Giving Workers a Voice
To advance worker power and curb
rising inequality, we must rewrite the rules of corporate governance.
One key reform: giving workers representation on
corporate boards. Roosevelt
Senior Economist and Fellow Lenore Palladino makes the policy case for
this big idea in a new working paper. Read
more.
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Why this matters:
Weeks after the Business Roundtable’s (BRT) “Statement
on the Purpose of a Corporation” declared that corporations should work
toward serving all stakeholders beyond shareholders, the trade group
named Walmart President and CEO Doug McMillon as
its next chairman.
As Palladino and United for Respect leader (and 11-year Walmart
associate) Cat Davis write
for the blog,
McMillon can start on his home turf. “Nobody on
Walmart’s board has the experience or understanding that associates
have of the day-to-day life in Walmart stores. Doug McMillon’s appointment to lead the BRT
seems to say he thinks we’re stakeholders. It’s about time he treated
us like that.”
- Moving forward:
To rethink the American corporation, policymakers need bold solutions.
In a Boston
Review forum led by Palladino, 13 thinkers
propose their ideas. “Restructuring corporations with employee
ownership and governance rights would represent a sharp break from
decades of neoliberal policymaking, but we cannot tweak our way out of
the mess of deeply-rooted economic inequality,” Palladino writes in
the forum’s opening essay. “These reforms may not be a silver bullet,
but they would ensure the basic standard that employees do
well when businesses do well.”
 How Wage Boards Guarantee
Representation
In the same Boston Review
forum, Roosevelt Fellow Brishen Rogers offers a way forward for worker
representation: wage
boards. “Legal scholar Kate Andrias and others
(myself included) have proposed that Congress establish ‘wage
boards’ with the power to set minimum standards for workers within
particular sectors,” Rogers writes. “As in the case
of co-determination,
this would guarantee representation, rather than just creating
pathways for representation.”
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On the trail: Referencing a Roosevelt
report by Rogers and Andrias, Sen.
Elizabeth Warren’s new labor platform promises to “amend federal labor law to
promote sectoral bargaining so that workers across industries—fast
food workers at McDonald’s, Burger King, and Taco Bell, or child care
workers across different employers—can band together and bargain
alongside labor organizations to improve wages, hours, and working
conditions on an industry-wide basis.” Tune in to
the #UnionsForAll
Presidential Summit today and tomorrow to hear working people tell presidential
candidates what they’re looking for in a leader.
Why Capital Gains Tax Cuts Are So
Regressive
 The Tax Gap and the Pay
Gap
Per the IRS’s latest measurements,
the net
tax gap—the
difference between taxes owed and taxes collected—totals $381 billion.
The tax gap, however, misses what corporations and the wealthy few
should owe in today’s skewed economy. As Roosevelt
Communications Director Kendra Bozarth writes
for the blog, “If
you’re worried about the tax gap, then you should also be worried
about what’s lost to a lax, inequitable, and unjust tax
code.”
- In other news:
Under Sen. Bernie Sanders’s new Income
Inequality Tax Plan proposal, “companies with
large gaps between their CEO and median worker pay would see
progressively higher corporate tax rates with the most unequal
companies paying five percentage points more in corporate
taxes.”
 Rewriting the Rules for
All
On the latest episode of
Pitchfork
Economics, Roosevelt
Fellow Darrick Hamilton explains why government is necessary in
building an inclusive economy. “Without government intervention, we
end up with scenarios where power does what it does: It reinforces
itself. Economic power is used to gain political power, and political
power is used as a mechanism by which one can facilitate and structure
a society so as to enrich themselves.” Listen
here.
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