alt Hacker NewsYeah. There is no such thing, especially and in particular with publicly traded companies. The only meaningful way to change behavior is regulation.
Beyond that, "social contracts" benefit the powerful and have a tendency to turn a blind eye to the worst off. Does the "social contract" require me to be a white, college educated male to secure worker protections? If you need a clear example of this, consider the relationship between citizens and police in the United States, and how blind the majority has been to how fundamentally broken the "social contract" around policing has been for minorities. That's what a handshake-society looks like.
Granted having both might be nice, but relying on a social contract is like relying on a benevolent dictator. It's great until it's not.
Social contracts only work in high trust societies that are also ethnically and culturally homogenous so the only grumble citizens have is fighting over class and not race.
But if you have a very diverse society that operates on tribalism, then you need a strong rule of law with strong checks and bounds to weed out tribalism, but this doesn't come for free as policing and lawyering the behavior of all members of society to check if they aren't discriminating each other over immutable characteristics, is gonna costs the government and companies operating in this environment a lot of money, so you're gonna have higher operating costs. Which is why it's so much cheaper for US companies to hire in places like central europe where your payroll expense are mostly ICs and you don't need auxiliary armies of diversity consultants like in the US.