BlackRock chief executive Laurence Fink has used his annual letter to CEOs to defend stakeholder capitalism against critics who say the strategy is a veiled attempt by left-leaning business executives to fulfill a progressive political agenda.

"Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not ‘woke’,” he wrote. Instead, stakeholder capitalism "is capitalism," and a reason why businesses prosper.

Stakeholder capitalism argues that the purpose of companies is to serve the interests of not just shareholders, but the broader community, including employees, suppliers and customers. It's a contrast to shareholder capitalism, or the idea that a company's main purpose is to maximize profits and returns to shareholders.

Fink's reference to "woke capitalism" is likely a nod to conservative politicians and commentators, who have attacked corporate America's recent attempts to grapple with climate change, racial inequality and voting rights. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio criticized "the woke elites running corporate America" on Fox Business in September, and some U.S. state lawmakers have proposed legislation that would bar state investments in companies that use sustainable investment strategies.

But for Fink, paying attention to all stakeholders—not just returns-obsessed shareholders—is key to how a business makes money. Keeping employees, customers and suppliers engaged and inspired, says Fink, is necessary to ensure those parities keep delivering profits to shareholders—and thus ensure long-term business profitability.

Coming from the world’s largest asset manager—which controls significant stakes many of the biggest companies—Fink's annual letter is an agenda-setting exercise that signals what's top-of-mind for corporate leaders. Fink’s 2020 letter highlighted climate change as an investment risk; in the months that followed, many U.S. firms announced plans to become carbon-neutral.

Fink's letter this year touched on climate change, too, and again, Fink played defense.

According to Fink, BlackRock cares about sustainability “not because we’re environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients.” The shift to a decarbonized economy is inevitable, Fink says, and businesses that don't change their operations will be left behind. In his letter, Fink shared that BlackRock would ask companies to share targets for emissions reductions, and disclose their efforts to mitigate risk from climate change.

But BlackRock won't go as far as to cut out fossil fuels from its portfolio entirely. Fink defended BlackRock’s ongoing investment in some oil and gas projects even as other companies and organizations end their exposure to fossil fuels. Activists have criticized BlackRock's continued investment in coal, oil, and gas in spite of its stated commitment to the net-zero transition.

“[D]ivesting from entire sectors—or simply passing carbon-intensive assets from public markets to private markets—will not get the world to net zero,” he wrote. The transition would require moving through "shades of brown"—interim steps that would still require traditional fossil fuels to produce electricity and heat around the world.

In December 2021, BlackRock led a group of investors that took a 49% stake in Saudi Aramco’s network of natural gas pipelines. At the time, Fink said that “responsibly managed natural gas infrastructure has a meaningful role to play” in the transition to a net-zero economy.

Rather than abandon such companies entirely, Fink sees them as "foresighted" partners in the fight against carbon emissions—and, perhaps more importantly, a "vital investment opportunity".

In addition to climate change, Fink devoted space in this year's letter to a relatively new phenomenon: the Great Resignation, or the record number of workers quitting their jobs.

In his letter, Fink writes that “no relationship has been changed more by the pandemic than the one between employers and employees.” Greater demands on employers are “an essential feature of effective capitalism,” says Fink, ultimately creating a more prosperous economy and greater shareholder profits. He continues that “companies not adjusting to this new reality and responding to their workers do so at their own peril.”

Fink’s view on returning to the office is more moderate than some of his peers on Wall Street. JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon said that remote work wasn’t good “for those who want to hustle” while Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon called working from home an “aberration” that he intended “to correct as quickly as possible.”

In contrast, Fink says the pandemic presents CEOs with a “profoundly different paradigm,” including the end of an expectation that workers would “come into the office five days a week.”

With the successive outbreaks of the Delta and Omicron COVID-19 variants, major firms on Wall Street—including BlackRock, which had a policy of expecting workers to come into the office three days a week—have delayed plans to bring their employees back to the office.