Reset: Business and Society in the New Social Landscape by Rubin James & Carmichael Barie

Author:Rubin, James & Carmichael, Barie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS016000, Business & Economics/Consumer Behavior, BUS077000, Business & Economics/Corporate & Business History
Publisher: Columbia Business School
Published: 2018-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

With these new generations coming into the workforce, more than ever they are looking for those values. That’s important to them. What does a company stand for, what does it mean? So, we’re seeing companies put a lot more time, effort and resources into communicating and living their values and that is true from employee orientation from the beginning…. It’s true in recruiting as they try to find people who match their values, in new employee orientation and then throughout that lifecycle.14

With the global recession hitting them at the start of their careers, millennials may be the first generation to believe they will not retire better off than their parents, a long-held American cultural expectation. Data show good reason for that anxiety. An analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles shows that millennials are earning 20 percent less than boomers at the same stage of life.15

Recognizing this disparity, Starbucks has partnered with Arizona State University to offer American full- and part-time employees without a four-year degree (who make up 70 percent of the Starbucks workforce) full tuition for an online undergraduate degree program.16

Boxed, an e-commerce startup competitor to wholesale clubs like Costco and Sam’s Club, is similarly offering to pay the college tuition of its employees’ children through a nonprofit foundation created and funded by its CEO, Chieh Huang. Referring to the company’s nearly one hundred U.S. warehouse workers, Huang explained why this benefit was a better solution than a higher salary: “There is an issue of inequality of opportunity. If you can barely afford a car and then you get a double salary, maybe you can afford a car. But can you really pay four years of education for your children?” When some workers texted their spouses with the news, the response from one spouse was “You can never leave this company ever.” As Huang explained, “These folks have dedicated themselves to our company day in and day out. I’m really nothing without them, so this was just my way of making the situation right.”17

Absent from the explanations of employee policies like these is competitive labor data on salaries. Instead, the rationale is that it is the right thing to do, both for the companies and for society as a whole.

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