The omnipresence of corporations – as resource extractors and processors, employers and developers, lobbyists and campaign donors – has spawned countless initiatives to tame their excesses and steer their activities in the direction of the common good.
Now the challenge is to transform shared grievance into joint action among disparate campaigns. Greater strategic and organizational coordination is critical for confronting corporations commensurate with their scale of operation and influence. The seeds of a transformative redesign movement, already sown, have sprouted and are ready to spread across geographic scales.
In the political sphere, an essential step is the reconfiguration of the legal status and purpose of the corporation. This work can build on the pioneering work of B Lab and the consensus among legal scholars that the principle of shareholder primacy, wielded by defenders of finance capital, is baseless. Northern Europe has been a leader on this front, as “codetermination” structures, which mandate worker representation on the boards of large companies, are widespread in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries. And the model is spreading. In the US, presidential candidates are calling for employee-elected members on the boards of large companies, and for corporate boards to consider the interests of all stakeholders, not just the shareholders. A natural extension would be to create corporate board seats for representatives of all stakeholder groups.
