Molding Good Corporate Citizens

On the second day of 1996, with Christ mas just safely past, the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation outdid Ebenezer Scrooge. Although its profits were soaring (along with executive salaries), AT&T announced it was laying off 40,000 workers. Presumably the action was intended to increase efficiency and maximize profits--but was it the decent, responsible thing to do? Many Americans thought not--and  Rowe, a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly, contends that they were right.

"The problem, of course, is that corporations today aren't constituted to be responsible," he says. The CEOs of large, publicly traded corporations are forced to heed "an institutional mandate to maximize pecuniaIy gain."

Yet the corporation, Rowe points out, is a government creation. The state grants a charter to a group of people, recognizing them as a separate entity--a corporation--with its own rights and liabilities, distinct from those of the individuals involved.

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