Amazon Grapples With Shareholders Over Surveillance Tech
Amazon is facing a barrage of ESG shareholder proposals. It does appear that there’s some overlap among them, even as it’s gratifying to see Amazon try to get ahead of the mooted demands. There are certainly complexities associated with the implementation of some of these items, and knowing that investors have generally engaged with the board before tabling proposals, would seem to imply there might have been some foot dragging on Amazon’s part.
We commented this past week on the employee board seat demand, in a well shared Linkedin post. For this topic in particular, there are two important points to take into consideration:
- Any worker representative on the board has to be just that: representative of all the workers’ perspectives and concerns, otherwise having just one worker’s narrow perspective would be less useful
- There seems to be confusion about the preference of investors: would the worker be an actual board member or merely a board observer? The former comes with a need for training and significant personal liability. It would also take any new board member at least 1-2 years to be able to fully grasp the complexity of a business like Amazon’s and therefore be able to contribute within context, assuming they already had a good grasp of how governance is carried out by a board. So a high turnover of a yearly representative would be somewhat ineffective. Germany has a longstanding tradition of a similar nature, so it would be helpful to look for what worked (and didn’t) there
The greater issue we have mooted at CFU is that board structures themselves are outdated. If every stakeholder were to get a seat at the board table, it would become unwieldy. Yet there’s no doubt that stakeholder representation is critical. So the underlying question remains: how do governance structures evolve to accommodate this priority and the many other demands of a Digital Age?
How To Make a Social Safety-Net For the Post-Covid World
Happy to see the Economist echo our words on the need for a new social order to accommodate the Digital Age: “The social safety-net in many rich countries was creaking before covid-19 struck. Modelled on the ideas of Otto von Bismarck and William Beveridge, it had often failed to cushion workers from globalisation and technological and social change.” This was the theme of our Pillars whitepaper from Feb 2019. What the article doesn’t address though is the role of companies (and their investors) in innovating this new order. With the focus on supporting employment prospects, they should have a main chair at the table.
China Creates a Digital Vaccine Passport
Such a passport would, theoretically, be a boon for travellers and the travel industry. Covid won’t be the last pathogen to require an internationally agreed standard for travel. In fact, one can see such a passport becoming the basis for much international movement, such as insurance documents, driver’s licenses and others. Technology companies providing these capabilities could however, become caught in the ethical tensions between consumer privacy needs and government surveillance: “In China’s case, the police have built surveillance systems that closely watch WeChat, and one early version of the country’s health code software appeared to send data directly to the police.”
America Grapples With Regulating Surveillance Technology
Tech companies not only have a slew of lawsuits pending by regulators, but are also facing multiple city and state regulations regarding data and algorithm use. This will add significant cost to their operations and occupy risk committees and their boards. Rather than fight this plethora of regulations, how can the industry form standards of good practice through self-governance, which anticipate and synthesize the public and lawmakers’ preferences? It’s certainly not going to be easy, but this death by a million cuts is not either.
The Big Tech Report That’s Not About Big Tech
An interesting take on what happens to companies who act monopolistically for too long. Within democracies, eventually there come along publicly elected officials who make it their legacy to scale back such monopolies. At that point, there’s likely to be overreach that’s more painful to the monopolies, than would have been the case had they modified their behaviour in advance. The three main areas of the report’s focus are:
- Intentionally bad behaviour by tech companies
- Effects on consumers, with the traditional measure of price no longer an appropriate one
- Effects on business ecosystems and how longer term competition is impacted