Bernie Sanders's Walmart Speech May Offer a Preview of Larger Labor Proposals

[Uncle Joe]

On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders spoke at Walmart’s annual shareholders’ meeting in support of a resolution that would require the company to consider its hourly associates for seats on its board of directors. “The concerns of workers, not just stockholders, should be part of board decisions,” he said. “Today, with the passage of this resolution, Walmart can strike a blow against corporate greed and a grotesque level of income and wealth inequality that exists in our country.”

On policy, Sanders is perhaps best known for his support for two progressive proposals: Medicare for All and a fifteen-dollar minimum wage. But his appearance at Walmart’s shareholders’ meeting came on the heels of a report, by the Washington Post, that Sanders is expected to release a pair of proposals that take a new approach to reducing the wealth gap. One is a plan to require large companies, like Walmart, to grant workers a substantial number of seats on their corporate boards. The other would require companies to turn over portions of their stock to a worker-controlled fund, granting employees both stock dividends and, potentially, the votes in corporate affairs afforded to shareholders.

Sanders would be the second Democratic Presidential contender to offer a corporate-co-governance proposal. Last summer, Elizabeth Warren introduced the Accountable Capitalism Act in Congress, which would require companies taking in at least a billion dollars in annual revenue to grant worker representatives forty per cent of their board seats. Sanders’s worker-controlled fund would be a novelty in recent American politics, though it could be similar to a proposal recently offered by the Labour Party in the U.K., which would grant workers ten per cent of the stock in major firms. The case the Sanders campaign will make for these proposals is largely intuitive—if workers are granted more of a say in corporate decision-making, companies will make decisions that are better for workers. “Workers are not going to vote to send their own jobs to China,” Warren Gunnels, a Sanders policy adviser, said. “If a company in a big city can make a big profit by polluting the environment in which workers live, if the workers had a seat at the table, they would more than likely prevent that company from polluting their own environment.”

Democratic Presidential candidates have offered a flurry of policy proposals to lift the fortunes of middle- and working-class Americans, from Kamala Harris’s lift Act, which would grant thousands of dollars in supplemental income to working Americans, to Elizabeth Warren’s universal-childcare plan. But one of the major drivers of inequality is stratified access to stock and other capital. The top ten per cent of Americans own about eighty-four per cent of the stock in the economy and seventy per cent of national wealth over all. Beyond a handful of proposals, such as Cory Booker’s baby-bond plan for American children and Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, few ideas from the 2020 field address that gap directly. Although details are still light on Sanders’s stock-ownership scheme, it would presumably create a significant expansion in stock ownership among the middle and working classes.

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/bernie-sanderss-walmart-speech-may-offer-a-preview-of-larger-labor-proposals

[zentrum]

1. Fantastic.