Category: Capitalism

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When describing a good salesman people often refer to the adage that this guy is so good that he could sell refrigerators/air conditioning to the Eskimos. Which is generally considered a complement to the salesman’s ability. But why? Is it really a talent to brag about — convincing people to buy something that they didn’t want, don’t need and can’t use. Why would you brag about being a conman? But people do. They in fact admire it.

What is forgotten is that there is another person involved in this story — the Eskimo. He, however, is a chump. The mark, the person who it is all right to take advantage of because they should be smarter and more careful when talking to a fast talking salesman. Someone who deserves to get taken. The salesman, on the other hand, is the hero of the story. He is clever, a smooth talker, someone who gets what he wants, someone who doesn’t let a little thing as selling something unnecessary to a gullible customer get in his way. The salesman has the abilities people want. Who wants to be the chump.

It is sad that the whole salesman relationship is based on the notion that all he wants from you is your money and doesn’t care about whether you need or want what he is selling. The salesman is perfectly within his rights to sell whatever useless item he has to any gullible buyer willing to buy. It’s not the con man’s fault if the Eskimo is so gullible and bought the refrigerator. Buyer beware and all that crap but it isn’t an honest transaction.

Aren’t we suppose to value honesty above good salesman ship. Would it be so wrong for the salesman to tell the Eskimo that he doesn’t really need refrigeration? I am afraid there are an awful lot of people who would say yes. Why pass up an opportunity to separate a fool from his money. Someone is going to do it, right. And it is all perfectly legal which this tells you everything you need to know — we prefer the conman to the chump.

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Three 16 year old boys died in the past 5 weeks while working with big machinery.

One company explained that “the child ‘should not have been hired’ and that his age and identity were misrepresented on his hiring paperwork with an outside staffing company.” You don’t say. How innocent the company is acting? We were lied to and this poor unfortunate 16 year shouldn’t have been hired, we wouldn’t have hired him if only we had known his correct age.

For some reason I don’t believe it. Every employee has to provide proper documentation in order to work. The company has a responsibility to examine this documentation for validity. This is standard practice in place for some years. I used to do it in the 1980’s. HR departments should have this down. But OK, mistakes happen, perhaps a 16 year old was able to get a hold of a convincing fake document but a quick glance at the prospective employee might have set off some alarms. Somehow these boys with peach fuzz as beards were able to pass themselves off as older. Even if you accept that they are telling the truth, there is a frightening level of incompetence within the management of the company.

But I think this more than just an accident. One of the more illuminating giveaways that this is something more nefarious, is that it happened 3 teenagers at different companies and in different parts of the company met the same fate. This also might explain why Republican governors and legislatures, those champions of the working class, are loosening child labor laws. Companies are complaining that they are having trouble filling their open positions. Something must be done, so teenage labor is the solution to their problem.

Unfortunately, teenagers are banned from hazardous labor. No problem. These companies did a risk assessment about hiring underage employees. They figured out how much potential fines would be and then compared this to the price of raising wages and decided that paying the fines was the better deal. Higher wages are a sure thing while fines need only be paid if they get caught. Now that is a risk worth taking. They would probably have gotten away with it if nothing had gone wrong. This suggests that fines are too low. Fines should discourage companies from breaking the law, not be a factor in whether they are going to break the law or not.

But, saying that they can’t attract workers is misleading. These companies are having problems filling positions at the wage they want to pay. The wage isn’t enough to attract adults to perform an obviously hazardous job. When labor is scarce and the job is hazardous, the company needs to pay wages that attract the best workers. It is basic capitalism. They can’t just expect workers to risk life and limb for nothing. But, of course, these companies do.

What I find particularly irksome here is that these so called Capitalists only like Capitalism when it is to their advantage. When it isn’t, they moan to government for help — make the laws easier so we can hire people who will take the jobs at the rate we want to pay. Let in qualified immigrants who will take the lower wage. Hire teenagers who will take the lower wage. Boo hoo. Whatever they are, they aren’t good Capitalists.

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Our refrigerator, after 23 years of faithful service, died the other day.

Needing a replacement, Bob immediately found a new one. It’s a complicated and boring story but the crux of the matter is we can’t install the new one until we can detach our old one from the water system. A plumber has to do this and he needs a part. The installer said he can return when we know a date when this is completed. Bob has confirmed a date for the plumber.

All we need now is for the delivery people to come hook up the water for the new refrigerator and take the old one. The delivery man gave us a phone number and email address where we could contact them. Bob tried via email. No response. Bob then tried to call customer service. The recorded message informed him that he would wait an hour a customer service agent would answer. Thinking it had something to do with customer service being short staffed due to the 4th of July Holiday, he decided to wait until after the holiday. He called today very early in the day, and, received the same hour wait for an agent message. Customer Service doesn’t have enough agents when you start the day an hour behind. Given that we have heard nothing via email, I am willing to bet that no one is responding to emails and that our best bet is to wait an hour to speak with someone.

I recently had a similar experience while renting a car. We had to wait an hour and half in a line of more than 30 people to see a rental agent. There were two at the desk. Once we got our contract we went into another line to get our car. This desk had one person. We waited for 30 minutes in that line. At first, I thought a bunch of planes must have landed thus causing the long lines, but the line never got smaller, it had, in fact, got larger.

Of course, it isn’t the company’s fault. There aren’t enough good employees to do the job. They claim to be trying, but really are they? Management is always blaming labor for the lack of good employees. I invite you to look at this in a different way. Companies’ can’t find workers who are will do the job at the wage you are offering. They might have better luck if they paid more money.

Indeed, this is the way the market is supposed to operate. If something becomes more expansive to deliver, say oil for the sake of argument, then the market price goes up. So, when there is war in the Middle East or hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico preventing the refining of oil, everyone accepts that prices of oil will go up. This is what we are told anyway.

Then doesn’t the same theory applies to wages. If it is difficult to find employees at a certain wage, then you need to raise the wage until you can acquire the number and quality of employees where you can deliver the product or service you are selling. American business is, for some reason, resistant to learning this simple straightforward lesson of Capitalism. If forced to choose between higher wages or delivering bad service, they will choose bad service every time in hopes that if they hold out long enough, the labor market will change in their favor.

In the mind of Business Managers, Labor is the whipping boy for all the failures of American Capitalism. If there are problems, it was bad employees. If budget cuts are necessary, where do you think they cut first. Cut the number of staff while trying to maintain the same workload. Cut benefits, raise deductibles on health insurance, do away with sick days. They brag about profits, they brag about price shares but rarely, if ever, do you hear them brag about paying the best wages in the industry. Which is odd because a customer might infer that by paying the best wages, your company also has the best people.

I can’t tell you how many Rah Rah end of the year speeches I’ve listened to where the corporate heads are blathering on about all the successes the company experienced — profits are up, share prices are up, efficiency is up, automation is up. They claim how they are the best in the industry for this and that. Then some brave employee broaches the subject of wages. The talking head has a ready answer. The company pays wages that are in line with the labor market. This sounds like collaboration to me. If they all know the standard wage, they can gauge their salaries appropriately. I thought this was illegal but never mind. For some reason this stops all conversation about wages.

Employees buy it. Until recently, I always did. I thought well what can I say to that — the company pays what is in line with every other company in the industry. But, wait, doesn’t the company want to be best at everything? Why wouldn’t the company want to have the best wages as well? In almost 40 years of working, I have never heard a company head brag that they offer the best wages in their industry. They may say a lot of wonderful things about their employees, they may even believe what they say but they rarely brag about the wages. they are paying. Curious that, don’t you think?

Which brings me back to the extra refrigerator clogging up our kitchen. This effects customer service. Because lower paid employees are the most likely staff to work with actual customers, this lack of good employees has a detrimental effect on a customer’s experience. If you can’t afford to pay good employees you are also ensuring that, at least some of your customers, will have a bad experience. Companies are hoping that most of this will be handled through better automation, the problem is that if any hiccups occur and a human needs to get involved, the company almost guaranteeing a bad experience. Let me tell you if I have to wait an hour when I call a customer service department, I have already had a bad experience. I have had to wait an unreasonable amount of time. By the time the poor customer service agent answers, I am fuming and ready to quarrel. So, the underpaid sap might begin to think — I don’t get paid enough to this crap.

And around and around she goes.

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When hearing stories about swindlers and marks, Americans have a peculiar tendency to be angry at the mark instead of the swindler. The mark is almost as guilty as the swindler for being so gullible. If there weren’t so many dumb marks, swindlers would all be out of business.

This odd belief has created a rather interesting way of looking at business transactions. The basic assumption in business is that the other guy is somehow trying to screw you and you need to be extremely vigilant in order to avoid being taken. People expect salesman to overpromise, overcharge, and avoid talking about problems with the product. Since swindling is a part of the salesperson job description, people aren’t much bothered when they learn that the salesperson they are dealing with is a swindler.

Swindling is part of the American DNA. Swindlers began arriving on these shores pretty much the start. I remember Sister Mira telling the story of the Dutch buying Manhattan from the Indians. It amused her to no end how stupid the Indians were when they sold the island for $24. How could they sell such prime real estate for such a low price? Couldn’t they see that New York would soon become one of the most important cities in the world? The Dutch, on the other hand, were smart businesspeople. Doing what businesspeople do screwing over people to get a better price. The Dutch were smart, the Indians weren’t. There was no shame in underpaying the Indians.

Of course, Manhattan was not the great city it became when the Dutch settled, so the $24 might have been a fair price at the time. That, however, isn’t the story the Sister Mira was telling. She was telling a story about how the Dutch outsmarted the Indians and it was perfectly acceptable business practices to do so. Yes, children, at a Catholic school no less, learning that it is perfectly all right to screw people over in a business transaction. Being fair is not a part of capitalism. If the Indians wanted a fair price it was their responsibility to bone up on Manhattan land values and not for the Dutch to offer a fair price. Deception is just a part of business.

When I moved to California, I learned that my car would not meet California pollution standards. It was an older car. I decided it would be easier to buy a new one in California and sell my old car in Kansas rather than driving an old car half way across the country and upgrading. Since I never sold a car before, I asked for advice from a guy who I knew had experience in buying and selling car. He immediately offered to buy my car, giving me the impression, that, oh shucks, I know you are in hurry to leave, I don’t need the damn thing but let me just take this off your hands so you can leave without worrying about selling your car. I took him up on the deal. Once the title and the check changed hands, he couldn’t wait to tell me how he just screwed me over. The car was worth at least a thousand dollars more than he paid.

I should have known, right? Absolutely I should have known that was why I asked him in the first place. I wasn’t trying to sell him the car, I was trying to learn how. Instead of telling me how, he, knowing I didn’t know what I was doing, offered to buy the car. Then, after the sale, he gives me the lesson that I wanted in the first place. He took advantage of me and felt absolutely no guilt about it. To add salt to the wound, nobody felt the least bit sorry for me. I should have known better.

These stories litter the American Business history. Antique dealers going to garage sales and finding a treasure. They buy the treasure for a song and then earn a fortune on the resell. The antique dealer is admired for his business savvy while the seller is a chump. If the seller doesn’t know what he has that is his own damn fault. The seller got the price he was asking for. There are no moral qualms about it that is just the way Capitalism operates.

Getting a fair price is different from getting a good price. One is laying all your cards on the table and the other is just deceiving someone. Shamelessly deceiving at that. This is particularly annoying when many pro-Capitalist apologists try to argue that Capitalism is the only moral system. I am uncertain what lesson Sister Mira was trying to impart to her class. What I learned, though, was that you don’t have to be fair when working in business. Do whatever you need to do to get the deal done. Be the swindler and not the mark. How this jibes with making me a good Catholic, which I mistakenly believed was Sister Mira’s primary responsibility, is beyond me.

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During the 2009 banking crisis, I had a conversation with a prosperous real estate man. He wasn’t the least bit fazed by all the individuals losing their homes because they could no longer afford the monthly mortgage payments. He said it was a good lesson for these people who will now make better decisions regarding their future home purchases. When I pointed out that banks should learn this same difficult lesson so they too will learn their lesson about risky behavior. He was quiet for a moment as he absorbed my point.

Once he got his footing, he argued that this was different. The collapse of banks could lead to a much bigger collapse of the whole economic system, devastating everyone. The country can’t takes such a terrible risk because we don’t know where an economic collapse would take us. Of course, he is right. However, he also adamant that the ordinary person still needed to learn the lessons of the free market even if the too big to fail companies are spared this lesson. He understood the unfairness of it all, understood that it wasn’t quite the perfect capitalist system he talked about. But we, and I include myself in this, choose to live with this imperfect version of Capitalism because nobody wants an economic catastrophe that might occur if we let the rich go under.

This disconnect from theory and practice for the rich while maintaining the importance of market principles for the poor is a distinctly American position. Almost every other Western Economy offers a greater social safety net for its ordinary citizens while regulating companies too big to fail and taxing the rich who benefit from this protection of their businesses. Americans, on the other hand, protect the rich while letting the poor fall prey to the mercies of the market. So the game is rigged and everybody knows it but can’t admit it because socialism is bad. This misunderstanding of the government safety net is so out of whack with actual reality that I have met people who believe Medicare isn’t socialized medicine when it actually epitomizes how socialized medicine should work. But I can choose my own doctors with Medicare, it isn’t socialized medicine if I can choose my own doctors. I beat my head against the wall.

Instead we continue to push the facade that the market rules, the market decides and nothing is personal. If a person makes good decisions, they prosper. If a person make bad decisions, the person grows poor. Except this isn’t exactly how the system works. The people with a lot of money can make bad decisions and absolutely nothing happens to them because if they do go down the drain they can take the rest of us with them. Too big to fail is not market capitalism. Yet, we cling to this schizophrenic version of a market economy.

Once we see things differently, maybe, we could get the rich to take more responsibility for their protected enterprises. Greater regulation of business and higher taxes seems like a fair trade for this protection and, if you are thinking soberly about the continuation of capitalism, it is the only way to bring an element of fairness back into our version of a market system. It might even save capitalism from its very worst instincts.

Yet, as Robert Reich pointed out, these paragons of pure capitalism, are complaining about any effort to rein them in. They helpfully remind us that regulation and higher taxes are not how a free market works best. Right. Thanks. But if you are talking about how capitalism is supposed to work then, in a free market failing businesses are allowed to fail, aren’t they? Failing businesses would stop handing out bonus checks to their upper management if they knew the government wasn’t going to bail them out because they would need the money to save the business. So when this begins to happen, I will happy to listen to talk about how free markets are supposed to work. Until then you need to explain what concessions you are willing to make for the too big to fail guarantee that the taxpayers are giving your companies and it better be good too.

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Wall Street Journal believes that trying to attain diversity sidetracked the management of the Silicon Valley Bank to focus on diversity as opposed to managing the assets of the bank. What really happened is that WSJ didn’t want to place the blame on bad management working in a banking system that is lightly regulated. And what better villain in this little disaster drama than diversity. Not bad investments. Not bad management decisions. Not that nobody is really looking at them despite the fact that they will be backed up by the Federal Government. No bad business practices couldn’t possibly be the problem here. It makes much more sense to say that management was too focused on diversity goals to do their real jobs.

It also gives them a chance to take a dig at one of their favorite bugaboo — diversity. If only the company wasn’t so woke, this would have never happened. Being woke caused the management to worry more about diversity than making money. It is also a subtle dig at minorities and women who, of course, make up a portion of the management team. Women and minorities are, as you all know, more concerned about diversity than making money. If only the bank had been run by old white men, who only care about making money, this wouldn’t be a problem.

There is no way to prove them wrong. It is impossible to measure. And nobody would ever admit to it, at least, no one who wants to continue in banking. And, don’t cry for these managers because I bet these managers will find future employment in banking. Which is a shame. Nobody with real power will get punished because banks will always be rescued. The people who run banks know that. So taking risks won’t be punished because the government will bail out the banks because, well, if they didn’t, the whole economy would go down the tubes. So why not bet the house on number 7? What’s there to lose?

The irony is that WSJ reported the real reasons the bank collapsed in their article which is actually quite easy to understand. The bank invested too much money in Federal Bonds. This means they could be affected badly if interest rates rose. The Fed has been signaling for months that they were going to raise interest rates. The bank management didn’t make any changes in their investments that might have protected their assets. The Fed raised the rates. Somebody publicly pointed out their weak position and a bank run ensued.

But, no, upon reflection, diversity goals are so distracting to management teams. How could they focus on their investments when they needed to hire a diverse work force? That is far better explanation. It’s in the Wall Street Journal after all.

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The New York Post is complaining that people get too much money in unemployment benefits so they opt for these benefits over working an actual job. Boo Hoo. Let me try to shed a tear.

First, and most importantly, I don’t know where the Post is getting its statistics but they are both wrong and misleading. As a recent recipient of unemployment insurance, I can assure you that it is nowhere as large as the Post is stating. I received the maximum benefit for unemployment which was all of $450.00 a week which is $11,700 in a six month period. When I reached the six month limit, I was immediately cut off.

How the Post got $71,063 as the maximum benefit for the state of California is wrong. The statistics that the Post provided base there numbers on both adults in a family of four (2 adults and 2 dependent children) being unemployed. Highly unlikely but OK for the sake of argument lets go with it. Using California as a measurement this means $23,400 is the maximum benefit they would receive. The average cost of the Obamacare Health benefits for a family of 4 without subsidy is $1,403. I doubt that the government subsidized $38,000 for a benefit that only costs $1,403. The Post’s numbers just don’t add it.

Then, there is that the Obamacare subsidy is based on a person’s last year of income tax statement. When I was investigating whether to take Obamacare when I became unemployed I learned that I was ineligible for the subsidy because I worked a complete year and thus made too much money. I would become eligible for the subsidy only after I filed for income tax in the next year. By this time, I lost my unemployment benefits so coupling Unemployment and Obamacare benefits is misleading. The unemployed rarely, if ever, receive both benefits at the same time.

The Post also uses the maximum benefit as its benchmark. What the Post failed to advise its readers is that only the highest paid earners received the maximum. People who made lower salaries, received a lower level of unemployment insurance benefits. Yet, the way the Post frames their case, every unemployed person is making $71,063 (at least in California) on Unemployment Benefits and Obamacare. This sum isn’t even close to the truth. Most people aren’t receiving the maximum benefit and are not receiving it in conjunction with Obamacare subsidies.

Finally, and most damning of all, the present unemployment rate for nation is 3.7%. There isn’t a lot of unemployed people to get back into the workforce. Cutting Unemployment Benefits isn’t going to change this.

So what is a poor businessman to do? The answer, rooted in Capitalism, is he should raise wages so he can attract workers. Perhaps stay at home mothers, retirees and students might be enticed into the workforce with higher wages. Why not give it a try and see what happens? But, no, the Post would rather complain about the lazy nature of the American Worker instead of recommending that businesses adapt to the present economic situation and pay higher salaries.

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I was surprised to see this article about teens illegally working for PSSI, a company that cleans up for meat plants. So here we are in 21st Century USA where companies hire underage labor to do their work. In this case, the work also is dangerous because it requires the use of toxic chemicals and machines capable of killing a person.

PSSI claims that it did a thorough check. It is not their fault if these precocious teens used false documents to get their jobs. This argument will probably get them off the hook. The company may have to pay a fine, an upper management person might have to fall on his sword but when all is said and done the country needs people willing to clean the dirty floors of meat plants.

The teens in question were immigrants which makes me curious about this company’s HR practices. Being immigrants, I would think the company would be particularly careful when a prospective employee provides this information. The Federal Government requires every employee to prove that they can work legally in the USA. This is the whole reason for law. But 31 underage teens got employed. I mean I can give PSSI one or two teens getting through a rigorous vetting of the documentation but 31 suggests something altogether different. HR was either not checking them at all or not caring that they were fake. Also forget the documents, I suspect that some of these teens actually looked like teenagers. There were 13 year olds working at the meat plants. That someone in charge wasn’t a bit startled to see all these fresh face youths working in the plant and not question their age is alarming.

This raises another question for me. If PSSI wasn’t checking documentation to ensure the age of their employees, how well were they checking the adults they hired for their immigration status. I suspect not very well at all. Which gets us closer to the real problem — PSSI can’t get many American citizens to do this dangerous job for the wage they are paying. I mean why else would they overlook the law regarding underage employees. The company was taking a risk. The fines are probably minimal and, mark my words, there is probably a tidy sum set aside for just such an exigency. So if a company needs to pay low wages with little risk of getting caught and minimal financial hardship or legal punishment if they get caught, what is a company to do? Hire the most vulnerable and desperate people and hope they don’t get caught.

Capitalists are pretty adamant that prices must follow the market. If there is less of a product and high demand, the prices go up. If there is a surplus of a product and low demand, the prices go down. The same, at least in theory, applies to wages. Except it doesn’t. Companies set the wages they want to pay and then find the people who will work at those wages — even if they have to act illegally to get those employees. They would rather illegally employ children in dangerous jobs at low wages than up their wages in order to attract a legal adults. This is not how market capitalism is supposed to operate.

It makes me curious as to why the Republican Party has not latched on this particular problem. They oppose immigration. They say they want Americans in good private industry jobs. Enforcing child labor laws and immigration laws would seem like a no brainer. Make it difficult for companies to employ illegal immigrants and children. Hurt companies with hefty fines and imprisonment of executives who break these laws. If there are no jobs for immigrants, a large wall on the border would be unnecessary. They wouldn’t come.

Of course a large wall on the border would involve all kinds of construction and money, money, money for everyone and the immigrants would keep coming. Business secretly wants these low wage immigrants because they can control them better than American citizens. If the Department of Labor started enforcing labor laws, it would get messy fast. The Federal Government might see how business actually operate, the government might even try strictly enforcing these laws which might force companies to pay higher wages.

This is why we have children in 21st Century America working with toxic chemicals at dangerous jobs.

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One of the more pernicious bromides that infects American life is the idea that you can do anything you want, be anything you want. You just have to be willing to put the time and effort into it. Of course, there is some truth to it. Yes, some people are lucky enough to achieve their dream but not terribly many and some start with hidden advantages that makes their journey to success a bit less bumpy.

The American ethos is built around the stories of the very few winners in the race and not the millions who struggle on the less glamorous sidelines. But we know it in our hearts. Millions of people will not be Super Bowl Quarterbacks. Millions of people will not be Rock Stars. Millions of people will not be President. Millions of people will not become billionaires. An overwhelming number of Americans will lead regular lives with regular incomes no matter how hard they try to be something else.

Yet, we still hold to this idea that you can do and be anything you want. It’s unhealthy and it is cleverly couched in language that conveniently blames the individual for not fulfilling his dream. There is always that if you willing to put the time and effort into it part of the equation that makes this idea impossible to refute. Obviously, it’s not the system that failed, it’s you. You just didn’t put enough effort into it, did you?

Yes there are people who beat the odds. We love to hear their inspirational stories hence the mind numbing blather about Olympic athletes overcoming impossible odds to follow their dreams. On the other hand, you don’t hear the stories of all those athletes who fought impossible odds and didn’t make to the Olympics. Obviously, there are more of these stories than the success stories but these stories don’t get heard. We only want stories that reveal something great about America. The problem is that these failure stories are telling an important American story. Everybody doesn’t make it to the top. Most people don’t. It could be lack of money. It could be bad breaks. It could be the slightest lack of talent. She sings well but there are other singers just the slightest bit better. Or how does five foot tall basketball player get into NBA?

People have to be realistic. That doesn’t somehow fit into the idea as presented. You can be anything you want to be. How is this a good idea to pass onto children? Telling children to have big dreams, go for it and then when they fail, letting them think it’s their fault for failing. Because they will, because there is always that second part of the idea, if you try hard enough. Yes, let’s be realistic, but not too realistic because we wouldn’t want to discourage young people from beating their heads against the wall trying to be something they didn’t have a chance in Hell of becoming.

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Business managers are complaining about how people won’t work like they used to in the good old days. As the linked Los Angeles times article points out, this is a complaint as old as the Republic. The problem isn’t the workers, it is the wages.

I once worked at a call center. I supervised workers who made hotel reservations and they, on a busy day, may receive 20 or more calls in an hour. Having performed the job as an employee, I can assure you it was boring job full of mindless tasks. It did pay the bills. Barely. Call center operators are taking calls pretty much the whole time they are on the clock. This is the way companies want it. They want just enough operators to make sure that they only lose a small percentage of incoming calls. That’s right, they would rather their employees are always working than all of their customers get served.

The call center’s biggest problem was employee turnover. Because the pay was low and there was rarely any employee commitment to do anything other than an all right job, and, if they lost their jobs that could easily replace this job with one making the same wage, people quit or lost their job on a fairly regular basis. This meant that management generally was in a hiring and training mode most of the time.

Sometimes, the Uppity Ups would wonder why we couldn’t slow employee turnover. I’m sure my bosses, who were all a pretty smart lot and knew the answer to the problem, would suggests more money for labor. It was a dance that everyone knew had to be danced but that never really changed anything. Because more money for lower level employees is always off the table. The Uppity Ups received the truth and then acted as if it was never proposed. More money for lower level employees is a budget buster. Strangely, more money for higher level employees is not.

The Uppity Ups that counter the idea that more money will make lower level employees happier in their job. They have read some article in a business management magazine which site scientific studies that say people don’t just work for money. Money isn’t even one of the top reason that people work. Try to work on these other non-money reasons to bring down worker turnover because these studies prove that more money isn’t the answer. Employees want recognition, they want challenges, they want better jobs, and then they want money. So we would go off and see how we could improve those other areas.

We found that we were just as restricted in improving employees work life in those other areas as we were in more money. We needed employees on the phones not at the better jobs. This being the fact. We had significantly more entry level jobs than upper level jobs. Once anyone managed to get one of the upper level jobs, they stayed forever. So these better jobs rarely became available and just as a side note that me be obvious but I feel compelled to mention, a better job meant more money. The reason many people go for better jobs is they get more money. Regardless, this option was off the table as well.

Challenges. The job was answering the phone and booking hotel reservations. Almost every call was exactly the same. Different cities, different dates, maybe but there were no challenges except getting the customer off the line quickly and making no mistakes. The company already had a negative incentive on those two tasks — if you failed to meet standards after a three month period, you were fired. There was no challenge we could add to the job and there was no incentive in doing either task much better than you were. There, also, was an amazing disincentive to getting better at either task. If you worked faster, you made more mistakes. Which could put you on warning. If you made less mistakes, you talked too long. This too would put you on warning. Once you found the right balance, you maintained it. All management was left with was recognition and there are only so many pats on the backs a person can take before it looses its effectiveness.

In reality, all we could do was give them recognition. Everything else was off the table. Recognizing good work without spending a dime. More money isn’t the answer says the uppity ups. But it is and they know it is because this, of course, is their defense of the income imbalance between the top wage earners and the bottom. You have to pay top management top salaries in order to interest them and keep them in the job. Why doesn’t that same philosophy work for lower wage workers?

But I never stopped believing that if low level employees got more money for their jobs and, because they received more money, these jobs might be something they value and would want to keep, that there would be less employee turnover. The Uppity Ups refuse to believe this. They just can’t believe that people don’t value the crap wages they are paid. Herein lies the problem.