In Davos, Business Leaders Say They're Tackling Climate Change

BY davidkirkpatrick | February 01, 2019
Editor's note: this story was originally published on Techonomy.com

Christiana Figueres wants to thank Donald Trump. She’s the one who, more than any other person, drove the process that led to the Paris Climate Agreement, as executive secretary for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Now she’s confident the pact’s aggressive carbon-reduction goals will be met, she said at a lunch panel hosted by Bloomberg at the World Economic Forum in Davos in late January.

And surprise–she largely credits Trump. “Every time we see some inexplicable attack on someone or some idea, it leads others to double down,” she said. As a result, nations, cities, and citizens around the world are working harder to reduce carbon emissions, she says.

Optimism about our ability to beat back climate change was my big takeaway from Davos. But I also got a sense there that for at least some in business, fighting climate change and working to improve the planet was finally becoming not just a hollow “responsibility.”

“Decarbonizing is a business opportunity,” said Johan Rockstrom, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, also on the lunch program. He was not the only one making that point. At the lunch, Börje Ekholm, CEO of Ericsson, said digital technologies, especially the enhanced internet of things made possible by 5G wireless infrastructure, will assist humankind in meeting fully 1/3 of the climate goals for 2030.

“The business community is way ahead of the political leadership,” climate expert Rockstrom continued. “We are doubling renewable energy produced by solar and wind every 4.5 years. That’s exponential, and means 50% of the world’s energy will be produced from renewable sources by 2030, even with business as usual.”

That same evening, I went to a reception hosted by Unilever’s departing CEO, Paul Polman. As much as any big business leader, he has made a conscious commitment to global betterment a central element of doing business. The reception, attended by hundreds of his friends and fans, was focused on how business can help achieve the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.

Like Rockstrom, Polman sees working towards the goals not as a burden for business, but as an opportunity, along with an obligation. He said 1800 CEOs have already committed to integrating the SDGs into their companies’ work, and that achieving them would create at least 380 million jobs.

Our theme here at Techonomy in 2019 is Collaborating for Responsible Growth, so I was heartened to hear Polman call for companies to stop talking about corporate social responsibility, and instead begin pursuing “responsible social collaborations.” Working across boundaries between industries and between business, civil society, and government is the only path to addressing the scale of the world’s problems.

My final day in Davos, I attended the annual lunch hosted by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff in a giant white geodesic dome in the center of town. This year the lunch, too, was focused on combatting climate change. Benioff moderated a panel including Figueres, the primatologist and conservationist Jane Goodall, Will.i.am, Bono, and Kengo Sakurada, CEO of Japanese insurance company Sompo Holdings.

In his inimitable earnest fashion, Benioff asked the panelists a very non-corporate question: “How can we bring our light into the next five years? Look into your heart.” Figueres proclaimed “This is the moment of choice on climate, and on everything.” Goodall said business must ask how it can perform for the good of the planet. Will.i.am, much of whose focus these days is on entrepreneurship around AI and speech, said we need to pair our efforts at creating smarter machines with parallel efforts to insure people are better educated. Bono was in fine form, as if composing lyrics: “We have to decide if we’re firefighters or arsonists…Businesses, like species, will become extinct if they don’t evolve to changing environments… Consumers are waking up to the power they have in their pockets. They realize it’s political power.”

The idea that consumers are voting as much with their wallets as in the ballot booth was a nice corollary, or even an explanation, for Rockstrom’s point that business is ahead of politicians on climate change.

But the coup de grace was delivered by a 16-year-old climate activist named Greta Thunberg. Benioff, presumably knowing what he was doing, handed her the mike. What we heard was not typical Davos fare. Thunberg quietly thundered: “Some people say that the climate crisis is something that we all have created, but that is not true, because if everyone is guilty then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame. Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular, have known exactly what priceless values they have been sacrificing, to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. And I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.” Facing that accusation, the audience first gasped, then applauded. “The future is in your hands,” Thunberg proclaimed in conclusion. Former Trump economic advisor Gary Cohn, sitting in my line of sight, who had been fidgeting and focusing on his phone during most of the panel, did not applaud.

That night, at a dinner in a restaurant back room hosted by my friend Matthew Bishop, the author who is now a managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation, a debate broke out among the assembled journalists, activists, and businesspeople. Several said the World Economic Forum was just a bunch of plutocrats scheming to maintain their wealth. Yes, partly, it is, as Thunberg had pointedly noted. But there were also plenty of more productive threads to this tapestry, I insisted. I left Davos inspired to help continue those at our own Techonomy conferences in 2019. Join us May 14-15 in New York to hear some of those same voices, which I am more determined than ever to assemble here.

David Kirkpatrick is the founder and editor in chief of Techonomy, a conference series and journalism platform focused on the intersection of technology and the global economy. Kirkpatrick is also the author of the bestselling book “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World.” He spent 25 years at Fortune, and founded and hosted its Brainstorm and Brainstorm Tech conferences

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If the Boss Wants You Back in the Office Five Days a Week, They Should Think Twice

In its heyday as the proto–Silicon Valley tech company, Hewlett-Packard innovated by what became known as the “next bench” syndrome. H-P was a company founded by engineers (Bill and Dave) for engineers and new products happened when one engineer asked a fellow practitioner sitting nearby if there might be something else the company could make that could be useful to him.While this ask-your-office buddy ideation might seem quaint—after all, innovation can and does come from anywhere—corporate America is now demanding a return of sorts to the days of white shirts and pocket protectors. After a long, pandemic-induced experiment with remote and then hybrid work, the people in the C-Suites are apparently lonely.More and more of them want your butt back in the office five days a week, and they are going to get their way, leaving some very unhappy employees to stew about it. According to a recent poll by KPMG, 79% of CEOs see all the professionals back at their office posts in the next three years–that’s up from 34% last year. This will be distressing news to people who moved away from corporate cities like Seattle to places such as Omaha, which tried to position itself as a low-cost haven for remote employees. At least companies are providing some perks for your five-day-a week return: unlimited amounts of hand sanitizer, for instance, and cleaning wipes. Maybe some more free food.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is among the latest to announce that sitting in front of your laptop at home with your dog and your three year old no longer qualifies as getting it done. Some Amazon employees voiced outrage, even threatening to quit. “Go right ahead,” seems to be the response from HQ in what some have labeled a layoff by another name. Long before that, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon decreed that bankers and traders, who tend to operate in packs anyway, had to decamp from their Manhattan apartments and Manhasset manses to reoccupy the company’s pricey office buildings, especially its new HQ. Dimon’s argument is basically, “I’m not spending $100 a square foot to look at empty desks.” Nor does he believe that managers can lead effectively from home.Other financial industry bosses apparently concur. In Manhattan, where I work, office “busyness” rates reached 73.4% in August, a figure that compares occupancy to pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Nationwide, the rate is 60.4%, according to Avison Young, a real-estate advisory firm.What the Research ShowsFrom a productivity viewpoint, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to mandate a return to the office, at least not based on academic research. The data, for the most part, points the other way. In the largest study yet of working-from-home professionals, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found that employees who work from home two days a week are “just as productive, likely to get promoted, and far less prone to quit.” According to the job-finding site FlexJobs, employees who work at home at least part-time can save up to $6,000 annually on commuting and other costs—a back-door raise they are loath to give up.True, Bloom’s study was limited to an experiment on 1,600 employees at Trip.com, a Chinese travel agency. And an earlier study, of which Bloom was a co-author, determined that fully remote employees were 10% less productive than their office-dwelling counterparts.  Meanwhile, yet another study from the University of Essex in England notes that, while remote workers there put in more hours–including 18% more after normal business hours—their average output didn’t change much. “Therefore,” the study concluded “productivity fell by about 20%.”What Most Workers WantAny survey of employees, however, will deliver the consensus that, while they enjoy being with their colleagues, they love a workplace that can be molded to their needs. Parents with kids need the hybrid flexibility, and Gen Z kids may need the socialization of the office. They both want a little of both.The kind of CEOs who get driven to work and have large private offices don’t necessarily see it that way. Nor do they seem particularly interested in the workplace data that supports the benefits of hybrid work. They’re focused on another data set: current economic data, which is now turning in management’s favor. That data shows that layoffs are up, quits are down, and the unemployment rate is ticking up, if ever so slightly. (Recent hurricanes will boost unemployment, temporarily.) The pending election might also be causing people to lower their appetite for risk and stay put.There could be more than executive ego at work here, too. If you’re the big boss, you want to be able to see and hear, in person, all the people you are bossing, even if you recede to your office sanctuary for most of the day.Which means that job holders and job seekers are no longer calling the shots the way they did in the roll-your-own days of the pandemic.  In my shop, our CEO just upped the ante to three days a week in the office from two, citing the need for enhanced collaboration to tackle these particularly perilous times in the publishing industry. I get that need for collaborating on site, having worked as a print magazine editor for a couple of decades. But surrendering the now comfy confines of my home office for an additional day at the office feels like a loss.And for the germaphobically inclined, it’s not as though the pandemic is in the past; companies have just chosen to treat it that way.  When I pointed out to a colleague that Covid-19 cases are rising rapidly nationwide, the response was on the order of: Yeah, but the latest wave isn’t as severe as past versions and there are now vaccines and remedies such as Paxlovid. In other words, suck it up, cowboy.The 13 million Americans employed in manufacturing might find all this contretemps about office work a bit amusing. It might be possible to say, build a transmission in your living room, but the machining noise tends to be loud. Likewise for the people working in service industries from restaurants to retail to healthcare. Sure, you can consult with a teledoc, but that’s not going to help you when you need to be pried out of your wrecked car by firefighters and  EMTs. You want a first responder, not a chatbot. Nor will your garbage be picking itself up anytime soon.The Upsides of the OfficePart of me sides with the bosses. What the productivity studies can’t measure is that a significant benefit of going to the office is being at the office. Being social. Being part of a company’s culture, which is a living breathing thing, as opposed to being merely part of its labor pool. Sharing not just the work but the human interaction that attaches. Going to lunch with office friends. And yes, the water cooler gossip, even if water coolers have been displaced by kombucha or cold-brew coffee dispensers. Need we mention, too, that office romances can hardly be undertaken sans office?(One thing that isn’t coming back to the office is any semblance of a dress code. Want to show up for that meeting in shorts, a T-shirt and Crocs? Go right ahead, and I’ll try to take you seriously.)As for the office work itself, we’ve all experienced those moments when a bunch of people thrown together suddenly connect on a breakthrough idea or solve a vexing operational problem. Indeed, the power of in-person collaboration has been likened to having a free electron floating around the room, just waiting to give the particle of a fabulous idea the positive charge that gives it energy. That spark could come from a sideways glance, a brief, post-meeting chat, or simply by running into a colleague in the elevator or parking lot.There’s also a reason why companies brag about being a great place to work. Yes, you can be employed remotely, but that’s not remotely the same experience.Why We Need to Find a Creative SolutionThis current faceoff leaves office managers and HR in a bit of a quandary when top management demands to see butts in seats. Perhaps looking at the question from an either/or perspective is the wrong way to do it. What the studies on office vs. remote work can’t control for is an individual’s performance. A high-performing employee is likely to be high performing whether they are working from home, at the office or at the beach. The most successful employers will figure out the geography that suits them best.Some companies, such as the HR platform Workday, have tried to appease bosses and workers with a sort of hybrid-hybrid. The company’s “work from anywhere” approach allows workers to spend 30 calendar days in a 12-month period working from just about anywhere. They may be on to something. Think about benefits. In most firms, there’s a benefits “menu” that allows employees to select from, say, several health insurers and within those insurers a variety of plans.Maybe we need to offer menu options with remote and hybrid work–a variety of packages to people in different life stages. The parent package could offer maximum flexibility in return for extended work hours. Take your kid to soccer, but give us those two hours back when we need them. The Gen Z package could include an exercise program near the office or lunch at Chipotle; the older workers package could include a more private workspace or a wellness program. Or something called chronowork, based on a person’s’ own body rhythms, which suits someone like me, attuned to working vampire hours. Running through all of them is the option to demand that all of the people show up at the office some of the time—on demand, even.People worked in offices for centuries because a central location was the best way to organize and run a business. The advent of computer networks altered that universe, making a central location less relevant; the pandemic then completely severed the historic relationship between work and geography. Some CEOs are now trying to redraw the management map to match the 1985 version. It’s sort of like going back to fax machines. Yes, they still function, but new technology has rendered them obsolete.  The hybrid model, which is inclusive of the vast variety of people and work styles today, is the new tech of business organization. It’s work that can work for everyone.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.(Photo by Sam Edwards/iStock by Getty Images)

Bill Saporito | October 23, 2024

Why a Software Glitch Sent Delta into a Tailspin: The Perils of Getting Technology and People Misaligned

Customer-facing airline employees are some of the most remarkable people in business. How can they not be? The workers on the ground face the annoyed, the demanding, the delayed, the furious, the not-going-anywhere-today, and the inebriated. Then they get a lunch break. Those on the jets face the entitled in the front and the cramped-and-cranky in coach.My admiration for these folks has only increased over the last decade as their ranks have been thinned by technology (with a push from the pandemic) while their tasks have been made increasingly fraught by the air-travel system in which they now toil. And in which we frequently roil.We got to see this combination of imperfect technology meeting overwhelmed staffing earlier this summer during the great CrowdStrike meltdown. Until its cybersecurity upgrade blew up, CrowdStrike was a company  known mostly to sys-op jockeys and hackers. Then the company introduced a wonky software update that within hours crippled millions of servers that used Microsoft Windows and all hell broke loose.Around the world, operating systems gagged, including those of major U.S. airlines, bringing traffic to a near standstill. In the U.S., only Southwest, which seemingly still uses floppy discs to run its data systems, escaped the meltdown. With the CrowdStrike collapse, the scene soon became all too familiar: lines of people desperately trying to get somewhere, their options narrowing, their frustration widening as the hours passed. Some would be stuck for days.And among those carriers, Delta stood out for coming apart like a cheap suitcase tossed down a baggage ramp. The carrier canceled more than 5,500 flights, and at one point refused to board unaccompanied minors, creating major angst for lots of parents. Meanwhile, word got out that CEO Ed Bastian had jetted off—Ted Cruz-style—to Paris for the Olympics while his airline was frozen in place. Delta blamed CrowdStrike and Microsoft, and has threatened to sue to recover some $500 million in losses. Microsoft, in turn, blamed Delta’s outmoded technology. During the depths of the outage, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian to offer assistance—talk about the ultimate Help Desk—but Microsoft says Bastian apparently didn’t respond. The carrier seemingly turned on its passengers, some of whom reported difficulty in getting hotels from Delta where they were stranded, as well as being low-balled by the refund offers being made to compensate them for lost flights and spoiled vacations. Delta’s service swoon seemed all that more severe given that the airline had reached cruising altitude in the post pandemic years, while rivals such as United and Southwest grappled more often with system freeze-ups.Using Technology to Supplant LaborYet Delta, as well as the other carriers, have been rolling the dice for years when it comes to matching people and technology. During the pandemic the carriers had to cut schedules (40% in Delta’s case) and jobs. As the nation and air travel recovered, they either didn’t—or couldn’t—rehire enough people who had left or were let go to match surging demand. (Remember “revenge travel”?) Increasingly, they relied heavily on technology to supplant labor. And they made us, the passengers, part of the labor force: encouraging carry on baggage by charging for checked bags, then introducing self-ticketing, self-check-in and self-bag-checks. Frontier even tried to eliminate its customer phone support.This latest air travel meltdown magnified an everyday incongruity that exists in the industry in that airlines are carefully configured to cope with the unpredictable—often to no avail. They try to plan for everything, from the catastrophic—a fatal crash—to the complex, such as a hurricane that threatens to spin the entire network into disarray. Then there are wars, revolutions, volcanoes, pandemics, strikes and assorted other calamities that are a regular threat to any global business, but to airlines in particular.At their vast flight operations centers, the carriers have teams ready for everything from a medical emergency on board to a rivet (or a door) coming loose on a 737 Max or a warning light on an Airbus 321 that won’t turn off. There are doctors, pilots, mechanics, meteorologists, Airbus specialists, Boeing specialists, avionics specialists, crew wranglers, airport and operations managers working 24/7 at the ops centers, and yes, people figuring out just who among us is going to get screwed when flights get delayed or canceled.Yet all of that preparation is no match for the way airlines are actually scheduled. They remain vulnerable to the phenomenon known as tight coupling, in which one unit in a system is highly dependent on the next. Cascading failure is almost a guarantee once the first fault is unleashed. Why can’t airlines prevent this from happening? The answer is that, despite the contingency planning, airlines are scheduled for optimum conditions, as though it’s always going to be sunny in Philadelphia, or Panama City or Paris. Which is not the case, of course. Worse, with load factors north of 85%, there’s little excess capacity, and little hope of a quick recovery once the system begins to implode.The contingency planning that airlines do can be undone by what they regularly come up against. Weather is by definition chaotic; technology is capable of catastrophic failure. Try building a service culture around that.Where’s the Service in the Service Economy?Although airlines are the most conspicuous examples of failing to balance people and tech, it seems to be creeping into all parts of the economy, as algorithms try to bring ever more precision to businesses. Especially in retail. The goal is to never have excess labor being employed for a single minute anywhere. In this frictionless world, there is always precisely enough help available to help you make your purchase or to get served.You know how that goes. We seem to live in a nation where there is always one fewer checkout lane open than needed (and don’t get us started on self checkout, which normally requires more than one self to operate). If you’re waiting in one of these lines, this understaffing can seem deliberate.Not too long ago, I was discussing airline operations with David Neeleman, founder of the highly successful new airline Breeze Airways (not to mention JetBlue, Azul, and WestJet) when he mentioned that he routinely passed by long lines of customers—or potential customers—at airport Starbucks. This frustrating level of service drove him to distraction—and this is a man who does not drink coffee. His point was that in an airport terminal, with scheduled flights, you can pretty much know how many people are going to be around your location at any given time. How can they not figure this out?, he asked, incredulously.Perhaps because they don’t want to: the obvious conclusion is that it’s better to be slightly understaffed than overstaffed, especially in businesses that ebb and flow during a day. In my nabe, the usual culprit is our CVS pharmacy, where the line gets 10 deep about the same time every day. Or at Chipotle, where 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. becomes a crap shoot as to whether your online order will be ready as the app promises. The problem? There are two hospitals nearby, and shifts are changing about then, something Chipotle’s scheduling software hasn’t seemed to have mastered. One more person-hour would do wonders, the difficulty being that you can’t schedule one person for one hour. So we wait.At Sephora, meanwhile, I seethed in a line on a Saturday afternoon with my wife as checkout terminals remained unpersoned even as the queue expanded. Spotting a manager, I asked, “Can’t you pull people off the sales floor? Isn’t everyone cross-trained?” She, of Gen Z, gave me that “okay, boomer” look before moving on. I’m still not sure whether she lacked the authority to shift salespeople to the front end, or the interest.Dissatisfied shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores are free to leave and not return, or to buy online. Dissatisfied fliers don’t have that option. How many times have I heard an angry passenger screaming, “I’m never going to fly this airline again,” at an agent and thought: Oh yes you are. And that includes Delta. The carrier may have burned some goodwill this summer, but there’s a still deep reservoir it can still draw on—at least for now.That includes its talent pool. As we have again experienced, when the technology chokes,  the front-line workers bear the burden for the company, because software doesn’t hear you when you scream at it. The airlines, and many other companies, either need to invest in more dependable technology—or they need to stretch their people a little bit less.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine, whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions and the myth of the “woke” corporation. (Photo by Panama7/iStock by Getty Images) 

Bill Saporito | August 22, 2024

The Power Gap Among Labor Unions: Why Some Have New Strength–and Others Don’t

As the United Auto Workers set up picket lines last week outside of plants for General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (maker of Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge), there was a sense of familiarity, of economic history repeating itself. In times past, the UAW would roll up to a contract negotiation with all eight cylinders of its union engine roaring. There were work stoppages, but when the Big Three controlled 80% of the market, the car companies had a lot of sales to lose in enduring a long strike, so they had some willingness to compromise.Since the 1980s, though, the UAW–not to mention the United Steelworkers and other large industrial unions–have been squeezed by the global labor arbitrage that shifted work to Asia. They’ve become fewer in number, less powerful politically and forced into waves of givebacks to keep their jobs. Most galling, for the UAW, was the adoption of a two-tiered wage system—a lower rate for new hires, vs. legacy workers. The scoresheet has not been kind to labor; its share of national income has been in a long decline, one that has accelerated in this century.This year, the wealth and power pendulum has started moving the other way. The post-pandemic reordering of the global supply chain that enriched some U.S. industries–think greedflation–has given the UAW, and a few other unions the chance to muscle up again. They’re seizing the moment to demand a share of that new wealth. This is a workforce that has done everything asked of it during the pandemic to meet the needs of corporations and their customers.Which is making labor more militant, more willing to hit the bricks for better pay and benefits. We're going to see this soon in Las Vegas, where the Culinary Workers Union, 50,000 of them, may strike the major hotels and casinos if there’s no new contract. Las Vegas has been recording record month after record month of revenues since the end of the pandemic, and the unions quite reasonably expect to get a piece of those winnings. Some corporations have acknowledged as much, with the Teamsters winning a big contract with UPS. Likewise, American Airlines just settled with its pilots on a new contract in August, providing a 46% increase in compensation, as “revenge travel” hasn’t slowed. Why wouldn’t you settle with workers if your airline is filling every seat, and facing a pilot shortage over the next decade? Pilots are United and Delta have also settled. That’s the benefit of a healthy economy,  when labor and management each have more to gain than lose.The economy can’t solve every labor issue. In Hollywood, both the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild have been on strike for months against the movie studios and the streaming companies. And in warehouses and coffeeshops nationwide, Amazon and Starbucks are fighting bitterly against determined unionization efforts.  Every labor negotiation rests on the extent of the common interests among the two parties. In the UPS negotiation, each side had too much to lose to take a strike. Shippers had already been moving their UPS business to other carriers as talks dragged on. And with drivers now earning more than $100,000 annually in some places, the urge to walk rather than deliver wasn’t strong. So UPS and the Teamsters settled and each can claim victory. This is the same Teamsters union that refused yet more givebacks with foundering Yellow Freight, and allowed the company to go under. Yellow had been in the red for years and the union could not see a way forward. With demand for truckers still high, and Yellow’s assets going on the block, there will still options for its drivers.For the auto companies, business is great but business is also changing rapidly–and that’s where the mutual interests are parting. Detroit has been able to sell every pickup truck it can build, for instance. These are the industry’s most profitable vehicles. How much of that business is worth risking? But the switch from internal combustion engines to EVs has introduced a host of new technologies that is reordering the workplace, and the unions are wary. Transmission plants get replaced by battery plants, for example, and the automakers are placing some of those plant in less union-friendly geographies in the South. The UAW has seen this movie before, when robotics came on the scene and eventually displaced a wide swath of jobs.Yet neither side is playing hardball, it seems. The unions are picketing at three selected plants–one from each automaker, a switch from the days when it would focus attention on one company.  That includes a Stellantis factory in Ohio, for instance, that makes the ever-popular Jeep. The union calls it a “standup strike.” The idea is to get the message across without crippling the entire industry. GM CEO Mary Barra, a lifelong GMer and the daughter of a GM engineer, has tried to keep the temperature low: “If you’re asking for more than the company made, I think that’s not a good position,” Barra said, but added, “I think we’re in a good position to get this done.” The gap remains wide, but that was also the case with UPS and the Teamsters.Technology is also a feature in the Hollywood strike by creatives against the studios and streamers. The actors and writers see AI technology being used to deprive them of earnings and intellectual property. Talks stalled, but there is still talk. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav tried to spread optimism, telling analysts: “We are just hopeful as a company, and I am very hopeful, that we can get that resolved. If we can get it resolved soon, then the long-term impact will be minimized.” But that optimism sounded a bit scripted, given that Warner has been willing to take a $500 million hit to earnings during the strike, and Zazlov’s lavish pay packet, $285 million over the last two years, has further impassioned workers over lavish media CEO pay.The dissonance could not be any greater in the case of Starbucks and Amazon, whose founders still exert a powerful influence on labor relations, leading to conflict. For Starbucks former CEO and chairman Howard Schultz, the battle with unions has been particularly difficult. Schultz, who grew up working class in Brooklyn, is a progressive. Starbucks pays well and has good benefits. He cares about the workforce, so he can’t understand why workers would want a union. He believes that he’s in the right position to know what they need, moreso than a union. But his view is from the top down. From that vantage point, understanding the workers’ point is view is difficult–very few business owners can do it. Henry Ford had the same stance–and his hired goons’ violent confrontation with union organizers was a turning point in UAW history.At Amazon, founder Jeff Bezos built a company by being a control freak over costs and operations and trained his senior managers that way. Unions represent a threat to that control mantra. And threatens to bring higher costs. Workers, for their part, see themselves as dehumanized labor inputs within Amazon’s system, not people. So the fight goes on, in both companies.The capital vs. labor issues this year are unique to their time–an economic situation unlike we’ve ever experienced and rapid technological developments that are rearranging traditional conflicts. The path to labor peace in the auto industry, then, may require these two old adversaries to bring more imagination and innovation to the negotiating table.  Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine. Previously, worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune.(Featured photo: United Auto Workers members walk the picket line at the Ford Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Mich., on Sept. 18, 2023. AP Photo/Paul Sancya) 

Bill Saporito | September 19, 2023