#Timesup: People and Planet Must Matter as Much as Profit

I went to business school in the late 90’s. Many of the titans of modern business did. We learned a lot about supply and demand, market shares, and competition. Not so much about environmental degradation, stewardship, or fair wages. Many of our case studies involved companies who had moved production overseas to lands of cheap and/or free labor, or to countries who had lax environmental laws, and how such brilliant business decisions improved their ROI and shares. Rarely did we discuss the economies left behind. Why should we? The costs of closing up shop and leaving a town aren’t factored into the equation. Those costs are carried by the taxpayers, paying taxes being something savvy business owners have lobbyists make sure they can avoid.

Last spring, my son and I traveled to upstate New York, along the Hudson River, to visit colleges. As we made our way from Albany to Burlington, VT, he noticed the dilapidated state of the towns. Homes boarded up, main streets empty, streetlights broken, a single gas station where all the action occurred. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen poverty, but it was the first time he’d seen economic abandonment. It terrified him.

What do I mean by economic abandonment? These were once steel and lumber towns, thriving places where the middle class owned homes, nice cars, and built churches with steeples, bells and art. Main streets lined with mom and pop stores where festivals for every occasion were once held. If you stand now on the street corner and close your eyes, you can almost smell the roasting corn on the cob and hear the high school band playing in the parade. When you open your eyes though, you see nothing on the streets but a fast food bag, blowing by on the breeze.

Poverty is something my son knows, we live in Santa Cruz, CA, and our streets are lined with the homeless. There’s a huge encampment along the river where the business district begins. While this is heartbreaking, this sort of poverty often seems distant to us…a type of poverty that happens only when you’re down on your luck, or struggling with addiction. It’s a story we tell ourselves, that if we play the game correctly, then we can avoid such a predicament. That’s a false narrative, of course, but humans are all about survival, and often it’s the stories we tell ourselves that enable us to continue living as if there’s nothing wrong, because the problem seems so much bigger than us.

But the poverty of economic abandonment speaks of a different road to nowhere — a road where you played all the games correctly, and still got screwed. A game where your town leaders let an industry come in and build a plant, often poisoning your water supply, in exchange for great, middle-class jobs, weekends off and health care. You take that job and work loyally for the company, perhaps for forty years, before retiring with a nice pension. Your sons and daughters work there, and you expect that to be the story for generations to come.

Until that day when the company packs up and abandons you for cheaper pastures. They’re tired of paying you a living wage. Or perhaps they have to start cleaning up their environmental waste due to new laws and that’s not profitable. So they fire up the cash machine and build a plant in China and close your plant down, leaving nothing to the community except a toxic factory that will fall to ruin along the riverside — and they don’t even have to clean up. Troy NY, is a good example of this. As you drive away you can see where the new economic development is occurring, but underneath are the scars of decades of economic abandonment, littered about the newly hopeful landscape.

Economic abandonment is the way of the MBA. Business students are taught to seek cutting costs at all costs. Get around unions by leaving the country. Get around the EPA by setting up shop in developing nations so starved for investment that they’ll allow toxins to pollute their air and water. Down go the costs and up goes the stock.

What can we do to make a difference? Because sooner or later, all the world’s people will realize they deserve a living wage for their work, right about the time business leaders are able to automate them away. Those same people will also want clean air and water, right about the time the richest of us do what? Fly away to another planet? If you hear them speak about it, that’s what they say. The plan isn’t let’s figure out how to create honest businesses with creative solutions to these problems. No, a colony on Mars seem to be the answer for most of our titans of business, and while that’s pretty cool, I’m honestly not impressed.

Here’s an idea that doesn’t require inter-planetary travel: No company can be traded publicly that doesn’t balance people and the planet with profit. Set worker and environmental standards within the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that must be met. A company must pay workers a living wage, be responsible for all environmental issues such as pollution and sustainability, and still make a profit. If you can’t, you don’t get to go public. For companies currently trading on the index, they can be given a timeline to come into compliance, or be forced to buy out their shareholders and go alone.

As the Uber IPO shows us, a company not only doesn’t have to care about it’s workers (their drivers are striking the day of their IPO) it doesn’t even have to be profitable (in 2017 losses reached an adjusted $1.8 billion). This is completely insane and not sustainable.

Inequality is growing. Our water and air are deteriorating. #timesup for a lot of things right now, but if we don’t focus on the human right to work and the planetary right to life, nothing else matters.