Work Ethic

Occasionally, something happens in the periphery of my life that really makes me angry. Usually it has something to do with a personal acquaintance but it can be more random. I was raised in a manner that probably doesn't occur that much anymore in that my parents instilled in me a work ethic that is very prevalent in my world view. In other words, any task that is worth doing is worth doing to the ultimate of your ability. I seldom do anything at less than a full effort as I not only feel it is the right thing to do; I get a sense of satisfaction from the effort as well.

The other side of this ethic is the idea that life is often unfair. Reality teaches us that the concept of fair seldom is the overriding concern in nature so to expect that life will be fair is to put yourself in for a lot of disappointment. Better to understand that fair is a human concept and one that seldom actually applies across the wide spectrum of our lives except as a goal. Don't get me wrong, I have great respect for the concept of being fair and feel that it is a fundamental goal in our relationship with other people. However, to expect that everything in life will be fair is not very realistic.

I have always felt that employment is simply an extension of myself. In other words, I don't separate my working life from my personal aspirations of how to treat other people. If I work for someone, I do my level best to give them the best return on the investment they are making in me. Again, it is not simply an ethical concern, it is part of the self satisfaction I derive from my work and the catalyst for going to work in the first place. I have been lucky enough to have worked in industries where I enjoy my work. Either that or I have never stayed in a job that I didn't enjoy, but I honestly don't remember a job that I had where I hated going to work every day. I have had some rough jobs, working in sweat shop manufacturing, farm work, construction work on many different levels, and even worked for a while in retail sales when I was in high school. I always derived a sense of satisfaction from doing the job and doing it well. I can't say I would have done the jobs without getting pay, but I also would not say that I ever did a job that I didn't derive a sense of satisfaction from.

Recently, I have become aware of a shift in how jobs are perceived. The last few years have been very hard on those seeking employment as unemployment has hit and lingered at levels that were simply unheard of for much of my working life. I won't bother to go into the realities of how such numbers are computed but it seems rather obvious that jobs are much harder to come by today than at any point in memory. Beyond that, most jobs that are available are low paying jobs with little or no opportunity for real advancement. This has led to a situation where there is excess of labor and very little demand of anything but the barest minimum of skilled labor in most jobs that are available. It has also created an ideology amongst business owners that I find to be dangerous and destructive.

Many businesses now operate on a business model that considers the excess of labor as their own private disposable pool of labor. We are seeing that play out in ways that simply didn't exist for much of this half of the last century. Wal-Mart is just one example of an entity that subsists largely off of that pool of labor but there are many, many more very successful and wealth corporate entities that use this same model. The long and the short of this model is that most employees wind up working less than full time so that they get no benefits. This would not be possible if unemployment was not rampant and a lot of these corporations fully realize this and lobby accordingly.

Free market adherents point out that this is perfectly acceptable under our system without admitting that this is not a free market in reality. Many of these industries take full advantage of government subsidies and tax breaks to build their business and in effect utilize government assistance programs to subsidize the ability of their employees to subsist on the wages they pay them. In other words, the government subsidizes their profits by making up the slack in what their employees make while at the same time giving massive tax breaks to the corporation up front. This system actually has no resemblance at all to a free market but you won't hear that view espoused very often.

I see this scenario playing out over and over again with my daughter's friends. The same people that rail against the work ethic of our youth and insist on cutting government assistance programs make huge profits off of the system through tax breaks and stock investments. I see the same germination of a work ethic in my daughter's friends that I am so familiar with but it is being strangled by a system that treats them like so many cogs in a machine. They struggle to subsist on wages little above minimum wage while their hours are cut and they are increasingly treated with less respect and more disdain from the people who profit from their labor. Small business owners short their hours, demand faster and more efficient use of their time while at the same time complaining that their employees have no loyalty.

Ethics is a two way street. You cannot treat people with no respect and expect to get respect in return. That has nothing to do with fairness and everything to do with reality. There has been a lot of publicity lately about how skewed our economic distribution system has become. Corporate leaders now make 700 times what their employees make as a national average. Small business owners seem to have taken this ratio to heart as well. While I have not seen real numbers on this difference, I can see by direct observation that the ratio at this level is well out of balance. Employees who work 32 hours a week at less than $10 an hour support business owners who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and call themselves job creators in a self-congratulatory way.

These same business owners rail against paying taxes while at the same time offering jobs that make it impossible for their employees to make a wage high enough to support themselves. Most are presently realigning their work scheduling to make sure that they are not liable for providing health care coverage for their employees under the new law. While this saves them money on the front end, it inevitably costs them more money on the long end when these employees are later forced to seek the most expensive care in the free world at hospital emergency rooms. These costs are then passed on to everyone else in the form of higher insurance premiums to cover these exorbitant costs to the system. In other words, those who have insurance subsidize those who don't while business owners reap the difference in profit margins.

The point of my most recent anger came in a conversation with my daughter the other night. The small business owner she has worked for the last few years is expanding his business. He has a fairly loyal group of steady employees who have worked for him for the last few years; so much so that he rarely makes an appearance at his business except to pick up money and distribute paychecks. As a part of his expansion he is asking this core group of employees to help train new employees and establish his new business in another community. This means a further trip to work, more responsibility, and more headaches for everyone.

In order to deal with these problems he has established a new policy requiring all employees to come to a weekly organizational meeting at the new place of business. In fairness to him, all these employees have received a modest increase in pay for their new responsibilities. However, these new required meetings are to be attended on their own time. His employees are all hourly employees but are expected to increase their attendance of off work meetings for which they will not get paid.

This is a point of contention to the point of outright anger with me. Every employer can choose to employ their people as hourly wage earners or as salaried employees. As there are advantages and disadvantages to each system, it is a matter of choosing which is best for the employer as employees seldom get the chance to choose. Having chosen to pay people on an hourly basis because it is most beneficial to the owner, it is both ethically reprehensible and illegal to then demand these employees attend meetings for which they will not be paid. These meetings are not so that the employees can advance their prospects or increase their earning power they are called so that the owner can advance his personal prospects and increase his profits.

I would venture to say that most small businesses still realize that it is their employees who make or break their business. Somehow, many can't seem to make the connection between treating their employees with respect and having their employees' respect in return. After all, loyalty and respect are simply outgrowths of this basic concept of human ethics. Give and you shall receive is accepted as a concrete truth without understanding that it is impossible to continuously receive without giving. Unfortunately, many of these concepts of honesty, integrity, and basic human consideration have been replaced with simple greed and profit maximization at the expense of all else.

I have made every effort to teach my daughter the value of work and ethical honesty. If you work for someone you owe them your best effort and your absolute honesty. The current economic situation of disposable labor makes a mockery of all of these ideals. I am tired of seeing the same people who rail about work ethics utilize business practices devoid of ethics of any kind. People learn by example and we are teaching a whole generation of workers that ethics and work are mutually exclusive. I cannot say what the results of this type of business model will be with any certainty. Whatever the result will be, they are multiplied in effect by the duration that we allow this to continue and I see no end in sight.