In Defense

Some of you who know me know that I went back to school to complete some courses, and I happen to be doing that through an accounting and finance program.

This necessarily involves a number of general business classes (hey, no problem since I'd never had any and learning is good) but I've often been surprised over the last year and a half about the general student body's and the instructors' blind faith in "business" and the immense benefit-of-the-doubt it's given to always be doing the "right thing".

I'm not kidding: I've heard defenses of child labour from a "well would you rather they not be able to dig themselves out of poverty or do something useful with their time?" point of view.  It's hard not to sit there open mouthed and gaping.  Harder still not to throw rotten fruit.  At a time when so many are whinging about higher education being a liberal bastion where wide-eyed innocents are brainwashed into no-holds-barred communism, I'm instead being exposed to defenses of everything from modern-day slave labour to fascism.

I've got an embarrassing number of textbooks that (in theory) give us real-world business examples, arguing that these make the material more relate-able, but (actually) reading considerably more like paid product placements (complete with URLs to pages on which to shop).  These have included unabashed praise for the Jared campaign at Subway, and the breathless celebration of an entrepreneur who, it turns out, long ago absconded with the money her customers had sent her.

Recently, in a lesson on payroll, we were reminded of the case in which a major bank was sued by employees for unpaid overtime.  The instructor reminded us that it's possible that the payroll department accidentally overlooked overtime because, perhaps, management hadn't send them the correct paperwork.

Uh, what now?

That's a mighty rosy view, I'd have to say.  How does a payroll department overlook something so hard that the workers involved eventually seek class-action certification?  It seems it would be impossible for something to get so far as court arguments without someone in the payroll department possibly having heard about it.  Gee, do you think it's more likely that there was an active policy of denying overtime pay instead?  I can't see how it could be anything but that; it's not like there was never a request from these employees for the overtime that was due to them — it's that excuses were always found not to pay it, even after the workers said, "You know, I think you're violating labour laws here, and I might have to speak to an attorney about it."  I would think it would be incumbent on a "payroll professional" to know the law, to understand it, and to absolutely insist that it be followed.  I mean, this went on for over 10 years.

I don't know how anyone could look a room full of people in the face, claim such a thing could be a mere bureaucratic oversight due to a paperwork glitch, and expect to be taken seriously.

It's immensely frustrating.  Businesses operating for profit don't need the benefit of the doubt.  We already know their goal: profit.  Society's job is to ensure they aren't out there committing wage theft, putting workers in danger, and being otherwise skeevy in order to push that profit just a bit higher.  The argument that, in general, businesses will regulate themselves — because harming their customers or employees is counterproductive — is plain hogwash, any anyone who has been living on planet earth with open eyes should be able to see that.

Look at Massey Energy, who kept two separate log books for their mine — one to show inspectors and one of the actual conditions — with the end result being the death of almost thirty workers.  "Massey managers appeared to have pressured workers to omit dangerous conditions from the official books … workers who tried to report risks were intimidated."  But wait, there were regulations in place here and the company was already violating them so, obviously regulation alone is useless.

But if there had been regular, surprise, physical inspections of that mine rather than remote inspections of the fake logs management had created, then the actual conditions would have been better known and the deaths of 29 workers, perhaps, prevented.  The answer is better regulation, not this quasi-self-regulation that seems to be in place.

The problem is a distinct lack of will among politicians to give enforcement agencies the funding and teeth required to actually make committing fraud, theft, and homicide unprofitable — because, if they can kill an occasional worker or two but still make a profit, you can bet there will be more than a few companies who will be OK with that.