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Tony Roller CARS and the employee stakeholder Corporate social responsibility (CARS) is now on the global agenda. The USA, the European Union (ELI) and a number of developing countries are all looking to corporations to help address issues such as inequality, health and unemployment. CARS is based on the concept of ‘stakeholder democracy, which is premised on the notion that organizations are made up of a number of different stakeholders with a multiplicity of interests, all of whom should have an influence over the organization’s activities.
This concept is supposed to preclude the privileging of any one interest above the rest (Gazed 2001). However, the question remains of how much influence different stakeholders will have in practice. Thompson & McHugh (1995) suggest that stakeholder demo- racy is fundamentally unrealistic about the distribution of decision-making power inside organizations, because it is the owners who hold the key ‘stakes’ in the organization and ultimately it will be their interests that predominate.
Gazed (1993) also argues that shareholder interests are always likely to predominate, favoring financial over non-financial outcomes, with markets tend- inning to reward bad rather than good behavior, ninnies Lecturer, Department of Management, SST Anthony College, and Research Fellow of the Centre for Innovation and Structural Change, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland. 42 maximizing short-term profits and externalities costs to individuals, the state and the region in terms of unemployment, poor working condo- actions, health and stress robbers, and pollution.
Furthermore, while the more extreme forms of employer exploitation such as child labor in ‘branded’ sweatshops often receive a great deal of media coverage, much less is said about the day-to-day abuses of employee rights in the industrialized countries, where it is assumed that companies (especially those adopting CARS) at least adhere to the spirit and letter of prevailing labor law and perhaps go beyond it in providing workers with decent pay and working conditions. Business ethics By badminton’s