IV. Human-centered Public Policies are Good for Business

Unlike most peer competitive economies, the United States has few worker and family-supportive public policies and instead leaves workers and families to sink or swim very much on their own. The prevailing idea of the last 50 years is that the “market will solve all.” That business knows best, and the government should play a limited role in our lives. Yet that approach has driven income and wealth inequality to among the highest levels of peer countries. Even many corporate leaders in the United States and abroad are now realizing that in their focus on short-term returns for shareholders they’ve lost sight of the stakeholders and the human workers who, since the 1970s, have been working harder and harder, are more and more productive, and yet have reaped less and less of the fruits of that labor. Recognizing that, some private equity investors will now only invest in companies that create good jobs. Many in the business community, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are beginning to see, after the devastation of the global pandemic, that child care is vital infrastructure that requires public investment, and that the current patchwork system squeezes parents, caregivers, and providers alike as it shortchanges children—and us all. Leaders in the growing gig economy, including Lyft and DoorDash, are realizing that, without supports like universal health care and a guarantee of paid time off, these flexible jobs make for unstable, unhealthy, often impoverished and trapped lives. These and other business leaders are pushing to untether benefits from jobs and employers and instead tie them to individuals, so individual workers could keep benefits as they move from job to job. Many see how that would actually build on the Great Reassessment and unleash entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation. Denmark’s “Flexicurity” model, for instance, gives businesses freedom to hire and fire workers, but the country has built a safety net with sufficient income and training that’s bouncy enough to support workers between jobs and help them transition into a new one.

In the United States, again unlike other peer countries, businesses can voluntarily choose to provide family-supportive policies like paid family leave. That approach leaves out 80 percent of the civilian workforce. The unpaid Family and Medical Leave Act leaves out more than 40 percent—though most low-wage workers can’t afford to take unpaid leave anyway. The fact that one in four mothers in the United States returns to work two weeks after giving birth because the United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee paid maternity leave, is nothing short of cruel. Even as many corporate leaders lobbied in 2021 against the care infrastructure investments proposed by the Biden administration because of its corporate tax provisions, businesses know the status quo is unsustainable. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and leaders from more than 200 businesses have argued in support of a national paid family and medical leave policy.

There is widespread consensus that gone is the old social contract—the implicit agreement that workers would work hard for employers who paid them fairly and provided the supports like paid annual leave, retirement savings, and health care they needed not only to survive, but to enjoy quality of life and thrive. Many business leaders recognize it’s time for a new social contract, not only for a corona-normal world, but for a rapidly changing future of work. And that must include rethinking the old “market will solve all” approach, and reimagining how investing in well-designed, well-funded, and well-implemented universal worker and family-supportive public policies is not only the right and moral thing to do, but good for human beings, the economy, society, the planet—and business, too.

Here’s a good place to start:

• Universal Care Infrastructure: Child care, home care, long-term care
• Paid Time Off: Paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, paid annual leave
• Flexible Work
• Stable Schedules
• Universal Health Care
• Equal Pay
• Fair, Living Wages and Living Hours
• Pregnant Workers Fairness
• Federal Unemployment Insurance System that Works
• The Right to Organize for Decent and Dignified Work Conditions
• Human-centered Immigration Reform