Why the American Public Needs a Voice in How Companies Act
When you think about measuring the performance of companies, what matters most to you? Profits? Stock price? Maybe. It’s also possible there are other things you care about. Things that are a little harder to measure, but that relate more specifically to who you are and what issues you care about. It could be job creation, or the way a company treats its customers or the communities in which it operates. It could be work-life balance or how much paid time off a company provides, or what its track record on discrimination or the environment is.
Whatever the issues — and from our nationwide survey work we know there are many — it’s likely that you’d have a hard time getting reliable, unbiased data on how companies are actually doing on them. And even harder would be to compare companies’ performance, within or across industries, so you can see how they stack up on the things you care most about, customized to your needs, and delivered in quick and simple ways.
Enter JUST Capital. We are building the definitive source of rankings and data on how companies perform on all the things ordinary people care most about – the things they believe define a just corporation. We started by asking thousands of Americans, “what makes a company just?” Since then we have completed what we believe is the largest set of surveys ever done on attitudes towards corporate behavior.
The results are at once insightful, surprising, and significant. They provide a blueprint for any business wishing to tap into its stakeholders’ hearts in a more authentic way. The most important issues by far relate to worker pay, benefits, and treatment. Fully 50% of the overall importance weighting across all the issues we uncovered relate to these things; fair pay, providing a living wage, non-discrimination in the workplace, being treated with dignity and respect, providing a safe workplace, helping workers prepare for retirement, and more. Other issues — all important, just less so according to our overall survey — include leadership and ethics, customer treatment, product attributes (quality and whether a product is harmful to health or the environment), doing business with repressive regimes, and, yes, making money for investors.
The point is this: if we’re going to address the great social, economic, civic, and environmental issues of our time, the resources of the $15 trillion-plus private sector have to be more effectively channeled. And this will only happen if market forces first incentivize and then reward more just behavior by businesses, starting with the largest, most influential corporations in the land. What does this mean? It means ordinary people buying from more just companies; choosing to work at more just companies; investing in more just companies; and supporting companies that simply operate in a more just way.
Markets thrive on information and transparency. Building a more just marketplace means empowering people with the right information. And that’s why JUST Capital was founded – to help build a marketplace that better reflects who America is and what we aspire to become. Please add your voice!
