Is not the business of business to maximize shareholder value?
The questioner makes interesting assumptions. First, that business can not be profitable with out child, forced, and cheap (non-living wage) labor. This is what the Robber Barons said during the onset of the industrial revolution; they managed to prosper anyway; what use is all our management knowledge if we must resort to sweatshop labor? Second the questioner assumes that shareholders only invest in corporations who are maximally exploitative of their workers (and ecology)? Yet there are many investors who put their money in socially and ecologically responsible corporations. Third, since the 1970s there is the “stakeholder” concept; there are more people who have a stake in the life of a corporation than just the investors. That would include the workforce, the communities and the ecology.
