How business delivers the good

Policy Review, Jul/Aug 1996 by Hood, John

Also, firms can save money in severance payments by getting their former workers re-employed. One study by Washington State University professor Duane E. Leigh found that job-search assistance was an effective tool for reemploying people, because it "allows for quick intervention before workers disperse after layoffs and plant closings; and, given their modest cost per worker, the evidence suggests that [jobsearch] services are cost-effective" by reducing severance and unemployment insurance costs. Health One Corp. discovered this after deciding to close Metropolitan-Mount Sinai Medical Center, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Instead of just handing pink slips to 1,200 employees, the company found jobs for 90 percent of them. Health One actually saved more in unemployment and severance expenses than the $500,000 it spent on job training and placement.

The corporate social-responsibility movement harbors an unrealistic, ahistorical view of commercial activity. Critics of corporations zero in on the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the Bhopal chemical-plant disaster because they are well known. All too often, we take for granted what goes right and dwell on disasters and villains-which are notable precisely because they are exceptional. The revolutionary ways in which corporations have improved the everyday lives of Americans over the past half-century are rarely recognized.

In our search for heroes, we lionize political leaders or military commanders or make-believe TV characters. Yet the real heroes of our age are the innovators who raise our standard of living and overcome the fundamental problems of humanity. It's a pity that, with few exceptions, those who create the amenities we enjoy and the innovations that make our lives safer, healthier, and happier toil in relative obscurity.

John Hood, a 1994-95 Bradley Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is the president of the John Locke Foundation, in Raleigh, North Carolina. His book, The Heroic Enterprise: Business and the Common Good, was published in June by the Free Press.