5. Improve the environment for
doing business.
For businesses to thrive in underserved markets, laws, regulations, and other support mechanisms must often be adapted so employees and consumers can overcome financial and physical barriers to gain jobs and make purchases.
Business can play a critical role in influencing policy, legislation, and regulation in ways that promote the social service supports—child care, health care, housing—that individuals from underserved communities require. Helping to shape policy so that it better meets the needs of underserved communities is both a matter of social justice and good business.
Corporate Voices for Working Families is a good example of how business coalitions can shape policy, legislation, and regulation. Corporate Voices for Working Families is a U.S.-based nonpartisan, nonprofit corporate membership organization that brings the private-sector voice into the public dialogue on issues affecting working families. Collectively, its 52 partner companies employ more than 4 million individuals throughout all 50 states, with annual net revenues of
$1 trillion. Corporate Voices and its partner companies work with Congress and the White House on issues related to working families that are not typically addressed through corporate government relations offices.
One example is Corporate Voices’ work on business and public policies that assist low-wage workers. In April 2004, Corporate Voices released “Increasing the Visibility of the Invisible Workforce: Model Programs and Policies for Hourly and Lower Wage Employees.” This report provided evidence showing how the provision of benefits to low-wage earners improves the corporate bottom line. The benefits studied included dependent care, employee development, financial assistance, and flexible scheduling. A study of 15 model programs reported positive impacts on employee attraction, retention, and increased worker productivity. These programs also help employees to better meet family needs, save for the future, and balance the demands of work and family.
Corporate Voices members also testified on similar issues affecting working families before a hearing of the Children and Family Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee. By bringing attention to the importance of these issues for low-wage workers, and to the business benefits that these supports can create, Corporate Voices helped to open up new and creative approaches in the development of business and public policy, including new ways of organizing, delivering, and funding programs that improve the environment for doing business.
[Sources: Center for Corporate Citizenship, 2004; Corporate Voices for Working Families, 2005.]
