Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently told employees that those who do not want to return to the office at least three days a week should consider finding employment elsewhere. According to a recording obtained by Insider, Jassy stated “It’s past the time to disagree and commit,” adding that if employees cannot commit to the new hybrid work model, “it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.” He characterized the decision to have employees return to the office part-time as a “judgment call.” Notably, Jassy said employees are free to leave if they do not want to comply with the hybrid work requirement. This makes clear that Amazon has not changed its stance on returning to office work despite some employees preferring full remote arrangements.
It probably wouldn’t work, but I’ve been wondering whether it would be possible to use the shareholders of publicly traded companies against them in these situations.
I’ve seen people mention that companies are obligated to maximize profits for their shareholders (might not be true everywhere, and my knowledge on the subject is extremely limited).
If there was data available for a given company that showed that profits were increased during a period where a substantial part (or all) of the employees worked from home, and then the company starts forcing the employees back to the office, could the board not be called upon to force the company to keep people in work-from-home-mode? Would the company not be obliged to do that, to maximize the profits? It seems to me that this would be in the best interest of the shareholders.
Nope, because the biggest shareholders in the vast majority of companies are financial institutions like Blackrock, that coincidentally have large commercial real estate portfolios as well.
Individual shareholders are a drop in the ocean next to that immense amount of centralized wealth. When you think of shareholders, it’s not even the 1%, it’s a couple hundred people who own everything.
Thanks, that makes perfect sense, and gels perfectly with my knowledge on the subject being ridiculously limited 😅
Are there any really big companies that don’t have shareholders? Just curious if it’s even possible to get really big without selling stock. Guess it’s probably a thing that even if there are any that don’t, they probably still have investors. Would be fun to know if there are companies out there that managed everything just on their product, growing organically I guess.
edit: to partially answer my own question, here is Wikipedia’s list of the largest private non-governmental companies by revenue.
You can get reasonably big, but in most Western markets public companies who are owned by the same few institutions have a controlling anticompetitive share.