patrick.net

The four big companies that I use to tell this story are GE, GM, Kodak, and Coca-Cola. There was a shift from a stakeholder orientation, where the CEOs of these giant corporations talked in terms of balancing all their constituents in this postwar era. They talked about taking care of their customers and the communities they operated in; they even bragged about how much they paid in taxes. Corporate America shifted to a model that is now largely centered around maximizing shareholder value. Investors have explicitly been put quite above all of these other stakeholders, so when you carve out the pie, a bigger share is now going to investors, and a smaller share is going to labor. That’s what happened.

Source: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/09/why-companies-and-ceos-treat-their-workers-like-garbage.html