Moments before I read your story this morning, I read a story in the New York Times about sick children in the U.S. suffering and sometimes dying because of corporate greed.
There's a big connection to your story, so hang on just a second while I make it.
The essence is that the United States is facing a severe shortage in pediatrics hospital beds, and the shortage is very new. In many regions, like the greater Boston area, children languish in crowded emergency rooms waiting for a pediatrics bed that is not going to open up. Medical staff scramble to find beds in neighboring cities and states, looking as far as hundreds of miles away.
Medical outcomes are, as you might imagine, often grim. To say nothing about the parents with a desperately ill child watching them medevaced and having no practical way to go be with them.
Why has this crisis cropped up in the last few years? Are there many more children needing medical care? Nope. Have the number of hospital beds in the United States not kept up with the number of patients? Nope.
It's all about profit.
Because of the way hospital care is reimbursed in the United States, adult hospital beds are significantly more profitable than children's hospital beds. So, corporate administrators have been steadily reducing the number of childrens beds in favor of adult beds.
The New York Times quoted one hospital administrator as saying "that's a no-brainer."
Reducing the ability to care for desperately ill children is a no-brainer if it means more profit. Imagine that!
That's the connection to your story. I'm thinking about that poor guy who died in the Amazon warehouse. I'm thinking about the Amazon executives who were perfectly comfortable lying about where he died, relying on a technicality to lie. Because telling the truth might affect their profits.
That sort of attitude is a cancer rotting the soul of the corporate world. And not just in the United States. It's a global epidemic.
Know any young people working for their MBA or who just got their MBA? Ask them what they learned in graduate school about corporate responsibility and morality. You'll probably get a blank stare in return. Or maybe they'll tell you that corporation should be responsible by donating to good causes.
But of course that's not what corporate responsibility means or should mean. Donating a little money once in awhile, in way that's going to give you tax benefits anyway, is not morality.
If you probe harder, then MBA student might start talking about ethical frameworks they learned about in school. If you listen closely, you're likely to be shocked.
What you'll hear will be a defense of profit in the name of fiduciary responsibility. You'll hear that since corporations exists to make money for investors, that managers of corporations have a positive moral duty to make a profit for those investors, as their prime purpose of existence. Everything else be damned. Seriously.
The true believers might try to soften that by arguing that corporate profits are good for everybody, but most MBA students won't even go that far. Probably because that argument feels increasingly silly in the real world.
But the profit ethos is the only ethos that drives the corporate world.
And in that world, there are only a few rich people. Everyone else is a worker bee, and if the worker bees disturb profit margins, then the worker bees have to be the ones to suffer to bring the profits back up.
Jeff Bezos and Amazon are perfect examples of how that works.
So are hospital chains reducing pediatrics beds because they're not profitable enough.
If you try to talk to corporate managers about how profits matter less than people, don't just give you a blank stare. They won't even be able to hear you.
That profits trump all is a no-brainer to them. They were educated and trained in a system where money is literally the only that matters.
Anyone who thinks they have a decent shot of getting rich in that kind of world should probably run the numbers again.
