ENDICOTT – This town in the hills of upstate New York is best known as the birthplace of IBM, one of the country’s most iconic companies. But there remain only hints of that storied past.
The main street, once swarming with IBM employees in their signature white shirts and dark suits, is dotted with empty storefronts. During the 1980s, there were 10,000 IBM workers in Endicott. Now, after years of layoffs and jobs shipped overseas, about 700 employees are left.
Investors in IBM’s shares, by contrast, have fared much better. IBM makes up the biggest portion of the benchmark Dow Jones industrial average and has helped drive that index to record highs. Someone who spent about $16,000 buying 1,000 shares of IBM in 1980 would now be sitting on more than $400,000 worth of stock, a 25-fold return.
It used to be a given that the interests of corporations and communities such as Endicott were closely aligned, but no more. Across the United States, as companies continue posting record profits, workers face high unemployment and stagnant wages.
Driving this change is a deep-seated belief that took hold in corporate America a few decades ago and has come to define today’s economy: that a company’s primary purpose is to maximize shareholder value.
The belief that shareholders come first is not codified by statute. Rather, it was introduced by a handful of free-market academics in the 1970s and then picked up by business leaders and the media until it became an oft-repeated mantra in the corporate world.
Together with new competition overseas, the pressure to respond to the short-term demands of Wall Street has paved the way for an economy in which companies are increasingly disconnected from the state of the nation, laying off workers in huge waves, keeping average wages low and threatening to move operations abroad in the face of regulations and taxes.
This all presents a quandary for policymakers trying to combat joblessness and raise the fortunes of lower- and middle-class Americans. Proposals by President Obama and lawmakers on Capitol Hill to change corporate tax policy, for instance, are aimed at the margins of company behavior when compared with the overwhelming drive to maximize shareholder wealth.
“The shift in what employers think of as their role not just in the community but [relative] to their workforce is quite radical, and I think it has led to the last two jobless recoveries,” said Ron Hira, associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The change can be seen in statements from IBM’s leaders over the years. When he was IBM’s president and chief executive, Thomas J. Watson Jr., son of the company’s founder, spoke explicitly about balancing a company’s interests with the country’s. Current chief executive Virginia Rometty has pledged to follow a plan called the “2015 Road Map” in which the primary goal is to dramatically raise the company’s earnings-per-share figure, a metric favored by Wall Street.
Job cuts have already come this summer – the biggest wave in years at the company. In Essex Junction, Vt., about 450 workers were axed in June. In Dutchess County, N.Y., 700 jobs were lost. At Endicott, at least 15 workers were told to leave.
Retired software developer Linda Guyer saw the change over her 29-year career. In the beginning, “it was a wonderful place to work – maybe the way Google is today, really innovative,” said Guyer, 59, who used to work for IBM in Endicott. But after training her overseas replacements and then being pushed into early retirement, Guyer said, “you end up feeling really cynical.”
IBM stopped breaking out how many workers it has in the United States versus other countries in 2009. The company probably began employing more workers in India than in this country around the same time, according to an analysis by Dave Finegold, a professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.
Many things have changed over the years about IBM, which has one of the oldest continuous histories of any company in the world. The firm that pioneered the floppy disk, an early version of the ATM and the one of the earliest best-selling PCs now makes nearly as much money selling consulting services as it does software. Defenders argue that the company has had to reinvent itself so many times to stay alive that the values of Watson are no longer as easy to apply as they used to be.
Doug Shelton, a spokesman for IBM, said that globalization and increased competition make it hard to compare the company to its earlier days under Watson and that it still has the biggest and most talented technology workforce in the world. Shelton said that the company’s head count has expanded every year since 2002 and that it is hiring for positions across the United States.
“Change is constant in the technology industry,” Shelton said in a statement. “IBM is investing in growth areas for the future: big data, cloud computing, social business and the growing mobile computing opportunity. The company has always invested in transformational areas, and as a result, we must remix our skills so IBM can lead in these higher-value segments, in both emerging markets and in more mature economies.”
The cultural shifts in corporate America have not changed only IBM. The company is merely a representative of what has happened at most large, globalized U.S. firms. But some experts wonder whether these companies have gone too far, leaving the rest of the country behind.
“We don’t build companies to serve Wall Street,” said Margaret Blair, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School. “We build corporations to provide goods and services to a society and jobs for people.”
Legal experts say there is no statute in state or federal law requiring corporations and executives to maximize shareholder value. Blair said that courts in fact allow wide latitude for managers and directors when it comes to business decisions.
“Let me be clear that this [shareholder-value] pressure comes from the media, from shareholder advocates and financial institutions in whose direct interest it is for the company to get its share price to go up,” Blair said in testimony before a House hearing in 2008, “and from the self-imposed pressure created by compensation packages that provide enormous potential rewards for directors and managers if stock prices go up.”
Some who defend the use of shareholder value as a measuring stick for corporate success argue that with retirees depending on stocks, whether through pension funds or 401(k)s, rising share prices benefit more than just Wall Street.
The main street, once swarming with IBM employees in their signature white shirts and dark suits, is dotted with empty storefronts. During the 1980s, there were 10,000 IBM workers in Endicott. Now, after years of layoffs and jobs shipped overseas, about 700 employees are left.
Investors in IBM’s shares, by contrast, have fared much better. IBM makes up the biggest portion of the benchmark Dow Jones industrial average and has helped drive that index to record highs. Someone who spent about $16,000 buying 1,000 shares of IBM in 1980 would now be sitting on more than $400,000 worth of stock, a 25-fold return.
It used to be a given that the interests of corporations and communities such as Endicott were closely aligned, but no more. Across the United States, as companies continue posting record profits, workers face high unemployment and stagnant wages.
Driving this change is a deep-seated belief that took hold in corporate America a few decades ago and has come to define today’s economy: that a company’s primary purpose is to maximize shareholder value.
The belief that shareholders come first is not codified by statute. Rather, it was introduced by a handful of free-market academics in the 1970s and then picked up by business leaders and the media until it became an oft-repeated mantra in the corporate world.
Together with new competition overseas, the pressure to respond to the short-term demands of Wall Street has paved the way for an economy in which companies are increasingly disconnected from the state of the nation, laying off workers in huge waves, keeping average wages low and threatening to move operations abroad in the face of regulations and taxes.
This all presents a quandary for policymakers trying to combat joblessness and raise the fortunes of lower- and middle-class Americans. Proposals by President Obama and lawmakers on Capitol Hill to change corporate tax policy, for instance, are aimed at the margins of company behavior when compared with the overwhelming drive to maximize shareholder wealth.
“The shift in what employers think of as their role not just in the community but [relative] to their workforce is quite radical, and I think it has led to the last two jobless recoveries,” said Ron Hira, associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The change can be seen in statements from IBM’s leaders over the years. When he was IBM’s president and chief executive, Thomas J. Watson Jr., son of the company’s founder, spoke explicitly about balancing a company’s interests with the country’s. Current chief executive Virginia Rometty has pledged to follow a plan called the “2015 Road Map” in which the primary goal is to dramatically raise the company’s earnings-per-share figure, a metric favored by Wall Street.
Job cuts have already come this summer – the biggest wave in years at the company. In Essex Junction, Vt., about 450 workers were axed in June. In Dutchess County, N.Y., 700 jobs were lost. At Endicott, at least 15 workers were told to leave.
Retired software developer Linda Guyer saw the change over her 29-year career. In the beginning, “it was a wonderful place to work – maybe the way Google is today, really innovative,” said Guyer, 59, who used to work for IBM in Endicott. But after training her overseas replacements and then being pushed into early retirement, Guyer said, “you end up feeling really cynical.”
IBM stopped breaking out how many workers it has in the United States versus other countries in 2009. The company probably began employing more workers in India than in this country around the same time, according to an analysis by Dave Finegold, a professor at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.
Many things have changed over the years about IBM, which has one of the oldest continuous histories of any company in the world. The firm that pioneered the floppy disk, an early version of the ATM and the one of the earliest best-selling PCs now makes nearly as much money selling consulting services as it does software. Defenders argue that the company has had to reinvent itself so many times to stay alive that the values of Watson are no longer as easy to apply as they used to be.
Doug Shelton, a spokesman for IBM, said that globalization and increased competition make it hard to compare the company to its earlier days under Watson and that it still has the biggest and most talented technology workforce in the world. Shelton said that the company’s head count has expanded every year since 2002 and that it is hiring for positions across the United States.
“Change is constant in the technology industry,” Shelton said in a statement. “IBM is investing in growth areas for the future: big data, cloud computing, social business and the growing mobile computing opportunity. The company has always invested in transformational areas, and as a result, we must remix our skills so IBM can lead in these higher-value segments, in both emerging markets and in more mature economies.”
The cultural shifts in corporate America have not changed only IBM. The company is merely a representative of what has happened at most large, globalized U.S. firms. But some experts wonder whether these companies have gone too far, leaving the rest of the country behind.
“We don’t build companies to serve Wall Street,” said Margaret Blair, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School. “We build corporations to provide goods and services to a society and jobs for people.”
Legal experts say there is no statute in state or federal law requiring corporations and executives to maximize shareholder value. Blair said that courts in fact allow wide latitude for managers and directors when it comes to business decisions.
“Let me be clear that this [shareholder-value] pressure comes from the media, from shareholder advocates and financial institutions in whose direct interest it is for the company to get its share price to go up,” Blair said in testimony before a House hearing in 2008, “and from the self-imposed pressure created by compensation packages that provide enormous potential rewards for directors and managers if stock prices go up.”
Some who defend the use of shareholder value as a measuring stick for corporate success argue that with retirees depending on stocks, whether through pension funds or 401(k)s, rising share prices benefit more than just Wall Street.