What are a Business's Responsibility to Employees? (Asphodel Chronicles)

---A continuation of the conversation between Professor Jana and Bob the Bus-boy (and owner of the truck-stop)---

“But don’t you think” Jana pressed “that business owners have a responsibility to their employees?”

“Yes, of course businesses have responsibilities toward their employees” Bob replied.

“Then why don’t you pay them a living-wage? How can you justify firing them from their job when they need that money?” Jana challenged him.

“Whoa, there. You are tangling up a lot of questions there” Bob said, holding out his hands as if to stop her.

“First of all, it isn’t “...the employee’s job…” “ Bob said. “It is work that I hired the employee to perform. If he does not do the work or if he causes other problems then I have to let him go.”

“You mean you fire him” Jana said, combatively.

“You know, I am not out here wiping tables because I enjoy doing it. I am out here because I had to let the bus-boy go today. You wanna know why I let him go? It was not because I enjoy wiping down tables” Bob asked

Jana nodded her head vigorously. She was very interested in hearing why Bob had fired the young bus-boy.

“I had the bathroom stalls repainted last week. The corporation who leases me the franchise is very, very big on having the restrooms what they call “sterile”. Being a truck-stop, most of our customers use the restrooms and corporate found out that customers pay a lot of attention to them” he said.

“So?” Jana said.

“The young man I let go took his break and went into the restroom and marked up one of the stalls with a Sharpie. Right after I paid $2000 to have the six stalls painted” Bob said.

“When I asked him about it, he not only told me he did it but told me that it was his right to express himself” he said.

“SO you fired him!” Jana said, emphatically.

“No. He fired himself” Bob said. “I told him that I was going to dock his pay to cover the cost of repainting that stall. He asked how much that was going to be and I told him $300. He called me every name in the book and stormed out. I might add that he took his uniform and his apron with him...another $150 out of my pocket.”

“If it cost you so much to fire him, then why did you do it?” Jana asked, mystified.

“I. Didn’t. Fire. Him. He quit” Bob reiterated.

“Look, when a customer goes into a restaurant they have certain expectations. They expect to be greeted. They expect to be served in a reasonable amount of time. They expect wholesome food at a fair price. They expect to not get shot or mugged. Right?” Bob asked.

“Of course” Jana said with a shake of her head. “You don’t have to explain this to me like I am a kid in grade-school.”

Bob thought that was EXACTLY the way she needed to have it explained to her.

“When you go into a bathroom, you might not recognize gang-symbols but you definitely recognize the graffiti as territorial markings, right?” he said.

“I suppose” Jana admitted in a lukewarm tone.

“Another thing is that fathers sometimes travel with their daughters. They might decide to take their daughters into the men’s room because of safety concerns. Would you take your daughter into a restroom with explicit drawings of male genitals on the walls?” Bob asked.

“Well, no” Jana admitted with more vehemence.

“So this is a truck-stop, not some grungy, college pub. Customers have different expectations. I might have kept the young man if he had admitted his error but he doubled down. He was defiant. I would never be able to trust him after that.” Bob said.

“But he probably needed that job” Jana circled back to her original argument.

Bob shrugged his shoulders. “He sure didn’t act like he wanted it very bad. He was acting like being the alpha-dog was more important to him than his pay-check.”

“You could have trained him” Jana said.

Bob cocked his head, quizzically. “This kid was a sophomore at the college. He had been in school for, what...15 years…, and the professional educators haven’t been able to teach him. Why do you think I will be able to do it. I have a hundred other things to do every day other than holding his hand and teaching him values that he should have learned in Kindergarten and that should have been reinforced every year after that.”

“I don’t have a degree in teaching. My job is to make happy customers, not be a social engineer trying to fix education’s failures.” Bob was getting a little bit hot.

“And it really isn’t a matter of training, is it?” he asked.

“Everybody knows that destroying property is ‘wrong’” Bob continued. “The problems is that a lot of folks don’t want to behave. They think being able to do any-damned-thing-they-feel-like is far more important than serving customers and collecting a pay-check.”

“I bet you have a hard time finding employees” Jana said, slightly snidely.

“I hire lots of people. And I let lots of people go. I will not tolerate vandalism, theft, excessive absenteeism or my workers using their smartphones when they are on-the-clock” Bob said.

“The people who stay-on as employees LOVE working here. They are proud of being part of a crew that excels. They like knowing that if they are scheduled to be off at a certain time then the person who is scheduled to be here WILL BE HERE, on-time and ready to work before they leave.”

“They appreciate that their coworkers all pull their fair share and in general, they are all cheerful people who are a joy to have around” Bob said.

“No smart-phones? How’s that working out for you?” Jana asked. Having taught at the college level, it was inconceivable to her that any business could stay afloat if they didn’t let their workers fiddle with their phones.

“I lose a lot of workers in their first week” Bob admitted. “But I tell them that I give them eight-hours of work for an eight-hour shift and if they are on their phones then they are either not doing their jobs or I screwed up and need to give them more work.”

“But surely they have dead-time…” Jana wondered.

“They have breaks when they can go to the break-room and use their phones or eat their free-lunch.” Bob said.

“What is the longest you ever had to wait before a waitress came over to your table?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe five or ten minutes.” Jana replied. She had never really thought about it.

One of the other women piped up “I once had to wait 45 minutes but it was at a real busy bar.”

“How long ago was that?” Bob asked, looking at the woman who had waited 45 minutes.

“Maybe last spring” she replied.

“Is the bar still in business?” Bob asked.

“I dunno. Lemme look” she said, whipping out her smartphone.

“Yes they are but they have a different name” she said after thirty seconds.

“That means there is another bar in that building but the business that left you dangling for 45 minutes went out of business” Bob gently informed her.

Looking over at Jana, Bob could not resist asking "How many employees is that business supporting now?"

Jana leapt to the defense of the business. “Well, the rent in that part of town is really high and it was competing in a very competitive industry.”

Bob slowly spun in place, looking at the dining room. “I also compete in that very competitive industry and I have been in business for almost 40 years and I never went bankrupt.”

“Customers who stop to eat in a truck stop are usually traveling. They have schedules to keep. They might be driving long into the night when they will be tired” Bob said.

“My wife trains the waitresses to be watching folks from the instant they come through the door. They wait for them to take off their coats and for everybody to get seated. Then they are expected to walk over with a full pot of coffee and greet our new customers and to point out the menus and to take their drink-orders.”

“Then they are expected to go back to the table when half of the diners have put down their menus.”

“If you look at their station, you will see that they have little hour-glasses used for egg-timers. They flip that over after they deliver the food and are expected to check on their customers when it plays-out after two minutes. Either that, or they can watch the table and go back after the last person takes their first bite” Bob said.

“They can’t do any of that if they are playing on their phones. It only takes them a couple of weeks before they realize that they get much better tips when they are concentrating on making our customers happy rather than thinking about snappy-comebacks on Teeter-totter" Bob said. "Waitress or waiter means they are WAITING for the customer rather then the customer waiting for the service."

“Why are you talking about the waitresses? You failed in your responsibilities to the bus-boy” Jana said in disbelief.

Bob was just about at the end of his patience. "Because it all ties together. The tips my waitresses count on will suffer if the restrooms look like a pig-sty. I have more than a dozen waitresses on the payroll. What about my obligations to them? What about my responsibilities to our customers? They put down their hard-earned money. Don't I have a moral obligation to feed the hungry?"

 "Are you retired?" Bob asked, seemingly out of the blue.

 "Well, yes" Jana responded, taken aback by what she saw as a personal question.

"Do you get a pension?" Bob asked.

"Yes. But why is it any of your business" Jana replied, somewhat tartly.

"Because your pension probably owns stock in the corporation that I lease the franchise from. Since you object to what I have to do to make a profit, why don't you send that portion of your pension back to the Fund Manager?" Bob suggested.

"In fact, since you seem to object to any corporation making a profit, you should probably figure out how much of the pension fund's returns are generated by stocks in public companies and return all of that"

Jana waffled. "I am really not a math person..."

"Let me help you out. For most of the last five years, T-bills yielded about 2% while the overall portfolios averaged about 6%. That means that two-thirds of your pension check came from publicly traded companies. If you really object to companies making a profit and will put your money where your mouth is, then you will mail two-thirds of your pension check back to the fund manager" Bob said, emphatically.

Then he turned and walked away before he said something that he would regret. 

***

I felt a few twinges of regret as I had Jana go full-retard.

Obviously, she is a smart person.

Just as obviously, in real life, all folks have their personal blind-spots. They will have some pet-theory that they are sure will solve ALL of the world's problems if only others would get on-board.

The issue is that the person cannot see the secondary and tertiary effects because they WANT the simple, obvious (to them) solution to work. "If only (somebody else) would change..."

Those seem to be the people who fall into endless-loop mode.