Corporations do not deserve praise for doing the right thing. They are not people, with feelings, who respond to emotional stimuli in the form of positive reinforcement. They are businesses that respond to the market (indeed, their legal duty is to maximize profits). In markets, negative pressure works. Asking nicely does not.
Nonsense--there is no "legal duty to maximize profits". That concept isn't really meaningful: maximize over what term? In fact Amazon is probably the number one counter-example to that idea, they've never prioritized profits and have plowed everything they can back into infrastructure. There's also no "legal duty to pay employees as little as possible", nor "legal duty to fight unionization" nor a hundred other things that some corporations do against the interests of their employees. For publicly traded companies the only recourse shareholders have is to vote out the board if they don't think things are being run correctly, but there's no law that's defining what correctly is.
Again, no, and IMO the cited case (eBay v Craigslist founders) is again more of a counter example. From the court opinion:
> Having chosen a for-profit corporate form, the craigslist directors are bound by the fiduciary duties and standards that accompany that form. Those standards include acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders.
"Value" yes, but again says nothing about "profit". The court acknowledged different stockholders can and do have different and even conflicting definitions for value, and that a contract (not a law) should be used to resolve those differences. In the end the only thing that the judge ruled against were actions specifically designed to destroy the value of the company's stock by making it harder to buy and sell. He didn't order e.g. that Craigslist raise ad prices even though it's widely believed they hold a ton of pricing power and are deliberately avoiding maximizing profit because they prioritize community.
I am not nit-picking, asking in good faith: is that enacted into a law ? Or is that part of a contract between shareholders and the board of executives ?
I have heard about that walmart competitor run like a family business and that gives every employees a voice (a cooperative ?).
there is such a thing as “fedicuary duty” [1] which could be sometimes interpreted as “maximize profits” i suppose...
according to this ny times article [2] it states:
`There is a common belief that corporate directors have a legal duty to maximize corporate profits and “shareholder value” — even if this means skirting ethical rules, damaging the environment or harming employees. But this belief is utterly false. To quote the U.S. Supreme Court opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case: “Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.”`
the ny times article also cites some sources such as supreme court case; it’s well worth a read
It is true that companies are not required to "pursue profit at the expense of everything else".
But it is also true that companies are held to legal standards that "include acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders" (Ebay v Newmark). This was famously weaponized against Craigslist several years ago, who were successfully sued over their refusal to let shareholders change corporate culture.
It's part of the contract for most standard corporations (that aren't B Corps) - the management has a duty to do what's best for the company, which usually comes out to "have a good reason behind doing something". If Amazon comes out tomorrow and says they're throwing in the towel and giving away their money to the Seattle poor because that will have a more positive impact, the lawsuits will be immediate and fairly one-sided. It would be a fairly easy case to argue that Amazon would be failing in their duty to shareholders by spending their money on something with no hope of an ROI.
It is neither. This seems to be a very common belief (i.e., that corporations are legally required to maximize returns for shareholders), but it is neither law nor regulation. Nothing prevents a company, even a publicly-traded one, from making decisions with other goals in mind, even if those decisions will reduce profits.
