the differences were occasionally a bit wider, but not profoundly so. Differentials widen, though, as you move down the status hierarchy. Data entry clerks in small establishments earned 7% below the national average, while those in large firms earned 20% above. Gaps for janitors were wider, and those for labourers were wider still. (Though this is mainly a story about private business, similar patterns were visible among government workers; in small jurisdictions, workers in “protective services”—like cops and prison guards—earned 18% below the national average, while those in large ones pulled in 11% more. This sheds new light on the passion in the United States for small government.)

These are pretty broad-brush patterns, and there may be simple reasons why pay increases with employer size. Maybe big firms have “better” workers—more educated, more experienced—and are more likely to be unionized. But there is now a large literature in economics showing that worker “quality”—I keep putting these things in quotes because, while conventional economists use phrases like this, I find it offensive to talk about people as if they were consumer durables ranked in some kind of buyers’ guide—explains some of the pay differential, it hardly explains all. In a phrase, size matters, and quite a lot—and there’s good evidence that the advantage has been growing over time.

Though the relation was first noted as early as 1911, a classic modern study in the field is a 1989 paper in the Journal of Political Economy by Charles Brown and James Medoff. They crunch data from several different surveys, and all tell pretty much the same story: while bigger firms (and bigger plants or offices within firms) do have “better” workers, that accounts for roughly half their pay advantage. Larger outfits pay more for similar work done by similar workers than do smaller ones. Using standard statistical techniques, this fact of economic life persists regardless of occupation, industrial sector, education, experience, geographical location, union status. The disparities remain whether workers are paid an hourly rate, a piece rate or a salary. Workers who move from small employers to large and presumably carry with them the same set of skills they had on their old job, generally get a significant raise (roughly equivalent to going from a nonunion job to a union one)—and the reverse is true as well.

As with pay, so with benefits. As of the mid-1990s, just 62% of full-time workers in small independent establishments (what the U.S. BLS calls plants and offices with fewer than 100 employees not owned by a larger entity) were covered by health insurance, compared with 77% of those working in larger operations; 42% of those in the small shops had a retirement plan of any kind, compared with 80% of those in larger ones. And as with pay and benefits, so with worker safety.

In a recent report for the International Labour Organization, U.S. economist Peter Dorman wrote that “size and risk are inversely correlated at all levels of scale.”

Most of what I’ve cited so far is based on U.S. data, but studies of other countries, including Britain, Japan, Germany and Canada, come up with pretty much the same results.

A 1998 paper by two Statistics Canada economists, Marie Drolet and René Morissette, shows that even after controlling for the usual factors—like worker education and experience, industry, occupation, and union status—large firms pay 15 to 20% more than small ones, a relation that has persisted over time. Pension coverage is at least four times higher in large firms. Despite the disadvantage in pay, workers in small firms are more likely to work more than five days a week. Small doesn’t seem so beautiful after all.

Why does size matter? Here the answers are a bit harder to come by, though there’s no shortage of suggestions. It’s nicer to work for small firms—fewer rules, less hierarchy—so they can get away with paying less (though large firms have lower quit rates than smaller ones). Large firms are more vulnerable to unionization, so they pay more to keep workers happy and organizers away (though the fact that the size effect prevails even among union workers calls this one into question).

Small firms have less market power, so profit margins are thinner and they’re under greater pressure to keep down costs. It’s harder to supervise a large group of workers, so higher pay is an incentive for them to behave without the boss keeping an eye on them every minute of the workday (though the persistence of the size effect even for workers paid piece rates, where the wage is a direct function of productivity, calls this into question).

Collecting a large number of workers under one roof——literally, in the case of a big plant or office, or figuratively in the case of a big business with lots of locations—results in all kinds of organizational and intellectual synergies that elude small firms, making them more efficient, innovative and profitable. Smaller firms have less snazzy capital equipment, duller managers and less sophisticated work structures, making them less efficient, innovative and profitable.

Workers in large firms may have “subtler virtues” (in Brown and Medoff’s charming phrase) that can’t be measured or statistically modeled, which might be responsible for the pay differential. As plausible as these explanations appear, economists have been unable to decide for sure whether they’re accurate or not (and the parenthetical remarks cast serious doubt on some of them).

I said at the beginning of this piece that small business often serves an ideological purpose. On the right, it’s deployed to resist any political impulses to regulate business or push up wages. That implicitly concedes that smaller firms are nastier to work for, but it’s also a bit devious, since McDonald’s probably would suffer at least as much from a minimum wage increase as Mom’s Burger Shack would. Here, small business becomes a virtuous stand-in for business as a whole, since small business probably has a better public image than the big, no matter how ill-deserved. Even if this is a devious move, it’s not much of a surprise.

What I find more surprising, and disturbing, is the tendency of some folks on the left to embrace small business with some passion. This is particularly true in the unfortunately named anti-globalization movement—as if internationalization itself were the problem rather than the way it’s carried out. Their anti-globalism is connected to a desire to “relocalize” economies, and with them to reorient production on a much smaller scale. These aims seem more motivated by nostalgia—and, in many cases, by a nostalgia for something that never existed—than any serious analysis.

Larger firms are also far more productive than smaller ones. Small-is-beautiful advocates rarely tell us how tiny enterprises would produce locomotives, computers or telephones; maybe they’d prefer to do away with these things and revive a hunter–gatherer society. But if that’s what they intend to do they should tell us.

And people who presumably care about workers should also rethink their passion for tininess: the experience of actually existing small businesses show that they’re not great employers, with poor pay, cheesier benefits and more dangerous workplaces. Bigger firms are easier to regulate, more open to public scrutiny, friendlier to affirmative action programs and more vulnerable to union organizing.

A progressive case for bigness is rare and unpopular these days, but somebody has to make it.

Doug Henwood is editor of the Left Business Observer newsletter, and author of the book Wall Street.

At least Morbius has the decency to just post his tweets. Jesus Christ.

this is the Doug Henwood take Morbs doesn't want you to know about

It’s pretty challops and contains a number of indefensible statements

You could’ve just linked

the smaller businesses i've worked for have been the jerkiest, mostly

10/19/17: El Tomboto accuses me of decency

Anyway nobody should earn more than X amount a year def but also nobody should have kids

Global overpopulation isn't really a thing, just horrendous resource allocation and, you guessed it, inequality

Maybe.... working just sucks

It’s pretty challops and contains a number of indefensible statements

You could’ve just linked

― El Tomboto, Thursday, October 19, 2017 7:41 PM (thirteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think it's pretty good, actually

don’t you guys believe in freedom?

― the late great

post of the year

i've had shitty experiences at small companies and big companies. i don't think large corporations are _uniquely_ evil.

lol at "people who presumably care", that's pretty slick

You thought you cared... but you really don't!!!!

heh ya thats p dickish rhetoric. that guy's writing actually drives me up the walls a lot of the time, but that's the only piece i know representing this view, which is useful to consider imo

"ppl who presumably care" is great shorthand for the elites of the D Party

the R Party doesn't pretend

lol what are you talkin about doc?

And people who presumably care about workers should also rethink their passion for tininess:

i just thought it was funny how he was implying "if you don't know about this way to help x, you don't really care about x"

just had to air that out.. i'm a petty man

Mostly, the argument Henwood is trying to make is privately owned shops with 150 or fewer employees, versus publicly traded ones that have 150+ or whatever.

small businesses aren't harder to regulate than large ones. The opposite argument is made just as easily - big ones span state lines and national borders, like IKEA. Try to regulate that. IKEA is one gigantic tax haven for a Swedish family. Regulate that how, again? To what end?

small businesses don't treat their employees worse by default. They tend to treat them pretty well until they go public (or get bought by a traded entity). Again, the bigger businesses are beholden to one thing - the board. This phenomenon has created more inequality than any proliferation of small businesses ever.

Lastly, for now, name some big traded firms that didn't start out with under 20 employees just trying to cover the lease. The top 10 tech companies all come to mind. Every business was a small business once, and the thing that changed was the board demanded some GRC quad charts showing how they were going to achieve regulatory capture by spending x% on white shoe lobbyists and lawyers.

I could fisk his essay for a few more hours but it's not worth the time. There are lots of things small businesses do that are stupid and a mess. Few of them are of the degree that giant firms commit, and multinationals also fuck shit up in ways that no small business could ever hope to do.

u can fisk deez nuts

jkjk

i do like IKEA tho

ime small firms are sad sketchy fiefdoms and large firms are kafkaesque bureaucrohell with no one at the wheel, sort of a pick your poison

i think the idea of class struggle a socialist like henwood believes in makes a lot more sense in a setting with large firms in industries with increasings returns where workers can strike and bargain over the surplus rather than with a multitude of small firms barely making ends meet; to a neoliberal shill like me i can't say i have a strong opinion about it except some two-handed answer like 'it depends on the firm and the industry blahblah'

i love intra-left beefs in that vein tho (reclaiming a position seen as reactionary by contemporaries in context). this piece by bhaskar sunkara on naomi klein is the kind of thing i like seeing out of the radical left; there was something too 'feel-good' about a certain strain of the left in the 90's and early 00's that it articulates well

https://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/naomi-klein-as-anarcho-liberal/

i think the idea of class struggle a socialist like henwood believes in makes a lot more sense in a setting with large firms in industries with increasings returns where workers can strike and bargain over the surplus

Has this been working out that well over the last few decades, though? How much has neoliberal globalization changed the terrain when it comes to this aspect of big business and organized labour?
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