We hear a lot about how much energy modern day flat screen TV sets consume, but the innocuous set-top boxes that drive them, along with their built-in digital video recorders, may be even more to blame. A recent analysis conducted by the consulting firm Ecos on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found that “the average new cable high-definition digital video recorder (HD-DVR) consumes more than half the energy of an average new refrigerator and more than an average new flat-panel television.” Overall, set-top boxes in the U.S. consume some 27 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is equal to the annual output of six average (500 megawatt) coal-fired power plants and accounts for the emission of 16 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

Part of the reason these boxes are such energy hogs is that they typically operate at nearly full power even during the two-thirds of the time when they are not actively in use driving TV screens or recording to built-in DVRs. “As a nation, we spend $2 billion each year to power these boxes when they are not being actively used,” reports NRDC.

To make matters worse, American consumers have little if any choice about which set-top boxes they get from their cable or satellite service providers. Since the providers usually own the boxes yet don’t have to pay consumers’ electric bills, they have little incentive to utilize or develop more efficient models. In Europe, Sky Broadcasting is beginning to distribute more efficient equipment to subscribers there. NRDC is urging the largest pay-TV service providers in the U.S. (Comcast, Time Warner, DirecTV, Dish Network, Verizon and AT&T) to heed the efficiency call with their own set-top box and DVR offerings.

Redesigning set-top boxes to power down when not in use is perhaps the biggest opportunity for energy savings. “Innovation to reduce power consumption when not in active use—such as has occurred with mobile phones, which also work on a subscriber basis and require secure connections—is sorely needed in set-top boxes,” counsels NRDC. Also, re-jiggering content delivery systems so that only one main set-top box sends signals to all the televisions in the house (or to lower power “thin client” boxes) could also cut down household electric bills and carbon footprints. The group adds that “better designed pay-TV set-top boxes could reduce the energy use of the installed base of boxes by 30 percent to 50 percent by 2020.”

Last year the U.S. government released new energy efficiency standards for set-top boxes within its EnergyStar appliance efficiency rating program. While this new specification is a step in the right direction, consumers have little knowledge about such options. NRDC urges pay-TV subscribers to request that their providers make available set-top boxes and DVRs that meet the newer EnergyStar 4.0 standards. The more of us that request such improvements, the likelier they are to happen. And the cable or satellite provider that can save customers money while reducing overall environmental impact may just win over an increasingly large sector of the American people that actually cares about being green.

Photo: iStockPhoto/Thinkstock

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

The federal government’s National Labor Relations Board continues to probe the pitfalls of social media in the workplace.

The limits of workplace rules and of employee behavior are “a ‘hot topic’ among practitioners, human resource professions, the media, and the public,” noted acting general counsel Lafe Solomon in a recent report.

Business Ethics previously examined the NLRB’s social media approach last August.

The NLRB’s new year-end survey of 14 recent unfair labor practice cases cited several instances where employers adopted “overly broad” policies in attempting to police use of social media at work or online, even though, in some cases the discipline or discharge of an employee was legal.

Several cases arose from employee rants and protests posted on Facebook, where disciplinary steps were upheld because the worker’s behavior wasn’t considered “protected concerted conduct,” a common issue in NLRB cases.  Employees, the latest memo noted, have a “right to discuss their wages and other terms and conditions of employment, both among themselves and with non-employees.”

“Overbroad social media policies are high on the NLRB’s current enforcement agenda,” says global law firm Ropes and Gray.  The firm’s analysis said “employers who wish to restrict their employees’ use of social media must take care to specify the precise types of communications that will violate their social media policy, and avoid using broad, generic terms that could be understood to reach protected communication and activity.  This includes such commonplace terms as ‘inappropriate’ or ‘defamatory’ ……”

Just blowing off steam via Facebook doesn’t get much sympathy at the NLRB.  Consider:

--a bartender complained on Facebook that another bartender was “screwing over” customers by substituting a pre-made mix for more expensive premium liquor, and fretted that the practice could lose business.  Eventually, the complainer was discharged for using “unprofessional communication” on Facebook.  The NLRB legal staff didn’t think the behavior was linked closely enough to working conditions for the discharge to be illegal.

--a respiratory therapist at a children’s hospital, riding in an ambulance with a paramedic coworker, posted  via cell phone a Facebook message “indicating that it was driving her nuts that her coworker was sucking her teeth.”  After two Facebook ‘friends’ commiserated online, the therapist said “she was about to beat him with a ventilator,” the NLRB summary said.

The coworker complained to the company, and the therapist was eventually disciplined for that and other behavior.  The NLRB legal staff found labor laws didn’t offer her protection because “it did not concern terms and conditions of employment. She was merely complaining about the sounds her coworker was making, and was not even suggesting that the Employer could do anything about it.”

--a warehouse worker who was feeling ill was told by his supervisor that he could leave but he would be charged an attendance point; the worker completed his shift, but, from his car in the parking lot, posted a Facebook comment saying it was too bad when your boss doesn’t care about your health.  And he told a ‘friend’ who expressed support that he (the worker) thought the company was, in the NLRB’s words, “just trying to give him a reason to be fired because he was about ‘a hair away from setting it off.’ "

He was subsequently suspended without pay and later discharged for inappropriate, threatening, and violent remarks.  An HR manager said she interpreted the ‘setting it off’ remark as a threat to bring a gun to the warehouse and shoot everyone in it.  The NLRB concluded the employee wasn’t trying to initiate group action over sick leave policies and noted he had “characterized his conduct as ‘just venting.’ "

On the other hand, some Facebook discussions do fall under protection of the labor laws:

--workers at a popcorn packaging plant commented on Facebook about the behavior of an operations manager.  One said she hated the place and couldn’t wait to get out of there; eventually, one of the workers was discharged for the comments about the manager.  But the NLRB reviewers said the comments were “part of a discussion of employees’ shared concerns about terms and conditions of employment.”  The memo noted “it is well established that employee complaints and criticism about a supervisor’s attitude and performance may be protected” by the labor laws.

--a nurse at a hospital where a discharged employee had killed one supervisor and critically wounded another posted a series of critical messages online during a seven-month period.  He also criticized the hospital’s “management style” in a local newspaper and in other forums, and made a critical presentation to a borough assembly.  He was terminated. The NLRB staff found that many of the nurse’s remarks amounted to the sort of “rhetorical hyperbole” that is protected under labor laws.

And the NLRB memo criticized a number of rules for 30,000 employees at a large clinical testing laboratory, labeling the provisions “overbroad.”  Among them:

--Language that prohibited prohibited employees from disclosing or communicating sensitive, confidential or non-public information about the company without prior approval of senior management or the law department.

--A provision prohibiting use of the company’s name or service marks outside the course of business without prior approval of the law department.

--A prohibition against publishing any representation about the company without prior approval by senior management and the law department, including statements to the media, ads, weblogs and voice mail.

--A requirement that social networking site communications be made in an honest, professional and appropriate manner.

--A provision saying employees needed approval to identify themselves as the employer’s employees and that that social media comments must expressly be labeled as personal opinions that don’t necessarily reflect the employer’s opinions.

An investigative series by the New York Times and a performance piece by Mike Daisey featured on This American Life have put the spotlight on Foxconn, the Taiwanese company whose massive Chinese factories manufacture some of the world's most popular consumer electronics.

As well as working with companies like Dell, Motorola, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard, Foxconn assembles popular Apple products like the iPhone and iPad.

Here's a quick look at what we know about Foxconn. (The company disputes workers' accounts of abusive conditions. In a 2010 company report, Foxconn said it promotes "employee respect, an atmosphere of trust, and personal dignity.")

Working for Foxconn

1.2 million: number of workers employed by Foxconn in China, according to the New York Times.

40: Estimated percent of the world's consumer electronics manufactured by Foxconn.

7: seconds it takes Foxconn's workers to complete a single step of their work, according to a survey cited by the New York Times.

12: Hours in a typical work shift, according to interviews with Foxconn employees.

83.2: Average hours of overtime worked each month, according to a 2010 survey of Foxconn employee.

13: age of a Foxconn employee Mike Daisey interviewed outside the gates of a Foxconn plant in Shenzen.

91: cases of underage labor found by Apple's audits of its suppliers in 2010, the year Daisey visited China.

3,000: number of workers Foxconn could hire overnight, according to Apple's former worldwide supply demand manager.

10-20: percent estimated monthly turnover in Foxconn's workforce.

$7,500: amount founder Terry Gou used to start the anchor company of Foxconn Technology Group in 1974, according to the company website.

$5.7 billion: Terry Gou's estimated net worth as of March 2011.

Living Conditions

230,000: number of workers at "Foxconn City" in Shenzen, according to the New York Times.

13: tons of rice prepared each day at the central kitchen at Foxconn City.

$0.65: meal allowance for dinner at the Foxconn City canteen in 2010.

2: number of free swimming pools there, according to The Telegraph, which noted that the pools "are said to be quite dirty."

70,000: number of workers at Foxconn's Chengdu plant who live in company dorms, according to the New York Times.

20: number of employees sometimes packed into a three-room apartment.

200: Reported number of police officers who responded to a Foxconn dormitory riot.

Deaths

17: Number of reported suicides of Foxconn workers in China between 2007 and February 2011, according to Wired. Eleven workers died after jumping off buildings in the Foxconn Campus in Shenzen, which were then draped with preventive netting. (Wired noted that the rate actually seems to be below China's national averages.)

70: number of psychiatrists employed by Foxconn to prevent suicides, according to a 2010 announcement by CEO Terry Gou.

100: Estimated number of employees at a Foxconn factory in Wuhan who stood on the roof of a factory building this month to protest working conditions and wages. Several threatened to commit suicide, according to the New York Times.

$450: monthly salary a worker involved in that protest said employees had been promised for moving from the Foxconn campus in Shenzen to one in Wuhan.

34: continuous hours a Foxconn employee worked in 2010 before he collapsed and died, according to media reports.

4: workers killed last year by an explosion at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu, China that assembles iPads.

$22: approximate daily salary earned by Lai Xiaodong, a 22-year-old college graduate, working at a Foxconn factory in Chengdu, China, according to the New York Times.

$150,000: approximate amount the company wired Lai's family after he was killed in the aluminum dust explosion.

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.   This article is republished with permission under a Creative Commons license.

What do you do if in the stress of crisis you make the right decision, but execute it in a way that discounts the human impact -- which only makes the crisis worse?

Joe Paterno in 2006.

If you are a trustee of Pennsylvania State University, you discover that the window of mitigating flawed execution can close well before you are ready.

Although the child sex abuse crisis at Penn State erupted in early November 2011, and some steps have been taken to try and restore trust, a series of blunders persisted into January 2012 that continued to discount the emotional impact of crisis.

On January 20, 2012, Penn State trustees met and elected new leadership – the officers who had fired iconic football coach Joe Paterno by telephone were replaced. The trustees announced a series of actions that begin to address some of the very human issues the crisis has been about, including paying for victims abuse-related health costs, and employee training on reporting abuse.

Whether the trustees’ new chair Karen Peez, vice chairman of the Bank of New York Mellon, would have tried to enlist Paterno’s support in healing the wound of those anguished by his firing became a moot point. On January 22, 2012, Paterno -- considered the “winningest” college coach in football history -- died of lung cancer that was discovered after he was fired. The wound for students and alumni only deepened.

Going forward, re-uniting the Penn State community and rebuilding trust needs to be less about brand building (“We are Penn State”) and more focused on connecting, particularly with student and alumni stakeholders, around the concept of the university as a learning environment – admitting mistakes and what specifically should have been done differently. Statements like “All of us, including the board, with the wisdom of hindsight could have done things differently,” said by Peez at the trustee meeting January 20, miss the point.

There is a rich opportunity for real dialogue in small and large groups and in university-wide forums about what went wrong, beginning with what is obvious now, without waiting for the results of the five investigations underway (federal, state and internal) including:

-- Students and alumni already know that firing anyone by telephone is totally disrespectful; doing it to someone who was the face of Penn State for 46 years, with whom most had a greater emotional connection than with any of Penn State’s presidents, caused outrage. How the trustees own the mistake non- defensively (as opposed to their justification given January 18, 2011) is a teachable moment and a stepping stone to trust.

Penn State Athletics Web Site - January 23, 2012

-- While respecting all Paterno’s accomplishments, part of the teachable moment is his 2002 leadership failure. He didn’t follow up on information he passed on about a young boy potentially being sexually molested. In his only interview following his firing, it was clear Paterno hadn’t come to terms with the impact of what he failed to do. Understanding that even iconic leaders make mistakes and how mistakes can be avoided is an important discussion topic for students.

-- Saying your administration will stand for transparency and communication to move the Penn State community forward raises expectations you will deliver on it. President Rodney Erickson (promoted from provost to president after Graham Spanier was fired with Paterno) hosted “Town Hall” meetings attended by over 1,000 alumni earlier this month. However, their value was severely compromised when, to the irritation of alumni, he deferred the bulk of their questions, which were about Paterno’s firing, to the trustees who weren’t represented at the meeting. One alumnus commented,  "the guy that’s taking the bullets is not the guy that we need to hear from. It’s the trustees. It speaks volumes that he’s up there and they’re not."

To pass through the crisis successfully, it will be essential for the trustees, the administration, students, faculty, staff, and alumni to own the crisis without PR equivocation. During the “Town Hall” meetings, Erickson told alumni that it “grieves”  him when people talk about "the Penn State scandal." He said it should be called, “the Sandusky scandal,” after the former PSU football coach now facing more than 50 charges of child sex abuse.

Like it or not, Penn State has become another learning lab for crisis and its aftermath. It may be a year or more before the findings of all the investigations on what went wrong are concluded. The criminal trials – Sandusky’s for sexually molesting minors and two former Penn State administrators’ for perjury and failure to report child sex abuse - haven’t started yet.

In the meantime, Penn State has the opportunity to wrestle with important questions that can define whether it will become stronger because of the crisis: questions like what priority to place on the human impact (emotional intelligence and how respect and compassion play out); what is meant and expected by ethical behavior and compliance; what was there about the culture that made the crisis possible;  how to measure the football culture’s impact on the rest of the university; and how to tolerate discomfort with unflattering headlines while the focus is on trust building, not brand building.

Photos: Joe Paterno on sidelines in 2006 via Wikimedia Commons; Paterno on GoPSUsports.com.

Gael O’Brien is a Business Ethics Magazine columnist. Gael is a thought leader on building leadership, trust, and reputation and writes The Week in Ethics.

The private equity practice of buying out a firm and restructuring its operations — often involving job layoffs at the target company — has been criticized for its negative effects on human lives and communities but also praised for improving businesses and making them more efficient and profitable. Past research has tried to weigh and assess these dynamics, but it has often been limited by such factors as incomplete data sets and a failure to compare employment changes at comparable firms during that same period, according to researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Harvard Business School, the University of Maryland and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Their 2011 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, “Private Equity and Employment,” uses comprehensive data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database between 1980 to 2005 to assess the average outcomes of private equity buyouts. The researchers study some 3,200 U.S. companies bought by private equity firms and the effects on 150,000 “establishments” — “specific factories, offices, retail outlets and other distinct physical locations where business takes place.”

The study’s findings include:

-- Relative to comparable businesses in the same industry — and with similar profiles in terms of size, age, and prior growth — establishments bought by a private equity firm will see, on average, a decline of “about 3% of initial employment over two years and 6% over five years.” Moreover, “gross job destruction at these target establishments outpaces destruction at controls [comparable industry businesses] by a cumulative 10 percentage points over five years post buyout.” This means that turnover of workers is indeed accelerated by private equity buyouts.

-- However, many bought-out firms either grow establishments in fresh directions or create new establishments — so-called “greenfield establishments” — in the wake of a private equity sale. Indeed, analysis “reveals that target firms create new jobs in greenfield establishments at a faster pace than control firms.” Taking these total effects into account, the employment growth differential is only about 1% less for bought-out firms compared to similar firms in the first two years.

-- Private equity’s impact on jobs varies widely among industries and by the nature of the buyout; it can indeed be net neutral or positive, depending on the case. The greatest losses are typically evident in the retail sector and for publicly-traded firms that are taken private: “Public-to-private deals, which tend to be highly visible, also involve large employment losses at targets relative to [other comparable firms]. In contrast, independently owned firms exhibit large employment gains relative to controls in the wake of buyouts, mainly due to greater acquisitions.”

-- Overall, “the sum of gross job creation and destruction at target firms exceeds that of controls by 13 percent of employment over two years. In short, private equity buyouts catalyze the creative destruction process in the labor market, with only a modest net impact on employment. The creative destruction response mainly involves a more rapid reallocation of jobs across establishments within target firms.”

Despite the study’s finding of a modest overall impact on employment at firms, the research does support the idea that “pre-existing employment positions are at greater risk of loss in the wake of private equity buyouts.”

John Wihbey is a Policy Journalist and Editor at Journalist's Resource, a project of the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative. This article is republished under terms of a Creative Commons license.

Dear EarthTalk: I understand that some Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic U.S. states have banded together to reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions. Can you enlighten? -- Bo Clifford, Cary, NC

Given the lack of federal action to curb greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., several East Coast states joined together in 2008 to form the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), committing to a market-based system to cap carbon pollution and lower energy bills while creating more green jobs.

Under RGGI, the 10 participating states—Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont—agreed on a region-wide greenhouse gas emissions limit, enforced through the sale of pollution permits to large fossil fuel power plants there. The utilities that run the plants purchase the right (at quarterly auctions) to emit certain capped amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2). The money raised is in turn invested in local businesses throughout Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states that promote energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. RGGI’s overall goal is to reduce CO2 emissions from the power sector in the states involved by 10 percent by 2018.

The program was conceived in 2008 by then New York governor George Pataki based on a similar federal program launched by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 that successfully curbed emissions of other pollutants that led to acid rain.

While RGGI had strong bipartisan support at launch, changing priorities have since forced some states to reconsider their commitments. According to RenewableEnergyWorld.com, New Jersey is likely to back out, while factions in New Hampshire and Maine have also called for a withdrawal. “The political tides have turned significantly since the program was started, and many legislatures are now dominated by a new crop of lawmakers looking to cut spending in cash-strapped states,” the website reports.

Environmentalists and many business owners have banded together to try to save RGGI in the face of economic threats to its viability. Last July some 200 Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic businesses signed on to an open letter urging the governors of the 10 participating states to keep up with the program so that it can achieve its goals. “The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative shows that market-based programs can reduce greenhouse gas emissions while boosting our economy and improving energy security, and we encourage you to support and strengthen RGGI going forward,” the letter states. The letter goes on to cite research showing a $4-6 increase in economic output for every $1 invested in energy efficiency programs in the RGGI states. “Even better, these market-driven investments create jobs in the clean tech sector—one of the most dynamic segments of our state economies.”

Perhaps more important, RGGI “serves as a powerful model for what a comprehensive national energy policy should do” says the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading environmental group. Whether or not the economy will improve enough or climate change will become dramatic enough for Congress and the White House to take federal action to limit greenhouse gas emissions across the board is anybody’s guess. In the meantime, keeping alive programs like RGGI might be the best we can hope for.

Photo: iStock Photo/Thinkstock

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) — the idea that companies directly contribute to the common good — is gaining adherents throughout the business world.  However, what constitutes responsible corporate behavior is open to interpretation by the firms themselves and the larger cultures in which they operate.

A 2011 paper from INSEAD Business School published in the Socio-Economic Review, “The Spirits of Corporate Social Responsibility: Senior Executive Perceptions of the Role of the Firm in Society in Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea and the USA,” surveyed 73 senior executives of large corporations and asked them to articulate their thoughts relating to corporate responsibility. The researchers focused on distinguishing between two types of corporate charity: implicit (“our goods benefit society”) and explicit (“we contribute to charitable causes.”)

Key study findings include:

- The senior executives of Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United States espoused an implicit philosophy of charity: “A large majority of executives in each economy agreed on the importance of taking society into account in the running of the firm.” However, there was “no sense that responsibilities towards society represented voluntary corporate action. This suggests that executives in these four societies tended to view their relationships with society as ‘implicit.’ ”

- Hong Kong executives adhered to explicit standards of corporate responsibility, with 60% mentioning “charity” as an obligation of successful corporations. Charitable contributions were seen as supporting Hong Kong’s economic well-being and elevating the status of the contributors; however, charity still remained subordinate to a company’s ability to generate wealth for its stakeholders and create jobs.

- U.S. executives were “unusually clear in assessing societal concerns as secondary, with primacy accorded to shareholder interests,” and society was positioned as a “constraint” to be overcome. Corporate responsibility was seen primarily in relation to job creation and innovation; only 14% of U.S. executives mentioned charity directly. Overall, there was a “strong emphasis on the provision of employment as a contribution to society, a claim that may ring hollow in the aftermath of the U.S. financial crisis but was credible for most of the [2000s].”

- Only 40% of financial sector executives in the U.S. alluded to the importance of society or community: “at the root of the financial crisis may not only have been insufficient regulatory oversight, but also a proliferation of financial executives with possibly deviant value systems.”

- “Germany emerged as a unique case. While the other three societies with implicit CSR tended to focus on one type of stakeholder — the state and society as a whole in Korea, employees in Japan and shareholders in the USA — German executives chose to emphasize the societal value of production in itself. This is consistent with the high rate of engineering doctorates among German executives outside the financial sector, which is likely to condition executives’ views to focus on the productive function of the firm.”

The paper’s authors worried that corporate behaviors may be divorced from broader societal benefits; they call for additional research to refine the evolution of executive values and the link between cultural context and corporate behavior.

Margaret Weigel is Policy Journalist and Editor at Journalist's Resource, a project of the Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center and the Carnegie-Knight Initiative.

Dear EarthTalk: How is it that global warming could negatively impact water supplies in the U.S.? -- Penny Wilcox, Austin, TX

Climate change promises to have a very big impact on water supplies in the United States as well as around the world. A recent study commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading environmental group, and carried out by the consulting firm Tetra Tech found that one out of three counties across the contiguous U.S. should brace for water shortages by mid-century as a result of human induced climate change. The group found that 400 of these 1,100 or so counties will face “extremely high risks of water shortages.”

According to Tetra Tech’s analysis, parts of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas will be hardest hit by warming-related water shortages. The agriculturally focused Great Plains and arid Southwest are at highest risk of increasing water demand outstripping fast dwindling supplies.

While the mechanisms behind this predicted dwindling of water supplies is complex, key factors include: rising sea levels and encroaching ocean water absorbing lower elevation freshwater sources; rising surface temperatures causing faster evaporation of existing reservoirs; and increasing wildfires stripping terrestrial landscapes of their ability to retain water in soils.

Researchers have already begun to notice dwindling water supplies across the American West in recent years, given less accumulation of snow in the region’s mountains as temperatures rise. According to a 2008 study out of the Scripps Institute for Oceanography and published in the journal Science, Western snowpack has been melting earlier than it did in the past thanks to global warming, leading to markedly longer dry periods through the late spring and summer months in states already suffering from extended droughts. Given that the length and strength of these changes over the last 50 years cannot be explained by natural variations, researchers believe human induced climate change is the culprit.

The upshot of these changes is that Americans of every stripe need to curtail their water usage—from farmers irrigating their crops to homeowners watering their lawns to you and I taking shorter showers and turning off the tap while brushing our teeth. Even more important, water and resource policy managers need to conceive of new paradigms for the management of freshwater reserves to make the most of what we do have. And all of us need to work together to cut down on the emissions of greenhouse gases that have led to global warming in the first place.

Analysts also worry that warming-related water shortages could erupt into conflict, especially in parts of the world where one country or group controls water resources needed by others across national borders, such as the Middle East where already five percent of the world’s population relies on just one percent of the world’s fresh water. Parts of Africa, India and Asia are also at risk for water-related conflicts. American policymakers hope that the situation won’t get that dire in the U.S., but only time will tell.

Photo: Comstock

EarthTalk® is written and edited by Roddy Scheer and Doug Moss and is a registered trademark of E - The Environmental Magazine (www.emagazine.com). Send questions to: earthtalk@emagazine.com. Subscribe: www.emagazine.com/subscribe. Free Trial Issue: www.emagazine.com/trial.

American corporations today are like the great European monarchies of yore: They have the power to control the rules under which they function and to direct the allocation of public resources. This is not a prediction of what’s to come; this is a simple statement of the present state of affairs. Corporations have effectively captured the United States: its judiciary, its political system, and its national wealth, without assuming any of the responsibilities of dominion. Evidence is everywhere.

• The “smoking gun” is CEO pay. Compensation is an expression of concentrated power — of enterprise power concentrated in the chief executive officer and of national power concentrated in corporations. Median US CEO pay for 2010 was up 35 percent in the midst of a lingering recession, while CEO pay over the last decade has doubled as a percentage of pre-tax corporate income. Yet there has been no justification for current levels of CEO pay based on economic value added.

When Lee Raymond retired as CEO of ExxonMobil at the end of 2005, after six years at the helm of the merged firm and another six as head of Exxon before that, he walked away with more than a quarter billion dollars in realizable equity. In his final year alone, Raymond received in excess of $70 million in total compensation — an hourly wage of about $34,500 calculated at 40 hours a week for 50 weeks. No metric can justify such a raid on the corporate treasury and shareholder equity, but Raymond is only a particularly egregious and early example of what has since become common practice. Little wonder that the driving concern of banks receiving TARP “bailout” money was to pay it back so as to escape any restriction on executive pay.

• Retirement risk has been transferred to employees. During the same period that CEOs were doubling their own compensation, the “best” CEOs of the “best” companies abrogated the century-old commitment by employers to provide pensions to their workers. IBM has been the corporate leader in abolishing a “real” pension system for its employees. The 2006 elimination of on-going defined benefit plans will “save [IBM] as much as $3 billion through the next few years and provide it with a more ‘predictable cost structure’,” TK said at the time. Translation: The worker bees are on their own.

This is the essence of “capture” – CEOs are enriched, while all other corporate constituencies, including government, are left with liabilities. A relatively few autocrats have taken control over the policies and wealth allocation of the United States.

• The financial power of American corporations now controls every stage of politics — legislative, executive, and ultimately judicial. With its January 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court removed all legal restraints on the extent of corporate financial involvement in politics, a grotesque decision that can have only one effect: maximizing corporate – not national — value. Today’s CEOs have been granted the power to direct political payments and organize PAC programs to achieve objectives entirely in their own self-interest, and they have been quick to use it.

More than $300 million was “invested” by corporations in the 2008 Presidential elections. The totals will be vastly higher in 2012 when the full impact of Citizens United is expressed, and the distribution will be politically agnostic. As Bill Moyers recently noted, President Obama “has raised more money from banks, hedge funds and private equity managers than any Republican candidate.”[1]

• Capture has been further implemented through the extensive lobbying power of corporations. Abraham Lincoln’s warning  about “corporations enthroned” and Dwight Eisenhower’s about the “unwarranted influence by the military/industrial complex” have been fully realized in our own time. Reported lobbying expenditures have risen annually, to $3.5 billion in 2010. Half of the Senators and 42 percent of House members who left Congress between 1998 and 2004 became lobbyists, as did 310 former appointees of George W. Bush and 283 of Bill Clinton.

Capture has focused on particular industries. Two powerful Democratic administrations have not been able even to propose a system of “single payer” health insurance.  Meanwhile, business interests have assured that whatever program of “universal coverage” emerges will lock in the interests of the insurance and the pharmaceutical industries.

History has yet to sort out whether the second Iraq War served any national objectives beyond military and industrial ones, but the suspicion that oil interests played a critical role in the rush to battle is enhanced by Vice President Cheney’s refusal to reveal the names of the participants in his energy transition committee. Simultaneously, the inability to force public disclosure of those participants offers a window into how thoroughly the energy industry controls its own agenda, destiny, and information flow. Not only has the industry succeeded in achieving and maintaining special regulatory and tax treatment; in multiple other ways, it functions virtually as an independent state.

• Capture has placed the most powerful CEOs above the reach of the law and beyond its effective enforcement. Extensive evidence of Wall Street’s critical involvement in the financial crisis notwithstanding, not a single senior Wall Street executive has lost his job, and pay levels have been rigorously maintained even when, as noted earlier, TARP payments had to be refinanced in order to remove any possible restrictions.

While several financial firms have paid civil penalties for their abuses, the amounts involved bear little relation to the malfeasance. US District Judge Jed S. Rakoff recently — and rightly — rejected the $285-million settlement agreed to between Citigroup Inc. and the Securities and Exchange Commission as “neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, not in the public interest.”

Worse, such fines as have been imposed on the financial industry are basically being paid by the government itself. At the same time that various regulatory agencies boast of record setting penalties assessed against banks, the Federal Reserve pays banks interest on money that is not being lent, resulting in an “interest margin” realized by U.S. banks in the first six months of this year of $211 billion — more than ample funding for any penalties suffered.

• Finally, capture has been perpetuated through the removal of property “off shore,” where it is neither regulated nor taxed. The social contract between Americans and their corporations was supposed to go roughly as follows: In exchange for limited liability and other privileges, corporations were to be held to a set of obligations that legitimatized the powers they were given. But modern corporations have assumed the right to relocate to different jurisdictions, almost at will, irrespective of where they really do business, and thus avoid the constraints of those obligations.

As Nicholas Shaxson writes in Treasure Islands, “The privileges have been preserved and enhanced, but the obligations have withered.” Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury is estimated to be losing $100 billion annually from off-shore tax abuses.

Government cannot and will not hold corporations to account. That much is now obvious.  Indeed, the dawning realization of this truth is what has informed the Occupy movement, but only the owners of corporations can create the accountability that will ultimately unwind the knot of government capture.

The essence of the problem is quite straightforward: a failed system of corporate governance. So is the cause: the unwillingness of trustee owners of America’s corporations to assert their responsibility, legal duty, and civic obligation to monitor and oversee the corporations they invest in. Fiduciary institutions own 80 percent of the outstanding shares of corporate America and thus bear at least 80 percent of the responsibility for present circumstances as well as 80 percent of the onus for saving the system itself. And the largest institutional investors — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Harvard University, and others — must take the lead because (a) they should and (b) all other courses have failed.

Urban park by urban park, campus by campus, the Occupiers are bearing sometimes inchoate witness to America’s capture by corporate interests. Now, men and women of conscience need to reoccupy the boardrooms of America’s corporations. The boardroom is where the takeover began, and it’s where capture can finally be undone and a government of, by, and for the people, not the corporations, restored to the land.

Robert AG Monks is a shareholder activist and corporate governance adviser who has written widely about shareholder rights & responsibility, government capture, corporate impact on society and global corporate issues.

Mr. Monks is an expert on retirement and pension plans and was appointed director of the United States Synthetic Fuels Corporation by President Reagan, who also appointed him one of the founding Trustees of the Federal Employees’ Retirement System.  Mr. Monks served in the Department of Labor as Administrator of the Office of Pension and Welfare Benefit Programs having jurisdiction over the entire U.S. pension system.

Mr. Monks was a founder of Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), now the leading corporate governance consulting firm.  He also founded Lens Governance Advisers and co-founded The Corporate Library (now Governance Metrics International).  He is a shareholder in and advisor to Trucost, the environmental research company.

The good news is that on-the-job misconduct by American workers may be at an all-time low, and when misconduct is detected it’s likely to be reported by co-workers.

The bad news is that whistle-blowers are being retaliated against for their truth-telling at a “shocking” rate – suggesting a “looming ethics downturn” for U.S. businesses.

Those are the primary conclusions of the seventh National Business Ethics Survey (NBES) conducted by the Ethics Resource Center, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization.  The bi-annual report is based on telephone and web responses from 4,683 employees of for-profit organizations during September 2011.

The percentage of employees who witnessed misconduct at work fell to a new low of 45 percent last year, according to the survey, compared with 49 percent in 2009 and a record high of 55 percent in 2007. The leading types of misconduct cited were misuse of company time (33%), abusive behavior (21%), lying to employees (20%), company resource abuse (20%) and violating company Internet use policies (16%).

And those who reported the bad behavior they saw reached a record high of 65 percent, up from 63 percent two years earlier and 12 percentage points higher than the record low of 53 percent in 2005, according to the survey.

However, while reporting was up, the survey found that retaliation against whistle-blowers hit “alarming levels,” with more than one in five (22 percent) experiencing some form of retaliation in return.  That compares with reported retaliation by 12 percent in 2007and 15 percent in 2009.

According to the survey, these were most common forms of retaliation:

Source: Ethics Resource Center - 2011 National Business Ethics Survey

In addition, the survey found, the percentage of employees “who perceived pressure to compromise standards in order to do their jobs” climbed five points to 13 percent, just shy of the all-time high of 14 percent in 2000.

“While most U.S. workers are currently ‘doing the right thing’ by following company standards and reporting wrongdoing when they see it, we see trouble ahead,” said ERC President Patricia J. Harned, Ph.D. “Retaliation against whistleblowers and pressure on employees to compromise their ethics standards are at or near all-time highs. These are factors that historically indicate that American business may be on the cusp of a large downward shift in ethical conduct.”

“The data make a very clear case that if business leaders will take heed of these findings and make ethics a business priority, they can have a dramatic impact on the conduct of their workforce. Risks noted in this report can be mitigated,” said Dr. Harned and former Congressman Michael Oxley, now chair of the ERC board, in introducing the survey findings.

Economy and Social Media

To help explain the “co-existence of widespread retaliation and pressure with historically low mis­conduct and high reporting,” the NBES cited two factors: the sluggish U.S. economy and employees who use social media while on the job.

“Thirty percent of employees agree that bad actors in their company are laying low because of fears about the recession,” the survey reported. “As the economy gets better – and companies and employees become more optimistic about their financial futures – it seems likely that misconduct will rise and reporting will drop, mirroring the growth in pressure and retaliation that have already taken place and conforming to historic patterns.”

As for social networkers, the Center found that 11% of the respondents identified themselves as “active social networkers”– meaning they spent 30% or more of their workday on social networks, even though that was not part of their job – while another 29% of workers devoted at least 10% to 20% of their workday to social networking. A surprising finding to the survey analysts: more than half (51%) of the social networkers identified themselves as “top or middle management.”

The survey reported: “A surprising and worrisome divide exists within the workplace between employ­ees who spend substantial time on social networks and those who do not. Active social networkers report far more negative experiences in their workplaces. As a group, they are much more likely to experience pressure to compromise ethics standards and to experi­ence retaliation for reporting misconduct than co-workers who are less involved with social networking.”

However, the survey found, active social networkers also “show a higher tolerance for certain activities that could be considered questionable.”  Among active social networkers, for example, 50 percent said it is ac­ceptable to keep copies of confidential work documents in case they need them in their next job, compared to only 15 percent of their colleagues. And 46 percent of social networkers said it is acceptable to take work software home to use on a personal computer, compared to only 7 percent of their colleagues.