Page 144 - COVID-19: The Great Reset

will forget, for example, that over the past 10 years, US airlines
spent 96% of their cash flow on share buy-backs and that, in

March 2020, EasyJet paid a £174 million dividend pay-out to its
shareholders (including £60 million to its founder). [136]

The activism to which companies may now be subjected is
going beyond the traditional confines of social activism (by
outsiders) and investor activism; with employee activism, it is

expanding internally. In May 2020, just as the epicentre of the
pandemic was moving from the US to Latin America, Google
employees, emboldened by a report published by Greenpeace,

succeeded in convincing the company to no longer build custom
AI and machine learning algorithms for upstream extraction in the
oil and gas industry. [137] . Several such examples in the recent past
illustrate rising employee activism, ranging from environmental

issues to social and inclusivity concerns. They provide a telling
example of how different types of activists are learning to work
together to further the goals to achieve a more sustainable future.

Concomitantly, a sharp increase has taken place in the oldest

form of activism: industrial action. In the US in particular, while
many white-collar workers were riding out the pandemic while
working from home, many low-wage essential workers “out in the
trenches” who had no choice but to go to work staged a wave of

walkouts, strikes and protests. [138] As issues of worker safety, pay
and benefits become more central, the agenda of stakeholder
capitalism will gain in relevance and strength.

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