July 25, 2015
The Washington Post reported on a speech by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which she decried corporate America’s short-term focus and called on companies to invest in their workers. She did not indicate any specific proposals for bringing this about. In an earlier speech she had suggested tax incentives to promote profit sharing.
It actually is not hard to give companies more incentive to invest in their workers, we can just make it harder for them to fire them. According to the OECD the United States has by far the weakest employment protection legislation, meaning that it is extremely easy to fire workers. The United States is the only country in which even long-term workers can be fired immediately for no reason and with no compensation.
Laws that imposed some cost for firing long-term workers would give companies more incentive to invest in workers and ensure that their productivity continues to rise. This is a very simple and well-established mechanism that is likely to be far more direct than any tax scheme that Ms. Clinton might put forward.
While she has not put out any specifics of her plan to promote profit sharing, it is worth noting that Carter administration tax incentive to promote employee ownership has largely been used as a tax break for creative owners. For example, when Sam Zell bought up the Tribune Company in 2007 he used the money in the workers’ pensions to create an employee stock ownership plan, which provided much of the money for the purchase. While this did nothing to give workers any effective control of the company, it potentially provided enormous tax advantages to Zell. (Since the company lost money, he turned out not to need the tax break.)
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