Herrington: We Built It

Public and private matters are a big debate topic nowadays. What is to remain private and what is in the public venue or sector? Obviously, maybe, anything that affects us all, that seems to be public, right? And anything that has to do with only you and only yours, that most certainly has to be what they mean by private, I’m sure. But we do have a lot of stuff that seems to overlap those two areas, and this seems to be where the debate has been heading. There are many key discussions that are on the forefront of what is like a boil that is coming to a head by November, just a few short weeks from now. I do not support either candidate formally. I question all platforms. I am what you might call an independent, so here is my view from off Main Street.

Let’s handle the slogans of the conventions. The point that has raised the most eye brows is the “Yes, we did build it!” campaign. Yes, we built what? The business? The roads up to the business? The public transportation, education, and communications systems? The arguments went back and forth until your head was swimming, right? We might argue that without the seed ideas, the original capital, and the entrepreneurial drive of the business owner, there would be no business. True enough. I’m there. If we are asking if he needed worker bees, cleaning crews, buildings to manufacture his products, and transportation systems to make the operation possible, then no he did not do it all by himself. The question is one of defining who did what. The republicans did not really totally ferret out that problem. Obama, for all of his supposedly grand ability to communicate, literally got parsed right out of context. If Jon Stewart has anything to do with it, it would be worth taking the time to actually see the entire video of the incident instead of a snippet of the context which is out of context, but that is water under the bridge by now. All I know is that business owners, who are business builders, are the key ingredient. No, they did not make the chair they are sitting in. No, they did not personally carve the door to their office, most likely. But when a basketball player makes a winning shot in NBA finals, he does not make the ball that makes the shot, or the hoop or the court or the stadium. When someone builds a business from the ground up, they assemble the group of people who actually do the basic chores to make the business operate. They bear the load of risk. They are the ones who will fail miserably if the entire thing falls apart. Okay?

On the other hand, the question the general public is asking about this process is, is there any shared ownership in the process of building a business? Yes, people get paid as they go, but the question remains, if people make you millions or billions of dollars, weren’t they underpaid all along? This is of course a very slippery slope. If you and I go do a deal and we split the money, how much should my cut be? If the idea was to move a box and we were to get $10 for doing the job, if you had the contact? You make 6 and I get 4? 7 and 3? 8 and 2? Well, some CEO’s make 500 to 1. Some even more. The guy on the line wants to know, “If you can afford to pay him as much per hour as I make in a year, why can’t I have a raise?” A company that takes away a $50 monthly benefit from 15,000 employees saves $9,000,000 a year. But if the bonus for saving that $9,000,000 is the amount the CEO makes as a bonus, then couldn’t we say he took it from them and gave it to himself?

Now the argument always goes, “If you don’t like working here, go somewhere else.” But, is there an agreement, however unstated, that a business has some integrity and will act in good faith towards its employees? If the employees are building wealth in the company by working underpaid while creating it and then are seen as unnecessary after the automation kicks in, then those people are seen as expendable all along, not necessary, just cogs in a set of gears. If so, then what the “Yes, we did build it” slogan really means is, “We paid people sub-standard wages to do a job for us, gave them no ownership, saw them as expendable, and then wrote them off when productivity reached a level where they were no longer necessary to do the heavy lifting, and we objectified them all by ourselves.” By the time a large scale business comes in and destroys the local business infrastructure so all the mom and pop stores go out of business, the only recourse to working somewhere else is to move from your family home and relocate, selling off what may have been the home you had dreamed of living in all your life. But then, it is only business, and when you hired on you should have thought about that. It is called good planning and not putting all your eggs in one basket. Do not depend on a business taking you all the way, because you are only an employee as long as they need you. They will get your labor, your good ideas, and your health. But when they are done with you, they built this business all by themselves and they own it and if they can find a way to jettison you with no costs at all, the CEO will get a bigger bonus this year.

To tell you the truth, life is a buyer beware event. If you get screwed, it is your own fault. People do not act with integrity, and they owe you nothing. The product is only good until the warranty is out. They will take you to the cleaners on price. And if it is not illegal and there is a loop hole that allows it, then it is a good business practice as long as it makes you money. No one is going to look out for you and everything that is anything they will use against you at the last minute is all in the original paperwork or in an e-mail outlining their official standing, all written out in language so dense it takes a constitutional lawyer to negotiate what it says, while they tie you up in court for a generation. This is the American way, and we built it.

runningturtle87