Earlier this month, Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat asserted that most business schools aren’t teaching “the most important, underrated CEO skill of the future” — leading an organized workforce. Based on my personal experience and research I conducted this spring during my final quarter in business school, he’s absolutely right. This post summarizes the results of my research, a survey of what MBA students think about labor unions.
During my MBA, the only courses that tackled labor issues were two electives in Human Resources. When other classes discussed workers, they tended to focus on how to hire and retain so-called “A players.” All other workers, it seemed, were expendable inputs, cost items in a P&L statement.
This seems a major gap in our education, especially since our two-year program coincided with a pandemic that wreaked havoc on the world’s workforce, a “Great Resignation” that significantly altered the relationship between businesses and workers, and the greatest resurgence in labor organizing in decades, with workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and Apple unionizing for the first time.
Many MBA students believe that more unionization in the U.S. would be a good thing, just not at their company — a sort of NIMBY-ism for labor unions.
Working with labor is a key responsibility of business leaders. How they handle that responsibility affects business performance and has a tangible impact on workers’ lives, with recent research showing that workers, particularly low-skill workers, earn lower wages when their companies are run by MBA graduates. If my classmates and I weren’t being prepared to handle this responsibility, what could be the consequences for the workforces we lead?
Read the complete article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/do-mba-programs-care-workers-lucas-levine/
