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Thread: I know I am getting repetitive but WTAF?? Once again, he totally misses the point, even as he references income inequality. Education is nice but it is not the answer!!! 1/google.com/amp/s/deadline…
When the primary problem people have is that they don’t have enough money, the answer is NOT to offer them your “creative solutions”. They don’t give a solitary shit about your creative solutions. You have money. They do not. The answer is right under your nose. 2/
You can’t reference income inequality as though you are some kind of social justice Santa Claus and then fail to concretely offer them THE ONLY THING THEY ARE ASKING YOU FOR. If I am dragging myself through the desert on my hands and knees and I manage to get to the 3/
Oasis, I am not going there because I am looking for creative solutions. I am going there for water. Or money to buy water with I guess. But of course, you are neither stupid nor crazy. You are, in fact brilliant and as I’ve said before, very nice. 4/
The problem here is that what workers are asking you for is not a change in their salaries but rather a change in your assumptions about salaries. As you rose through the ranks I am sure there wasn’t a soul around you who’d have dared to question much less notice 5/
The fact that even though the hotel maids were working harder and going home to more problems and facing more health, housing and transportation issues with less support and yes, less money than those in management, they were the most poorly paid of the people you worked with. 6/
No one ever questioned that those who “rose” (more normative a metaphor I cannot imagine—perhaps it is time to shed that one?) got more and more comfortable while those who did not, for whatever reason, “rise”with you lived lives of quiet and sometimes not so quiet desperation 7/
They are asking you to question that normative metaphor that has ceased to be a metaphor any more but rather has become a thoroughly subsumed ethos that some people “rise” and those who do not are “beneath” the ones who do. 8/
If you were to challenge this assumption that you and your fellow executives have made an article of faith you might see that no one is “beneath” anyone, that a hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s wage and that human beings are not interchangeable cogs, they are not 9/
Simply “expenses” to be wrangled and slashed; they are not machines always in need of fine tuning to be made to work faster, harder and more diligently so as to become ever more productive and therefore “cost-effective. You do not only have it wrong. 10/
You have it the opposite of right. Henry Ford famously said that he wanted his workers to be able to afford the cars they were building. He said that not because he was magnanimous but because he was practical. But here is what he also said.... 11/
“Why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they come with a brain attached?” He said that because he had found a way to disaggregate the complex job of building cars into a series of repetitive, soul-killing tasks. 12/
His high pay solved a persistent turnover problem for him, a problem he only needed to solve because the work he was asking people to do was just that soul-crushing. His high pay did indeed start on a path toward having a vibrant middle class in this country. 13/
But the legacy it left us with is toxic. It encourages American business to see the people who work in companies not as assets that yield returns but as expenses to be controlled, problems to be solved, and endlessly interchangeable parts of a greater machine only management 14/
Could possibly understand. In the process American business culture has exalted executives to near saintly status while reducing the status of the worker to that of a mere minion. The great irony of this is, of course, that in the name of efficiency and maximization we killed 15/
Sustainability I know it seems like I am picking on you personally. Believe me, Bob, it isn’t personal at all. But isn’t that just the problem? What IS personal any more? 16/
No, I am not picking on you and I am not obsessing over Disney. Disney is synecdoche. In this one company is every challenge American business faces in the new century. What will we do when automation kicks in, making 40% of all jobs disappear over the next 15 years? 17/
Will we change our view of service jobs once those are the only jobs left to be had? What will become of those less well educated or in myriad possible ways unsuited to “rising” if we refuse to challenge the orthodoxy about salary structures? 18/
What I am proposing is that you choose to lead. Disney is a point of pride for most Americans. No other company that I can think of combines size, profitability and the luster of “goodness” the way Disney does. No other company, therefore, is better positioned to model 19/
A different way of understanding employees and salaries. Have you ever wondered why, at a company so profitable, it is necessary to look to the federal government for guidance about how little it is legally possible to pay your employees? Would it be the worst thing 20/
In the world if NO ONE at Disney was working for the minimum wage? And don’t tell me you cannot afford it out of one side of your mouth, while polishing your profit bona fides out of the other. 21/
You only have 200,000 workers and most of them are delighted about their pay, or so I’m told. 22/
Think of it this way. You can continue pulling down nine figure compensation and you will retire a very wealthy man. Congrats. But I do wonder what you think you can do with all that money. Please don’t try to convince me that if you spend it all on philanthropy 23/
Rainbows and unicorns will soon roam freely and everything will be hunky dory. The best philanthropy on earth is always and only a nibbling around the edges of real problems. Real shifts will have to be political if they are to be both comprehensive and accountable. 24/
So you could keep on as you are, and retire a billionaire. OR... you could retire and have a legacy. You could retire as the most respected, most visionary, benevolent business man in not just America but the world. What’s it gonna be? Legacy? Or money. 25/
