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REAL MEDIA 2017 / ISSUE 99 9 DO WE TRUST CORPORATIONS TOO MUCH? David Whyte: We're in a period of unprecedented concentration of power in private corporations, private companies, and one of the features of private companies is that they have a collective identity, an identity as a company, which is separate from their owners or the directors, so when things do happen, when there is corruption or when there is crime or even when workers are killed in the workplace, very often, if it is prosecuted, it's the company that ends up being prosecuted or the company that ends up being fined. That's quite an easy way out for companies because the money comes from costs that are then redistributed. It's actually typical for workers to be killed and, if there's any payout, they suffer again because their wages are cut or prices to consumers go up. One of the things that we need to contemplate, in terms of the relationship between governments and corporations, is that we trust corporations too much. I don't say that as someone who is a naturally mistrusting person, but I just mean that we have a completely wrong idea of how we think about private companies, about corporations. We think of them as citizens in their own right, with responsibilities, and the whole corporate social responsibility debate is all about how potentially companies can make our lives better. We forget, actually, that the bottom line is always the bottom line. We forget that companies are there, primarily, and are under a legal obligation, to maximize returns, financial returns, for their shareholders. If we take that legal fact seriously, then we have to say, "Well, we can't trust them, necessarily, to control the things that affect our lives and our livelihoods the most." We can't trust them to supply energy. We can't trust them to run prisons or to ... the ATOS case, and Maximus, of course, are doing very similar things now ... to assess people as fit for work, because they get profits from doing that, and what we end up with is an economy in which we forget about the human impact of corporate activities because we trust companies. We have to stop trusting companies, and we have to stop seeing the interests of governments and the people and companies as being one and the same, because they're not. We have to sever that relationship. Catch the full interview at Realmedia. press In an interview with Real Media, corruption expert and leading UK academic David Whyte explains why corporations hold too much power in the UK.