I know the board has some fiduciary duty, but can a company put some guardrails on it when they go public, like saying the environment will always come first, or employees or customers or something?
I know the board has some fiduciary duty, but can a company put some guardrails on it when they go public, like saying the environment will always come first, or employees or customers or something?
It also has been unhelpful in the current arc that with unions being decimated (literally 1/10thed) in the last 60 years and wealth vastly concentrated (gee, wonder if there is a correlation?) it’s allowed very few individuals with massive share interests essentially drive all decision to the “profits at all costs or I’ll replace you and the board”. As wealthy shareholder concentration has spread amongst industries and the wealth concentration snowball has picked up steam you now have a tiny portion of people holding some ungodly percentage of outstanding shares–even relative to other wealth in society.
Interestingly, with the rise of 401ks(crammed down throats of americans to subvert pensions), institutional shareholders (blackrock, vanguard, etc.) these mutual fund and index owners own a massive portion of outstanding wealth and actually have the abilty, should they be pushed to do so, to drive change on all these things. Surprisingly, they haven’t stood up and done it and wealthy rats are scrambling to try to pass anti-activist shareholder rules. Remember, shareholder activists are only bad when it’s the poors, otherwise it’s a brilliant businessperson.