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Chapter 25
Government, Business, and the Definition of Labor
The hectic state of work and life in America is not only a matter
of historical chance. Nor is the financial desperation of the economic lower
half of our society. While the advance of technology with its division of time
into nanoseconds and picoseconds and of our own sense of urgently chasing after
minutes and seconds has something to do with our great, modern rush, there is
another fundamental cause. And while the personal finances and successes of each
of us have much to do with our own talent, study, and hard work, none of us
lives in a vacuum and is the sole agent of the wealth that comes one’s way.
Within government and industry, the political and economic laws and rules which
have been created and exist in our society have a great deal to do with how long
and hard we must work and who receives what rewards for effort and success.
In our political-economic system, economic success is rewarded
by the accumulation of private property, of wealth. The notion of private
property is, indeed, a sound principle. But it exists within the context of
other ‘principles’ and practices which are unbalanced, corrupt, and unjust.
The materially successful person righteously exclaims, “This
is my property!” Perhaps words to this effect could be true in a just society.
But in an unjust society such as ours today some portion of one’s wealth is
not righteously earned. It is merely stolen property. That one does not go out
and directly steal some particular property from some particular other, that one
merely is born into and lives and conducts business within a system created by a
privileged few long ago that redistributes to the few (steals) wealth created by
the many, does not alter this fundamental truth.
To say that one merely is born into and lives and conducts
business within a system that one did not create suggests an innocence which, in
truth, does not exist. To continue to exist, the system that was created by the
privileged few long ago must be and is actively sustained by the few today. The innocent child
grows into an adult who learns how the system works and well knows its
injustice. When conducting business and hiring others, the adult elects or not
to take whatever unfair advantage over others that the system permits and
fosters. The adult not only engages in immoral actions in the business world but
votes for those in government who create and sustain the unjust laws, rules, and
conditions under which business and labor are conducted. One may defensively
exclaim, “I did not create the system! I am only trying to survive and prosper
within it!” This is not an adequate defense. We are all caught within and are
to some extent the victims of circumstance. But we are not helpless
victims. In the face of injustice clearly understood by all of us, one may
choose or not to take action to change the unjust system and one’s personal
unjust actions within it. There are no adult innocents here.
In addition to unjustly redistributing the power and wealth of
the populace to the few, our political-economic system creates or exacerbates
many social ills. Despite its draconian effect on people’s lives, government
uses unemployment as a tool to manage the economy and to mitigate such factors
as wage rates and inflation during the business cycle’s expansions and
contractions. Some people are made to work a great deal more than they would
like to work while others would like to work but are underemployed or
unemployed. All suffer various forms of illness and unhappy circumstances from
this imbalance: stress, lack of leisure, physical and mental illness, family
dysfunction, poverty, and hunger.
Within the current system, the personal costs of stepping off
or being kicked off the “fast track” or of working less than full time are
enormous. Most people cannot suffer the loss of the higher pay rates and
benefits, especially healthcare benefits. Save for the leisure class, the
system is geared to make most people slave in high gear until in old age they
drop or are discarded to the trash heap. Millions watch what they thought were
secure retirements evaporate as rules are rewritten and companies evade lifelong
commitments.
Since the system politically excludes the economic bottom half
of the populace and takes from it most of the fruit of its labor, a strong whip
is required to serve as motivation to work. Hunger works wonders for keeping the
populace in line and toting the load another day. Desperate, impoverished people
create a source of cheap, obedient labor and soldiers. The fact or threat of
unemployment, poverty, and even brute force strikes fear in the hearts of those
who might be inclined to rise up against the system or demand justice.
And a lifelong mountain of debt serves well to keep the
potentially unruly in line. Recall the lines from the song Sixteen Tons
sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford, “Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t
go. I owe my soul to the company store.” Our entire system of mortgages and
credit is now “the company store” which keeps the populace sufficiently
enslaved and obedient for easy management and exploitation.
Whether it is true or not, it was written somewhere that at birth a
Rockefeller receives five million dollars. This is not a bad start in life and
not a bad idea. A wealthy nation such as ours could easily provide each child at
birth with a modest sum of, say, $100,000 just for the sake of discussion. It could be conservatively
invested and protected, earning daily compounded interest. Such a fund, to which
employers and individuals could add money, would serve as a person’s initial
economic stake in life and as a nest egg in his or her old age. It could be used
for the full or at least partial financing of education, housing, healthcare,
and retirement. This would bring new freedom, opportunities, and possibilities
into the lives of everyone. Instead of our being a nation of debtors, we could
enjoy the economic and personal freedom found in being a nation of savers and
investors. But as a matter of deliberate policy and action, the blind who occupy
the seats of power choose to economically enslave the populace, the better to
control and exploit it.
The prime forces motivating corporations, businesses, and
bureaucracies are not the enrichment of human lives but profit, growth,
efficient production, and self-preservation. The enrichment of lives that occurs—and
there is much—is a spin-off lavished abundantly upon those whose lives are
already lavishly enriched while ignoring those whose lives are impoverished.
History has amply demonstrated that there is no shortage of people within
government and business who are quite willing to do anything to anyone to
increase business and personal profit no matter what are the social and
environmental consequences.
Business will find its profits and efficiencies and set its
relationship with labor, ever seeking the lowest possible cost, in any way that
government promotes or favors by direct action or allows by turning a blind eye. Business
has amply demonstrated through time and around the world just how low it is
willing to sink in search of maximum profit. Government by its laws and rules
pertaining to work has shown itself all too willing to be ever so helpful in
satisfying the desires of business. Government can and does help labor to some
extent. It is only good animal husbandry to keep one’s economic serfs in at
least minimal health and able to work and produce. But business and the personal
profits of the elite class come first. This is the natural result of an electoral process and government that is
essentially owned, populated, and run by the same elites that own and operate
corporate America.
In recent
decades we have seen business, with government’s blessing, slash its work
force, force its remaining employees to redouble their effort, define a small
core of employees to be full time and give them a dwindling amount of perks and
benefits and often longer work hours, and define most of its workers to be
part-time, temporary, or “consultants” to avoid paying them healthcare and
other perks and benefits. Or work is farmed out to other companies that pay
lower wages and benefits or to other countries that profoundly abuse workers and
do not protect the environment. Our government even rewards such practices by
its tax laws. The ruthless, myopic pursuit of such policies by hosts of
individual companies and by our government has impoverished the American middle
class, drastically reduced the market for their own products, and caused
national economic decay.
Always unfair and unjust right from its beginning, our
American plutocracy now runs completely amuck. The greed and avarice
of the elite both in and out of government run rampant. Money no longer simply “talks”;
it reigns as our supreme principle and god. Millions have lost their pensions to
corrupt business practices. Millions have lost their good-paying jobs, their
health insurance, and their hard-earned, secure retirements. Americans in
general and American workers in particular feel helpless and hopeless in the
face of the speed and immensity of their forced decline.
Reorganizing the powers of our government by the creation of a
new, fourth branch, the demos, would go a long way toward redressing these
injustices. The demos issues and other issues discussed in this work pertaining
to leisure, minimum wage, taxation, the election of officials, and our political
education would directly and indirectly affect work and reward in our society
and mitigate our many social ills. But the good effect of a demos and the other
changes discussed so far in this work would not be able to correct every
business and government malaise. A great deal of the injustice and unhappiness
in our society is the result of rules and laws created (or omitted) by the current bodies of government.
Many of America’s unfair and irrational business and labor
practices could be corrected simply by reorganizing the relationship among
government, business, and labor and changing some government rules and
regulations regarding the conduct of business and labor. The remainder of this
chapter contains some recommended changes. These proposals are separate from the
central proposal in this book for the creation of a new fourth branch of
government, a demos consisting of the entire electorate, which is set in balance
with the other branches of government. They should be taken as recommendations
given to future demos elected members of the representative bodies of the
government when those bodies’ memberships demographically resemble the entire
electorate in body, mind, interests, and pocketbook and honestly serve the
entire electorate.
My first recommendation is a more rational way to calculate
reward for work. The basic recommendation is contained in the following six
bulleted paragraphs, but there are further references to this recommendation in
later text. (Not everyone will be able to follow this written description. A
thirty-minute, animated, video demonstration would more effectively present the
ideas.)
-
Define the length of a Standard Workweek as a
certain number of work hours per calendar week. As described earlier in the
book, the demos would set
the number of hours in the Standard Workweek. Each
calendar week would begin with what would be called “the first work hour”
or more simply “the first hour.” A person could work as few or
many hours during each calendar week as was agreeable to him
or her and
the employer. At the completion of each calendar week the first hour of
the next Standard Workweek would begin.
-
Eliminate the concepts of part-time, full-time, overtime,
and salary work. Express all monetary reward for work as wages earned per
Standard Workweek.
Express all perks and benefits such as sick time, vacation time, pension,
etc. in terms of minutes, dollar values, or percentages earned per Standard Workweek.
-
Using the work hour, not the workweek, to calculate all
wages and benefits, pay both wages and benefits on a sliding scale, each
hour
earning more wages and benefits than the previous hour.
-
Using an hourly linear scale, increase the payment of wages and benefits in such a way that
the work hour that is equal
to the number of work hours in the Standard Workweek is paid 50% more wages
and benefits than the first hour
in the workweek. For example, in a 40-hour Standard Workweek, one would earn
50% more wages and benefits for the 40th hour than one earned for the first
hour. An hourly wage increase additive
value is used to achieve this result: For a 40-hour workweek and a wage of $10.00
paid for the first hour, one would use the additive value $0.13 to calculate further hourly wages.
One would be paid
a $10.13 ($10.00 + $0.13) wage for the second hour, a $10.26 ($10.13 + $0.13) wage for the third
hour, a $10.39
($10.26 + $0.13) wage for the fourth hour, etc. By making this
calculation repeatedly, one would end up being paid about a $15.00 wage for the 40th
hour of work,
about 50% more than for the first hour.
The linear scale would keep increasing in the same manner past the 40th hour until the
employee’s last
hour for the calendar week is reached. In a similar manner,
use the appropriate minute, dollar, and percentage additive values to calculate the
minutes, dollars,
or percentage amounts of each benefit earned for each hour that one has worked
during a calendar week.1
-
Completion of the work hour in a calendar week that
equals the number of work hours in the Standard Workweek would result in one’s receiving
what by custom and practice would be considered to be full pay and benefits for the calendar
week. For example, with a 40-hour Standard Workweek, completion of 40 hours
of work would accumulate full pay and benefits for the calendar week.
But this “full pay and benefits” mark would be just a point on a sliding
scale. One who worked
in a calendar week fewer hours than the number of hours in the Standard Workweek
would receive some lesser amount of pay and benefits, and one who worked
more hours than in a Standard Workweek would receive some greater amount. There
would never be any extra lump sum of pay or benefits allotted for having
reached any particular number of hours in a workweek or at any other moment
such as holidays or when one is hired, terminated, or retired.
-
In addition to setting the length of the
Standard Workweek, the demos would also set the minimum wage that could be paid for
the first work hour of each Standard Workweek. This minimum wage should be
accompanied by a minimum package of benefits that must be paid for the first
work hour. The wage and benefits would increase with each work hour as
described above. This package of benefits would be too complex for the demos
to set. It should be set, therefore, by elected representatives, by
congress. The
minimum package of benefits should be similar to and proportional to the
packages of benefits most commonly provided to employees throughout business
and industry.
Businesses and corporations are becoming more
and more like perpetually transforming entities or shells which encase a dynamic flow of projects
and processes. New products and services are continuously being created while
old ones are discarded. The hiring, shuffling about, and laying off of employees
is becoming an ever more dynamic process. The lifelong, loyal relationship
between an employer and an employee is becoming increasingly rare, a ghost from
a previous age. Increasingly, the principal loyalty of the employer has become
to his or her business, and the principal loyalty of the employee must become to
his or her own career. We need to embrace and facilitate this
process by creating a whole new relationship among business, government,
educational institutions, and
labor. Redefining and justly rewarding labor as described here would be one important
step in the right direction.
But something else is needed. So that one may “flow” from job to job or
career to career in today’s
rapidly changing world and workplace without repeatedly falling into catastrophe, we
need to change the relationship between the individual worker and the workplace. Some things currently “attached” to the individual workplace should
instead be “attached” to the individual worker.
All benefits earned by an employee for each work hour
should be fully funded at the time they
are earned, portable, and secured by law. Each employee should have a permanent personal
account with a third party or agency outside the workplace into which is
deposited all accumulated sick time, vacation
time, pension funds, etc. These accumulated benefits in the account should
not be the possession of the employer but of the employee to use or to
easily take
with him or her from job to job. Educational and unemployment benefits
should also be accrued with each work hour and be deposited into the
employee’s account. All benefits would be used as the individual’s life situation warrants. The idea
is that the individual would move through his or her work life with an arsenal
of accumulated benefits that could be used when needed. These accumulated benefits
would be the individual worker’s property, not the
property of some particular business or of government. Throughout one’s work
life one
should be able to convert accumulations that exceed certain minimum levels into
cash to use at one’s pleasure. Upon retirement one should be able to convert
all remaining accumulations into cash.
Also related to the dynamic movement of labor,
both the processes used by businesses and the economic and other demands placed
upon businesses by government relating to the hiring, maintenance, and
termination of employees should be streamlined and their costs reduced, the idea
being that the costs involved in varying of the size of the workforce over time
should be reduced. This would facilitate the “flow” of labor among tasks and
jobs in our rapidly changing work world. The costs (other than wages and
benefits) of having, for example, thirty-seven employees at a given time
compared to, say, thirty-one should not be significantly higher.
Healthcare is a special problem. You’ve likely heard the
saying: The business of business is business. Business should not be
burdened by the financing of healthcare, which, at any rate, it does poorly or
not at all for the majority of people. The health insurance albatross should be removed entirely from
the shoulders of business. Businesses could put part of their savings into their
own
coffers and use part to fatten employee’s paychecks. (However, some businesses
may continue to find it makes good business sense to provide employees with
fitness guidelines, programs, and equipment.)
The huge for-profit, ‘healthcare
provider,’ i.e., health insurance, industry (which has never applied so much
as a Band-Aid on anyone) is an enormous drain, a black hole, on healthcare resources.
The for-profit health
insurance industry should be entirely scrapped and replaced by a lean, efficient,
non-profit, single-payer system. This would produce enormous savings resulting in more
resources going directly into real healthcare.
Everyone
should be included within the healthcare system. This would save the enormous costs of
determining coverage or inclusion and of the excluded showing up in emergency
rooms with advanced diseases which would have been more inexpensively treated in
doctor’s offices, clinics, or hospitals by preventative care or during earlier
stages of the diseases.
The new healthcare system which replaces the old one should be
a cooperative effort between the public sector and the private sector. The public sector portion of the healthcare system should
consist of a national, single-payer system financed in major part by general tax
revenue (the amount of which is determined by the demos), and in minor part by a
means-tested, scalable co-payment by the patients. Means testing should only be
done on those who claim themselves incapable of making a full co-payment. As an
added thought for your consideration, the co-payment could be waived or reduced for people
who maintain ideal body weight and whose annual physical examinations reveal the
results of adequate exercise and reveal no signs of alcohol, drug, or dietary
abuse or of smoking.
The single-payer system should consist of a lean national
headquarters and many local units which have a face-to-face
relationship with the actual healthcare providers and patients at the local
level. The system should be granular enough that those working in the local
units have intimate
knowledge of the local healthcare providers and of their patient clients. They
could even have special offices right within the hospitals and buildings of
major providers. Roaming audit teams guided by the local units would audit all
or randomly or judiciously selected private healthcare providers, keeping a long memory and
focusing on those who tended to abuse the single-payer’s pocket book. The
intent of local units and roaming auditors would be to provide a close watch
against corruption, expense padding, and patient overuse. These local offices with their intimate
knowledge of the local scene should also have the power to accept competitive
bids from local healthcare providers for contracts to provide, say, 1000
mammograms payable in one lump sum to reduce costs.
Employees of the single-payer system should have rights
equivalent to the rights of employees in the private sector, but the
single-payer should be able to be readily and promptly fire an employee when it
feels the action is justified and to expand and downsize operations as
needed without legal entanglement. One should be able to offer suggestions for
improvement of the single-payer system and to lodge complaints against the
system and particular employees working within it.
The private sector portion of the healthcare system should
consist of all of the private sector healthcare workers, professionals,
clinics, and hospitals that already exist everywhere in the country. They would have to compete for business and patients just as they do now and for
special contracts from the single-payer such as the 1000 mammogram example just
described.
One should be able to sue the national healthcare system and
the private providers of healthcare. The awards should be significant, but not
today’s astronomical amounts. The winning of any awards should result in a
review of the process and personnel involved in the incident and the local and
system-wide correction
of any discovered problems.
The members of the private and public sector portions of the
healthcare system should work together closely and creatively to devise programs
and methods of improving the health and the healthcare of the people in the
local community and to discover ways to reduce healthcare costs. Although, due
to conflicting monetary interests, their relationship would have an adversarial
aspect to it, they should strive to rise as much as possible to a cooperative
level for the benefit of everyone. The methods and
practices which prove most fruitful in a given local area should be forwarded to the national
headquarters for distribution to all other local offices for consideration and
possible use. There should be national standards, but local offices should have
some leeway to do what works best for them.
Both the single-payer public and the private healthcare
provider portions of the healthcare system should be rendered as efficient as
possible. Both within and among organizations, communications and execution of
tasks should be computerized, networked, secure, paperless, efficient, and fast.
Any electronic forms (or paper forms presented to the patient) requiring routine
patient data should first quarry the system for that data and enter it into the
form rather than the patients being asked the same questions over and over again
year in and year out. A patient’s records should be kept private and yet the
person should be able to go to any doctor, clinic, or hospital anywhere and be
identified and medically known. The healthcare system should not create any
processes that produce unnecessary paperwork, which would require more staff and
increase overhead. The focus should be entirely on giving prompt, efficient,
competent, loving healthcare to everyone.
The recommendations in this chapter produce some very desirable
results.
Those who for whatever reason worked fewer hours
than the Standard Workweek set by the demos wouldn’t be unjustly cut entirely out of benefits as they are
today. They would receive benefits proportional to the number of hours worked.
Those who worked more
hours than the Standard Workweek wouldn’t be unjustly rewarded too much but
would earn full pay and benefits and then some. What takes the trauma out of the
variation in work hours is that the wage and benefits scales would increase smoothly
as the number of hours increased. There would be no “all-or-nothing”
transitions such as those that exist between full-time and part-time work today.
Because the hourly wage and benefits sliding scales would be linear, slant upward,
and reach ever higher amounts as the
number of work hours increased during each workweek, the employee would be motivated to work
more hours. While the
wage and benefits scales would motivate employees to work more hours, they would
discourage employers from working
employees too
long. Given the upwardly-slanting wage and benefits scales, at some point it
would become a
rational business choice to hire more employees rather than pay the current
employees for increasingly expensive hours of work. The wage and benefits
scales (and the absence of lump payments and healthcare costs) would act as an increasingly costly slope rather than a
brick wall, removing jarring jumps from labor and production costs making them
more predictable and manageable.
As the economy expanded, profits grew, and workers
became in short supply,
employers would be willing to pay for more expensive work hours, thus stretching
the workforce and including everyone in the benefits of the expansion. As the
economy contracted and profits shrank, rather than laying off employees
employers could simply reduce the number of hours they worked each employee, thus
conserving their skilled workforce for better times. Rather than workers ending up fired
and in bad straights, they would simply tighten their belts a bit. At least they
would still
have jobs and something coming in to make do. During a contraction in the
economy there would be less of a tendency to lay off workers so unemployment would
not rise so rapidly taxing the resources of government.
Recall that the demos sets the percentage that
private sector revenue and income are taxed in support of the federal
government. Thus, government revenues expand and contract along with the rest of
the economy. And its employees’ wages and benefits would follow the same
sliding scale calculations as those in the private sector. So the number of
hours its employees worked would increase and decrease as the economy fluctuates
just like in the private sector. When the rest of us are hurting, the government
is also automatically made to tighten its belt in a way that conserves its
skilled workforce.
With employers no longer involved in health
insurance, with wage and benefit costs tied directly to each hour worked rather
than to the concept of a forty hour workweek or to the number of employees, and
with trained employees more likely to remain during lean times, costs, profits,
hours worked, and wages would all efficiently expand and contract with the
economy.
A market economy is all
about selling goods and services to consumers. During an economic downturn,
millions of workers having to tighten their belts a notch would remain better
consumers than if a significant portion of them ended up entirely unemployed. This should cushion
and lessen the downturn and aid in a more prompt recovery. Individuals who
did end up jobless would have on hand accounts full of resources to use while
preparing for and finding new jobs. And during the multiple job
and career changes that the modern employee can increasingly expect, whatever
other problems he or she must face, the lack of healthcare would not be one of
them.
The redefinition of work and reward for work and other
recommended changes presented in this chapter would not
eliminate bad times and unemployment entirely—people would still quit jobs or
get laid off or fired, and companies and businesses would still go belly up—but it would go a long way toward improving the relationships of employers,
workers, and government and making all of our lives a lot more sane.
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Beyond Plutocracy - Direct Democracy for America
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© Copyright 2001-2017 Roger D Rothenberger
Footnote
1 For
simplicity all values in this discussion are rounded off. In an actual situation
in the workplace, computers or calculators would make all wage and benefit
calculations more precisely and with the greatest of ease. In the example wage
calculations presented here a 40-hour Standard Workweek is used and a wage of $10.00
paid for the first work hour. To end up with a $15.00 wage for the 40th hour of
work, a 50% increase above the $10.00 paid for the first work hour, one must
calculate the amount that each hour’s wage must be increased above the
previous hour’s wage, an amount we may call the additive factor. In our
example the additive factor is calculated as follows: The value 0.5 is divided
by 40 yielding the value 0.013. The first hour’s wage $10.00 is multiplied by
the value 0.013 yielding the amount $0.13. So $0.13 is added to each hour’s
wage to calculate the next hour’s wage. 1
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