Quotes by Robert Reich

I think re-engineering or restructuring or downsizing or rightsizing or whatever you want to call it, it's basically firing, has gone way too far. Employees, as I've talked to them across the country, feel that they are not respected, they are not valued, they are worried about their jobs. They simply feel that the company is no longer loyal to them. Why should they be loyal to the company, they ask me. Why should I go the extra mile? Why should I care?

I think it's not good for a company in terms of its own bottom line to allow too great a gulf to open up between the compensation of the boss at the top and everybody else. Because what is it that holds a company together, that makes the average worker feel that he or she is part of an enterprise that they have a common fate, that it is necessary to put in the extra mile to make sure that that company works? It's the sense that everybody is working together, that there is not too great a gulf between people at the top and people at the bottom. The best companies in this country, the best companies, try to encourage a sense of teamwork, of common enterprise, of everybody in the same boat together. You cannot do that if the CEO is earning 140 times what the average worker in that company is earning.

In the early 1970s, Milton Friedman argued that corporations should not be socially responsible because they had no mandate to be; they existed to make money, not to be charitable institutions. But in the economy of the 21st century, corporations cannot be socially responsible, if social responsibility is understood to mean sacrificing profits for the sake of some perceived social good. That's because competition has become so much more intense. As to the meaning of "corporate social responsibility," Friedman and I would agree: If a certain action improves the corporation's bottom line, there's no point in labeling it "socially responsible." It's just good business.