Mass consumerism and “adver-teasing” have parents competing with multinational corporations not only for their children’s values and beliefs but for their health. According to one study, Joe Camel, the cartoon mascot of Camel cigarettes, is now as recognizable to six-year-olds as Mickey Mouse. Cigarette brand names have become affixed to virtually every professional sport, from soccer to skiing to sailing. If you doubt that tobacco companies target children as prospective consumers, ask yourself what gets three thousand American children to start smoking on any given day, or talk to Dave Goerlitz, an actor who appeared in commercials for Winston cigarettes for seven years, until he became so disgusted by the company’s blatant attempts to lure children that he left the business and joined an antismoking crusade. Or take a look at the previously secret documents from Philip Morris, which produces two out of every three cigarettes American children smoke, that U.S. Representative Henry Waxman of California read into the Congressional Record in July 1995. Among the revelations was that the company, as Waxman put it, “studies third-graders to determine if hyperactive children are a potential market for cigarettes.”
In cases where children are directly and seriously endangered by products, the government can and should step in, as the President has done in his proposal to have the Food and Drug Administration restrict children’s access to cigarettes and smokeless tobacco, curtail cigarette advertising that appeals to them, and require tobacco companies to fund an educational campaign designed to counter the message that smoking is “cool.” (Predictably, the tobacco companies are spending millions of dollars to fight the proposal through legal action in the courts and through an advertising campaign against “government bureaucrats.”)
But government is a partner to, not a substitute for, adult leadership and good citizenship. Parents must become more willing to stand up to consumer pressures from advertisers and from their own children. They can resist the impulse to “prove” their love by showering children with things they do not need and give them precious time and attention instead. They can make a moral statement to their children and to manufacturers by refusing to buy products that promote gratuitous violence, sexual degradation, or plain bad taste. In the summer of 1995, clothing designer Calvin Klein withdrew an advertising campaign targeted at teenagers that featured young models in sexually suggestive poses after consumers objected.
Copyright 1995 by Herblock in The Washington Post.
If parents do not take a stand, how can we expect children to resist the consumer culture’s message that style is more important than substance? We can measure its potential for destruction in the young lives already lost to murder over a ski jacket or a set of fancy new hubcaps. Parents need help from the village to counteract and to curtail the force of this message. The broadcasters and publishers who provide time and space to advertisers must exercise greater restraint and better judgment. Business must work with government and families to find ways of balancing the interests of industry with the interests of children.
THE CONSUMER culture’s assault on values adds to the pressures families are under in today’s fast-changing economy. Most of us remember a time when business was an anchor in our communities. After World War II, when America had about 40 percent of the world’s wealth and only 6 percent of its population, our nation enjoyed an economic boom in which businesses were expected to produce goods and services of high quality, not only for the purpose of bringing in profits for stockholders but also to create the jobs and higher incomes that would build the middle class. After all, if no one had jobs or incomes, who would buy the goods and services that businesses were producing?
In recent years, however, long-established expectations about doing business have given way under the pressures of the modern economy. Too many companies, especially large ones, are driven more and more narrowly by the need to ensure that investors get good quarterly returns and to justify executives’ high salaries. Too often, this means that they view most employees as costs, not investments, and that they expend less and less concern on job training, employee profit sharing, family-friendly policies, shared decision making, or even fair pay raises that share with workers—not to mention their families and communities—gains from productivity and profits. Even workers’ jobs may be sacrificed as executives seek short-term profits by “downsizing” or “outsourcing” (farming out to independent contractors work previously done in-house) or moving production to countries where wages are lower and environmental and other regulations less stringent. Instead of “We’re all in this together,” the message from the top is frequently “You’re on your own.”
Despite record profits for many companies, the gap in income between top executives and the average worker has widened dramatically. In 1974, the CEO of a large corporation typically made thirty-five times what an average factory worker earned. In 1993, CEOs made almost 150 times the average factory worker’s wage—if he or she was lucky enough to have a job still. At the same time, as Stephen Roach, chief economist and director of global economic analysis for Morgan Stanley, notes in a recent report, “Between 1991 and 1995, nearly 2.5 million workers have fallen victim to corporate restructuring—a carnage without precedent for a U.S. economy in the midst of ongoing recovery.” American workers, he observes, have “been left with a profound sense of insecurity regarding job and earnings prospects.”
Changes in the economy, such as technological innovations and the globalization of commerce, have combined over the past two decades to produce what economists Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook call a “winner-take-all society.” The middle class, the backbone of our nation, is splitting, with more and more falling into the “anxious class” of honest, hardworking Americans who go in debt every time a child falls ill or the family car breaks down. Midlevel managers and white-collar workers are increasingly vulnerable to becoming what Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls “frayed-collar workers in gold-plated times.” Hardly the stuff of which the American Dream is made.
This growing inequality of incomes has serious implications for our children. America’s turbo-charged economy has produced cheaper and better goods and services and greater efficiency and competition, but it also has created serious social dislocations that undermine family and community values. As Alan Ehrenhalt, author of The Lost City, in which he examines the decline in community life since the 1950s, observes:
The unfettered free market has been the most radically disruptive force in American life in the last generation, busting up neighborhoods and communities and eroding traditional standards of social life and personal conduct….
It is the tyranny of the market that has destroyed the loyalty of corporations to their communities; customers to their neighborhood merchants; athletes to their local teams; teams to their cities…. Politicians have every right to endorse such changes. But to endorse them and then in the next breath tout the traditional values of neighborhood and family is to defy common sense.
The decision by a profitable company to lay off workers in the name of corporate efficiency affects not only those workers but their children, families, and communities. So does its decision to impose a part-time workweek to avoid paying employee benefits. And who suffers most when a company decides to make do with fewer employees, forcing parents to work extra shifts at night or on weekends—times when child care is virtually nonexistent?
To be fair, while corporate restructuring is eliminating many jobs, the economy is also creating millions of new jobs, with small businesses starting at a record pace. In short, it is a great economy for successful entrepreneurs and for well-educated employees in strong companies that are worker- and family-friendly. Still, until recently, downsizing reduced the number of jobs that our rate of growth normally would have created, and fewer of the new jobs carry health care and pension benefits.
For those who live in urban areas with few businesses of any kind, the impact of changes in the private sector is most direct and devastating, with high rates of unemploym
ent and crime, drug abuse, welfare dependency, and school failure. By now we know, however, that problems elsewhere eventually affect us all. Government has a big responsibility to help remedy them. But its resources are limited, partly because, in an effort to support growth, it takes less of people’s incomes in taxes than does almost any other advanced economy.
Other developed countries, including some of our fiercest industrial competitors, are more committed to social stability than we have been, and they tailor their economic policies to maintain it. Although Japan’s economy, for example, has grown sluggishly in the last four years and is currently experiencing its longest postwar slump, government and corporations there continue to support a system in which many workers enjoy much greater job security. To them, the trade-off is worth it.
In Germany, too, there is a general consensus that government and business should play a role in evening out inequities in the free market system and in increasing the ability of all citizens to succeed. Compared to Americans, Germans pay for higher base wages, a health care system that covers everyone but costs less than ours, and perhaps the world’s finest system of providing young workers who do not go on to college with the skills they need to compete in the job market. As a result of such investments, German workers command higher wages than their American counterparts, and the distribution of income is not so skewed as ours is.
We have chosen a different path, leaving more of our resources in the hands of the private sector. We get much greater job growth and more new business starts than our competitors, but we also endure more of the harsh consequences of a more open economy. As a society, we have a choice to make. We can permit the marketplace largely to determine the values and well-being of the village, or we can continue, as we have in the past, to expect business to play a social as well as an economic role. That means we have to look realistically at what government must require business to do, principally in the areas of health, safety, competition, fair practices, and the environment; what government should attempt to persuade business to do through partnerships and other incentives; what consumers and workers have to do for themselves; and what business leaders should do, on their own, for their customers, employees, investors, and the larger community of which they are a part. The last two categories may be the most important. We desperately need, for the sake of our children, a national and global economy in which people act not only as consumers but as citizens, in which workers reassert responsibility for themselves and the success of their companies, and in which our businesses can do well and do good.
IN THE PAST, our government has taken steps on its own to improve the lives of working Americans and their families, by legislating and funding programs for families and children, some of which, like the Earned Income Tax Credit, I discuss in other chapters. Government has also mandated business to take certain actions, as with the Family and Medical Leave Act.
There are additional actions we can take, through our government, to preserve our country’s promise of opportunity for all. We can raise the minimum wage, which is nearing a forty-year low; two out of five minimum-wage earners are the sole breadwinners in their households, and many recent studies show that a modest increase does not cost jobs. We can give middle-class families a tax deduction for the costs of their own or their children’s post–high school education. Congress can pass a “GI Bill” that would give unemployed or underemployed workers vouchers they could use to cover the costs of up to two years of training at their local community colleges. We can increase access to affordable health care and reform insurance laws so that workers cannot be denied insurance when someone in their family has been sick or lose it when they change jobs. We can make it simpler and less costly for small businesses to provide retirement savings plans for their employees, by reducing the administrative burdens and costs of establishing and maintaining those plans.
We can also give business incentives to be better citizens, supporting competitive markets in the process. One example is the urban and rural empowerment zones created under my husband’s administration to encourage private investment in distressed areas. The government can also improve its credibility by becoming more efficient and less burdensome on business, as illustrated by the elimination of sixteen thousand pages of unneeded federal regulations that Vice President Gore’s Reinventing Government team has undertaken, and by the administration’s partnerships with business.
Automobile manufacturers have entered into a partnership with the government to build a “clean car” that uses much less fuel. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Project XL has elicited the agreement of companies in many different industries to meet higher environmental standards, in return for government’s willingness to scrap the rules telling them how to meet those standards. A number of our most powerful telecommunications and computer companies have joined forces with the government in a project to connect every school in America to the Internet and to see that every classroom has adequate computers, good software, and well-trained teachers. Defense contractors have entered into partnerships to develop commercial products, in an effort to save jobs jeopardized by smaller post–cold war defense budgets.
Community-minded companies are already doing a number of things that citizens should applaud and government should encourage, when possible, with legislative changes to make them more attractive. Some companies tie workers’ wages to business performance and to executives’ compensation and follow a no-lay-off policy, which means that when business is down, both workers and managers take proportionate reductions in pay. Others offer employees stock options, health and pension benefits, ongoing education and training opportunities, and tuition bonuses or reimbursements for their children. Still others provide child care or at least permit parents to take time from work to become involved with their children’s schools.
In 1989, television producer Norman Lear and former Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke, along with a number of other prominent business leaders, professionals, and educators, launched a national nonprofit organization called the Business Enterprise Trust. The idea was to create a new spirit of enterprise among present and future business leaders that “combines sound management with social conscience.” Each year, the trust confers awards on business people and firms whose practices reflect courage, integrity, and social vision. Winners over the years have included individuals and companies that could be models for businesses of all sizes in every American community:
Finast, a supermarket chain that built and renovated stores in inner-city Cleveland, is proof that business can operate profitably in depressed neighborhoods. The company not only improved its efficiency and profitability, but also spurred economic development in an area shunned by other businesses.
Fel-Pro, an automotive product manufacturer based in Skokie, Illinois, purchased two hundred acres of land for employees’ recreational use and created a summer day camp at the site, which serves hundreds of employees’ children each year. Fel-Pro has initiated many other family-friendly policies, including a day care center near the plant, emergency home care for employees’ sick dependents, tuition reimbursement for employees, and college scholarships, admissions counseling, and subsidized tutoring for their children.
Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks Coffee Company, has worked to give his employees a stake in the company’s success. All Starbucks workers who work twenty hours a week or more receive health coverage and stock options. The company maintains that the rise in its insurance premiums was offset by a lower turnover rate and a corresponding decrease in training expenses for new workers.
Rachel Hubka, who founded Rachel’s Bus Company in inner-city Chicago in 1989, hired many people who had previously been considered unemployable. She instilled in them a strong sense of pride and entrepreneurial spirit, producing capable school bus drivers and a successful company.
Examples of enlightened business practices are far too numerous for me to mention more than a handful, but there are not yet enough.
> Socially minded corporate philosophies are the avenue to future prosperity and social stability. Harvard Business School professors Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Michael Porter argue that the economic future belongs to businesses that invest in their workers and communities. In her book World Class, Kanter examines the relationship between globalization and the strengths of local communities. Porter believes that “Companies will understand the need to rebuild the corporation and create a sense of community again. The ones that do that will be the winners in the next stage of the competition.” I certainly hope so. It is going to take the contributions of our businesses to give America’s children the future they deserve, both to make their living and to build a lasting village.
Children Are Citizens Too
We can succeed only by concert. It is not, “Can any of us
imagine better?” but, “Can we all do better?”
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
In the spring of 1995, Chelsea and I traveled together through South Asia. As the mother of a teenager, I felt very lucky indeed that my fifteen-year-old was willing to spend ten days with me. We toured Mother Teresa’s orphanage in New Delhi and talked with young women who were studying business in Lahore, Pakistan. We saw a rural bank founded and run by poor women in Ahmadabad, India, and learned about the place where Mahatma Gandhi lived while starting the movement for Indian independence. We visited grassroots efforts in Jessore, Bangladesh, and in Colombo, Sri Lanka, that are bringing basic health care to pregnant women and their babies and expanding economic and political opportunities for women and the poor. Everywhere we went, we were impressed by the progress people were making, despite overwhelming poverty and internal political strife. In each country, we met democratically elected leaders who had endured terrible hardships—imprisonment, torture, exile, the assassinations of husbands, fathers, sons, mothers, daughters—under previous regimes.
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