On the Other Hand

Placing blame isn't the same as finding solutions

On the other hand

I spent my professional life building my own architectural woodworking business.  That requires two skills, woodworking and business.  To be good at either takes perseverance. While I think most people are smart enough to do either, not everybody is prepared to make the commitment.  And there’s no reason they should, if they don’t want to.

My other choice was to have a job, like most people.  Certainly, I’ve had jobs before, of one sort or another. In summers, while a student, I was a camp counselor, kitchen help, a bus boy (can I say that?), and a factory worker.  None of these jobs required great skill.  None of these jobs required any sacrifice on my part, besides showing up.  But I did get my teaching license and when I graduated college, my first career move was to teach grade school science for six years.  After that, I went off to discover what other things I could do with my life, and ended up with the business I created.  It was forty years with no roadmap, no instructions, no guardrails, no guarantees. 

So much for the autobiography.  Here’s some thoughts and observations that don’t get the attention that they need:

The teacher is the boss of the students.  The employer is the boss of the employees.  Pretty similar, right?  Wrong.  They are nearly opposite. The teacher is paid to see to the needs of the students.  In essence, the teacher works for the students. But the boss is PAYING to have his needs met.  We seem, these days, to think that employers have some obligation to employees in a similar manner as teachers to students.  Why?  If that were the case; if employees are to be accommodated by the employer, shouldn’t the employees be paying the employer? 

Sure, this is the point at which people say that it is in the employer’s best interest to accommodate employees, in order to have a more motivated work force.  OK, and what does the employer get in return?  Anyone?  Anyone? Bueler?  In all the talk that has gone on concerning this topic, and there has been a LOT of talk, how often have you heard consideration of the employer? We incessantly hear about employEE rights. How often have you heard anyone discuss employER rights?

As I said, like most people, I started off with jobs that required little of me.  Then I became a teacher, and I had greater responsibility.  Still, the entire school was not on my shoulders.  Mostly, my only concern was my classroom. And if my students didn’t learn well, I still got paid.   If they didn’t learn well, it was on me to try to teach them better.  That’s what I was being paid for.  I was the boss of the classroom, but my sole responsibility was to benefit my students as well as I could.

Then I became an actual boss.  I didn’t hire employees for the continued thrill of trying to educate them.  I hired them because there was work to be done, and I needed them to do it. The concept should be obvious.  To many, it is not.

I taught in a rural school, and had all the students, all together. It gave me a great perspective.  Classes were comprised alphabetically. In each class I had the black students, white students, rich students, poor students, motivated students, and goof-off students. It was the ultimate controlled experiment.  The only variable was the students themselves.  Some learned and comprehended.  Some didn’t. Some were after good grades but didn’t care so much if they learned anything; while others wanted to learn, but didn’t care about grades.  As I’ve mentioned in other posts, some of my best students got the worst grades. 

In other words, there’s all kinds of different people with different motivations. And what kind of indicator is race, relative to any of this?  None whatsoever.  I saw at the time, and looking back now, that my best students were both black and white.  And so were my worst students.

Most of these students, good and bad, have become employees. Some are good, productive employees, some are not.  I never hired any of my students, having moved to a new location for my business. And I was never a teacher to any of my employees.  But the parallels are obvious enough.  And here’s where the difference between being a teacher and being an employer really show themselves. As a teacher, I could afford to fail to make good learners out of all my students.  I got paid anyway. As an employer, all my employees had to be productive.  Otherwise, why were they there?  If they weren’t productive, I had no choice but to fire them.  It’s not philosophical, it’s economic necessity. I even had employees that were so bad, productivity increased after I fired them, even WITHOUT a replacement.

Let’s just say, being an employer colors your perspective.  No, not everyone is owed a job, contrary to Ted Kennedy’s insistence otherwise.  No, not everyone is owed a living wage.  Employees are owed whatever wage and benefits they agreed to work for, in exchange for their doing the job they promised to do when they were hired. Employees who want more than the minimum must PROVIDE more than the minimum.

And that gets me to the multitude of programs designed to guarantee equity, and so forth.  To what end? Good students get good grades.  Good employees make good money.  Good employees that want to make more money do their homework.  What will it take to get paid more? They find out, and then they do it.

It’s a myth that there is some abundance of good employees and that employers can pay as little as they want, and still get the employees they need. In my experience, and in talking with many other employers, the biggest problem in running a business is in finding good employees. We can’t afford to be racist.  If the best candidate is black, or a woman, no problem. If you look really, really hard, you might find an employer who would hire a second-rate white employee before he would hire a first rate black.  But there’s not enough of those racists to even matter.

There’s a lot more employees than employers.  If politicians want a lot of votes, it doesn’t pay to take the side of employers.  Same thing for selling tickets to Hollywood movies. It doesn’t pay for Hollywood, or Washington, to point out that employers have rights. It doesn’t pay to suggest that those employees that don’t have the income they want should look inside themselves, rather than blame someone else.

Everything I’ve experienced, as an employee, employer, teacher, and student, tells me that the real problem in this country is the victim mindset.  We are being sold a bill of goods.  The educational system has the luxury of being able to fail miserably at adequately teaching students.  They get paid regardless.  Real life isn’t like that.  Don’t expect it to be.

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