When Chrisopther Marquis was a student at the University of Michigan, he attended a talk by legendary General Electric CEO Jack Welch soon after he retired.
Welch was lauded by many as the best CEO of the 20th century, and professors treated him like a visiting head of state.
The students were less deferential. One asked why GE refused to clean up the hundreds of tons of toxic PCBs it had dumped for decades into the Hudson River.
“Welch bristled, dismissed the scientific consensus of PCBs causing cancer, and scolded the audience to appreciate GE’s partial restoration of the damaged ecosystem,” Marquis says.
“What stood out to me wasn’t just Welch’s evasiveness or arrogance – it was that he presented this as common business sense – corporations are in business for their shareholders – responsibility to the communities they pollute is a secondary consideration, no matter how serious the offense.”
That episode stood by Marquis throughout his professional life. He is now a professor at the business school at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
His new book is titled – The Profiteers: How Business Privatizes Profits and Socializes Costs (PublicAffairs, 2024).
We asked Marquis to recount the Welch episode.
“I was a graduate student at Michigan,” Marquis told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview earlier this month. “And I attended the taping of a PBS program featuring an interview with Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric. Fortune magazine named him the CEO of the 20th century. We now know that the Welch model was very destructive.
The New York Times journalist David Gelles wrote a book recently titled – The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America-and How to Undo His Legacy (Simon & Schuster, 2022). Welch abided by a shareholder first model that did not respect the communities, the employees or the environment.”
“But when I was at the University of Michigan, he had just retired, he had written a book. Most of the interview was self-congratulatory. The PBS interview was conducted by Stuart Varney, who now does commentary on Fox News.”
“There were a bunch of softball questions from people like Jack Nasser, the CEO of Ford at the time and Michael Eisner from Disney. But then they had student questions. And one of the student questions was about GE’s PCB toxic chemical pollution in the Hudson River. And he responded – this is how business is done, you students are basically tree huggers who have some fringe belief system. When you look at the YouTube video of the event, you don’t see the students asking these questions. But the student newspaper, the Michigan Daily, reported on these student questions.”
“Those interactions sat with me for a long time. The students were asking Jack Welch, who ran the company for twenty years, these questions. You have acted in ways that are irresponsible to workers, the environment, and the communities where they operated. And Jack Welch’s response was – that’s the way business is done, get over it.”
Marquis’ book is an expose of how society pays for corporations’ free lunch and the cost of environmental damage, low wages, systemic discrimination, and cheap goods.
Let’s address the question raised in your book’s title – how does business privatize profits and socialize cost?
“That relates to an economic concept of externalities,” Marquis said. “Carbon emissions are a simple example. A company is polluting and there are costs to the general public and society from those carbon emissions – health effects or climate change. This is thought of as an economics problem or an accounting issue.”
“There are ways that companies, through their PR, through their lobbying, shape how society handles those externalities. The plastic industry knows that much of the plastics they are producing are not recyclable or very expensive to recycle. But still they want to have the chasing arrows symbol with the number in the middle on the bottom of all plastics because then the public thinks it is recyclable. And people take the plastics to the recycling center thinking that it is. And that’s instead of the company being held responsible for their own waste.”
“Most of the externalities in the United States are borne by people very far away from us – people in the Global South. That’s part of the book.”
“But the other half of the book is looking at companies that are trying to be much more thoughtful about their externalities. And it becomes like a proof of concept, where more and more companies could and should be doing this.”
You give examples in your book of what you call corporate gaslighting and greenwashing. You give one example of the litterbug public relations campaign.
“It’s similar to the chasing arrows on plastic bottles. There was a famous ad from the 1970s. It’s called the crying Indian ad. It featured someone in Native American dress. He’s looking over a polluted creek. And a tear rolls down his cheek and it says – people pollute, people can stop polluting.”
“Same for the term litterbug. It was part of a campaign to put the responsibility of waste onto individuals and not on the companies and industries that should be addressing this.”
“Another example is British Petroleum promoting personal carbon footprints. About 70 percent of carbon emissions are from the actions of about 100 companies. So yes, it’s important for individuals to care about how much we fly, being vegan, or eating less meat. But actually, we should realize that we should be putting a lot more attention on the companies and try to hold them to account and not just worry about our own individual behavior – like flight shaming Taylor Swift for having two planes or whatever. She probably shouldn’t be having two planes to fly to eleven places a month.”
“So much attention is put on the individual, when we really should be looking at the companies that create the problems.”
You have written another book titled – Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2020). There are some large famous public benefit corporations. But there are only a handful of them. Outline the movement toward public benefit corporations.
“It’s important for us to move beyond the neoliberal shareholder first model to something more sustainable for the planet and the people on it. Private, voluntary action is only going to get us so far. We can’t rely on that to make these fundamental changes.”
“Public benefit corporations are creating a variety of processes, standards and practices that demonstrate that business can be very effective in being responsible actors as well as being thriving businesses. This makes it easier for policymakers to see that there are models that work. We need more stringent policy action around corporate behavior than we have now.”
“In the EU, there have been a variety of measures around corporate accountability and corporate governance that very much build on this public benefit corporation movement.”
The title of our publication is Corporate Crime Reporter. Your book uses terms like accountability. But you don’t focus as much on law and order, crime and punishment.
Congress could change the ideological landscape with lawmaking that institutes a governance structure of law and order for corporations. It would be unlawful to act the way they are acting.
“I would be very supportive of that,” Marquis says. “The fossil fuel industry has been aware of the effects of carbon emissions since the 1970s or 1980s. The industry has consistently misrepresented that. They are making record profits. Putting the oil companies under very stringent regulatory oversight? If that were possible, I would be supportive of it.”
“The model that I have focused on is not as drastic. The neoliberal ideology came about with corporations pushing it through these various organizations like the Heritage Foundation. The neoliberal revolution came through thousands of public policy actions, not through one fell swoop. It wasn’t a magic wand. There is no magic wand. We need to be pushing on as many fronts as possible.”
But it seems like you are leaning more toward corporations taking the initiative. Your ideal seems to be that we become a nation of benefit corporations like Ben & Jerry’s, Patagonia and Danone.
“In a public benefit corporation, the charter changes so that the company is not beholden exclusively to its shareholders, but can actually insert language for a public benefit mission. The Delaware law refers to public benefit corporations. Other states refer to it as only benefit corporations. This movement has also spread overseas. After Delaware passed its law. Italy then passed a law. France now has a version of it. There are some in Latin America.”
“Under these laws, companies have a broader mandate around being a benefit to society. There might be 20,000 or so such corporations now around the world.”
“When Elizabeth Warren was running for President, she suggested a policy where the top 1,000 corporations would be required to convert to public benefit corporations. In the UK and Canada now there are efforts now ongoing to make the mandatory type of corporation be a benefit corporation. The voluntary action provides innovation and proof of concept. And the idea then can be picked up by policy makers like Elizabeth Warren and translate that into public policy.”
“In the United States, it doesn’t seem like this will happen in the near future. But that is how change can happen if we want to make business more responsible.”
Let’s play that out and let’s say the top 1,000 companies will be required to become public benefit corporations. Does that mean that fossil fuel companies – inherently dangerous companies that externalize their costs on us – will be put out of business?
“These companies’ legal mandate would be to provide public benefit. And they could then be sued by the communities they are harming with their pollution. It sounds extreme. But if companies were held accountable for their societal impact, and if people can challenge the companies in the courts, things like putting the oil companies out of business would be one implication.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Christopher Marquis, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 30(12), July 28, 2025, print edition only].