Business
While there is a lot of focus today on companies’ role in addressing environmental and social issues, less attention is being paid to companies’ role in with respect to traditional economic challenges. Yet, through their business operations, almost all companies can have more direct impact on issues of economic opportunity and fairness than they can on the environment or on social legislation. And there’s an additional imperative: a recent survey by The Conference Board’s Marketing & Communications Center, along with the Harris Poll, on consumers’ views on sustainability, found that fair wages and work conditions are more important to buying decisions than any other issues, suggesting that these kinds of issues are cutting across the political divide. In this podcast, Paul Washington, Executive Director of the ESG Center, speaks with Martin Whittaker, the founding CEO of JUST Capital – an independent nonprofit that provides research, rankings, indices, and data-driven tools to empower all market participants to help build a more just economy, thereby moving the vision of stakeholder capitalism from rhetoric to reality. They discuss what companies are doing – and can do – regarding economic opportunity and fairness. One of the key takeaways: companies have a real opportunity to tell their “economic opportunity and fairness story” on how they are creating value for all their stakeholders, not just their investors, and what they are doing to contribute to a fair and inclusive economy.