Environmental News Network - June 6, 2001
Shareholder activism
By Claude Morgan
[snip]
"The beauty of shareholder activism is that, essentially, we're able
to cut out the middleman," he says. "We don't have to fight Congress.
We don't have to fight Trent Lott. We go directly after the bad guy." ====
Ultimately, yes, they will. SA is not even half the battle but it's a good start.
[snip]
"Companies will never admit in public that they like a shareholder
resolution," says van Buren. "But in private, they'll say they're
glad for it. It gives them an opportunity to deal with important
issues before they get hit by public opinion." Or rammed in the
pocketbook. ========
The strategy should be to deconstruct the public/private binarism for the sake of a more mutlidimensional and multifunctional definition of the corp. in order to make it's legal/communicational boundaries more porous/malleable to worker, supplier and community concerns. As Barry Bozeman puts it "all organizations are public"; it's the spectrum of publicness that needs to be morphed in reconfiguring the corporate form.
Companies like these negotiations because they don't have any legal entailments unless enough shareholders take them to court in which case we're up at my first point and it will be very expensive for a minority set of shareholders to win....what? What will they do when the judge says "if you don't like it, sell your stock."
Ian