Pandemic Could End Shareholder Supremacy for Good

In 1943, a group of top U.S. businessmen, calling themselves the Committee for Economic Development, began meeting in New York to discuss postwar employment. Sooner or later, they knew, legions of servicemen would be returning home in need of jobs. Forecasters were predicting that up to 30 million people could be unemployed once the war ended, which would plunge the country right back into the depression it had pulled out of only recently.

To avoid that fate, economists calculated that the country needed 58 million private-sector jobs, up from 49 million in 1940. Abandoning conventional corporate wisdom, the committee embraced organized labor and called for deficit spending by the federal government. According to Rick Wartzman’s book, “The End of Loyalty,”1Harrison Jones, the chairman of Coca-Cola, argued that companies would need to start hiring more workers than they needed “so that the nation’s economic flywheel would begin to turn —workers becoming consumers, leading to demand for more products made by more workers.” In addition, prices would need to be low and paychecks high — even though that would obviously affect profitability.