Trusting in big business

Transparency is about ensuring that the processes by which a business runs are explicit and verifiable.

Businesses are now being subject to more requirements to be transparent in socially desirable ways. While some may think this restricts them too much, the push has only come about because there have been too many cases where business owners and managers have been grossly unfair and tried to cover it up, so now everyone pays the price.

However, given businesses are personally benefitting their owners because of the privilege afforded them by a democratic process, they should expect that that privilege has a price, and that that price is about being fair to the citizens that give their consent to that privilege. People and hopefully their governments expect businesses to be behaving somewhat ethically, and don't wantonly damage people and public property.

With a lot of government expenditure provided by personal income tax receipts, to keep providing services, with their increasing cost base, the average wages per person must keep increasing.

Even the Reserve Bank of Australia is saying that low wages are a problem, but why are they?

In general people spend upon necessities, and some desirables, first, before savings or investment. If they have any disposable income after those, then they can use that for discretionary spending, like mainly upon the goods and services that small businesses provide. Spending is also where governments gather more money through taxes and duties. When small business is bouyant, their owners and staff will hopefully be paying more income tax.

Tax cuts for large businesses are being touted as the saviour for our wages problems, via what's known as trickle-down economics, yet with the revelations of the royal commission into the banks in Australia showing a horrific lack of social responsibility, is big business generally capable of being relied upon for wages outcomes?

This is where the ideology by which a government frames its thinking decides which is more desirable, with so-called conservative ones favouring the former, because they will generally be trying to reduce government costs.

No matter what political persuasion a governments has, providing these is still expensive, so there will always be a considerable level of government expenditure. In this way, all democratic governments are to some extent socialist.

Privatisation is seen as a way of reducing government involvement in the provision of services based on the assumption that businesses will be more efficient.

The first counter-argument to privatisation is that business requires profits to pay shareholders, which means that getting businesses to provide services will increase the cost of those services due to the profits being on top of the same cost base. While businesses are reputed to be more efficient, that only occurs if there is ongoing competition. Most privatisations of public services have been awarded as multi-year monopolies, which means they have no competition during that time.

While governments are subject to a lot of scrutiny, developed over decades or centuries of laws requiring accountability, farming out services to private corporations mostly means a huge drop in scrutiny level. This is because business laws are based on contracts and none of those are going to be able to be written to have the same level of comprehensiveness that governments are under.

Companies are motivated by profit, and so unless there are water-tight service level performance criteria that focus on beneficial outcomes for their customers that they are required to meet, they will do their utmost to provide the absolute minimum level of service and do whatever maximises their income. An example is with private prisons in the US, where the prisons themselves decide their internal punishments, which mostly keep extending prisoners' lengths of incarceration, allowing them to be exploited as labour forces for hire. Minimum efforts are made at rehabilitation because of this.

Universal government-run medical care has been shown to provide the lowest costs to run compared to any mix involving private services, while increasing the overall health of citizens. Unfortunately, we have seen that ideologically-driven conservative efforts to undermine the NHS in the UK by chronic underfunding as a portent to privatisation. Successive conservative governments in Australia have tried to sabotage Medicare by propping up a chronically inadequate private health insurance system. And the dysfunction of the excessively costly US system is obvious.

Government-run services don't have to be inefficient, but are often hampered by political interference by politicians beholden to those who seek to profit from a country's citizens. These are the ones who want us to believe that business control of services is more efficient, but who don't care if we are worse off from it, as long as they make profits. Governments should not farm off services to private enterprise where citizens will suffer as a result, especially when there is plenty of evidence of failures indicating which services fare worse in private hands.

Don't listen to those who derive enormous profits from weak government as they are exactly the same people who are desperately trying to undermine democracy through thinktanks that push junk economic policies and philosophies based upon selfishness. As individuals, we should be free to choose a lot about how we live our lives, but it is only strong democratic governments that will protect us from the psychopaths that want to divide and exploit us.

We expect that when government provides assistance to people, they enter into a contract to earn that assistance, and showing that they are actually undertaking steps to do so.

While businesses have to comply with some regulations, they are not subject to the often invasive scrutiny those getting government assistance are subjected to. Some might argue that the difference is that businesses have the potential to add money to the government coffers, in addition to enabling their workers to do so. But does that have to be taken as a given, without further governance that their activity will add to the economy in ways beneficial to the general population?

Big business, like others, is increasingly being given more of an explicit social contract to fall in line with. We now know that they generally cannot be trusted to do the right thing by society in general, though they are greatly accepted, and run, by those already at the top eschelons of society, who benefit from the bad societal behaviour.

We have seen huge growth in senior executive payments, despite often poor business performance.

Executives seemed to be hired on the assumption that they will heroically bring good fortune to businesses, but are they really worth those huge payouts? An executive is reliant upon the whole workforce pulling in the same direction. In large enterprises, these employees are hired by human resources processes, and a lot of their job descriptions are well defined. Most executives inherit a lot of these processes, tweaking where required to ensure the business is generally staying on track.

That begs the question of whether an executive is really adding so much value that they are worth hundreds or a thousand times what most of their workers individually earn. The real question is whether they perform so much better than someone paid only 5 to 10 times what most workers earn. Many companies have CEOs and boards that are showing dubious management expertise, with some showing despicable behaviour and leadership.

Perhaps it is time for us to have some more realistic expectations of executive performance, and define some concrete company performance indicators that show how they are actually fulfilling the social contract that allows them to operate. Economies are stagnating because companies are sabotaging workers salaries to appease greedy senior executives and shareholders. This is unsustainable. It may be time to peg CEO salaries as a low multiple of the median (middle) salary in their businesses, so that everybody has to get raises to justify higher executive salaries.