The End of Loyalty: The Rise and Fall of Good Jobs in America

"Wartzman is a wonderful, award winning journalist who wrote for the Wall Street Journal and the LA Times . This is a nice book where he focuses on a couple of major corporations, including Coca-Cola, and traces a sea change in attitudes and behaviors among the America CEO class over time. In the past, of course, major corporations did all sorts of terrible things. But, there was—at least the argument goes—a set of responsibilities to local communities and to workers, there was a broader stakeholder mindset, which held that a responsible corporation owed it to their workers to treat them well, and owed it to the communities in which they were anchored to treat them well, and, for a variety of reasons, that all changed. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Take a figure like Mitt Romney , former presidential aspirant, current senator from the state of Utah, former governor of Massachusetts. He’s had a colorful career. Mitt Romney’s dad, George Romney, was once an acclaimed CEO of a major car manufacturer in the United States. George Romney, famously, when the company was doing great and the board kept voting for higher and higher pay, rejected pay increases offered to him, saying that he earned plenty and didn’t want his salary to be too much higher than his workers. He thought that would be unseemly. Mitt was himself a co-chairman of Bain Capital, and had no such compunctions whatsoever with respect to remuneration. That’s not to pick on Mitt Romney, it just illustrates a broader normative shift among the corporate class from one where there was some restraint and responsibility when it came to their own pay and the pay of their workers, to one, now, where it’s much more a question of ‘take whatever you can get’, and then do what you can to hold labor costs down. Yes. It’s tricky. I’m a quantitative-minded social scientist, and most of the work I draw on is quantitative as well. So, capturing this cultural shift poses methodological challenges. But, like you said, it’s so evident. I think there are a lot of institutional changes that help to carry along this cultural transformation. But it’s clear that even over the course of this one generation, from George Romney to his son, something in the mindset of the CEO class, some sense of restraint, just evaporated."