Dear Valued Boss:

Thanks for the informative and illustrative letter regarding why I am losing my job, what’s wrong with this country, and why the economy’s current condition may cost not only me my job but everyone else who works for you as well.

You shared your tidbits and your back story with us because you didn’t want to just spew rhetoric. Yeah, I see you park your Mercedes and I’ve seen your grandiloquent house when you were kind enough to invite the lowlifes, er, I mean the employees, to your Christmas party. Yes, you’re right, those flashy icons of luxury do conjure up some idealized thoughts about your life-about what it must be like to make it, to finally get to the point in your life where you can afford some of those things.

So, now that you’ve shared your back story, here’s mine.

When you were starting your company 28 years ago, I was a young teenager just out of high school with no clue what to do with my life. No discipline or drive ever pounded into me to single-mindedly seek a goal no matter what the cost, no matter how many late nights worked away from family and friends. What to do? How do you choose a major or a direction in life when you have no clue what you’re good at or what you want to do with your life because you’ve never had the opportunity to be told that you can do it, that you can make it, that you are worthwhile? And yet, lo and behold, out of the blue comes the idea that maybe you could have your own business, if you just worked hard enough. That’s what they’ve always told us: work hard, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and you can be or do anything you want. Except sometimes life gets in the way in ways unexpected&.

I’ve lived in that same 300-square foot studio apartment that you did, but I did it with 2 kids, making $14/hour, paying $500/month for rent, $800/month for day care, plus utilities, phone, and, oh yeah, I guess I had to figure out some way to feed the kids and myself in all that also. And I worked evenings at home typing after the kids went to bed so I could make ends meet, and swallowed my pride enough to go on daycare assistance to help pay the long-suffering and long-waiting babysitter who lovingly cared for my kids while I slaved away at your business, despite the fact that I was raised to believe that anyone who went on “assistance” was lazy and shiftless. Imagine trying to reconcile that image and those feelings when you’re trying to get money to pay the bills and still feed your kids.

And I drove a piece of junk that was so used and worn out that I didn’t know if it would run from day to day; a car that I had to start with a wire under the hood because I couldn’t afford to have the dead solenoid replaced, so instead a friend showed me how to start it with the wire. I learned how to strip wires real fast when the old one wore out and wouldn’t start the car anymore! I barely ever had an extra penny to put away in savings, much less the money to start a business of my own. Yes, I made my own bed and lay in it when I married badly, had kids, and ended up divorced, but I worked my fingers to the bone just as much as you did just to survive, provide a good home for my kids, and try to put something away for a rainy day in case anything happened to me or the kids. The thought of losing a job or someone getting hurt was absolutely terrifying.

As for your friends who went out and got jobs, worked only 40 hours per week, and made a modest $50K/year, I would loved to have made that $24/hour that they were making and in only a mere 40 hours/week! I would have loved to have the extra money to occasionally buy NEW clothes instead of going to the Goodwill or Value Village to clothe my children and myself. Luckily for me, those kids were never the type who got snobby about their clothes, nor did they become embarrassed about not wearing more expensive designer-type clothes as they grew older. I would have loved to have the chance to drive a decent car, have the hope of owning a home instead of forever living in Apartment Hell, and maybe, just maybe, take an occasional REAL vacation and not just time off with the kids that was spent in town because I couldn’t afford plane tickets to anywhere much less a hotel or rental car. And back then, who was going to give a credit card with a decent line of credit to a single mother of two making a lousy $14/hour?

And, where in the world do people still get to arrive at work at 9 and leave at 5, which makes me think you are giving your employees a paid lunch? I’d kill for a position like that! I’d love to have the luxury of arriving for work at 9 am and sleep in another hour in the morning. Then I might not be so drag-my-butt tired. And while it may seem to you that I arrive at 9, mentally check in at noon, and then leave at 5 pm, what you don’t take the time to see is that I’m doing the best I can to make it through a full day of work for you because I have worked so hard at the other end of the day-when you don’t see me-to make ends meet. In all of this, where am I going to have the time to go back to school to get a better paying job? Oh yeah, and the money for the tuition? As the Sopranos liked to say so much, Fugeddaboutit! I’ve often heard where administrators go back to school in the evenings to get their masters degrees online. Well, that’s nice if you have the extra time that comes with not having to moonlight and if you have the money to actually do that. Plus there really aren’t too many scholarships for women in my age bracket with two kids making the “astounding” amount of money that I do. Can you imagine the idea that someone who makes only $14/hour makes too much for some scholarships?!

The other thing you often don’t see is that, although this is your company, many of your employees will often feel like it is their company too. Given half the chance, a decent income, and a little trust, they’d give their left arm for you, work overtime without pay, and be just as concerned as you about the business when the economy tanks. All too often, the folks at the top don’t see the fact that the folks at the bottom consider the place they work to be an extension of their LIVES just like the employer does. In that rare alignment of company, culture, and employees, there can actually be such a thing as concern for the company on the part of the employees, with just as much concern as the owner has. However, color-blind glasses prevent this simple thing from being seen and, therefore, prevent the employers from building that bridge that allows both sides to work together towards the common goal and which allows both sides to worry together and put their heads together to brainstorm ideas for running the company more efficiently for less expense.

So, instead a divide develops. You stand on your side saying, “You don’t understand me and you never will. All you care about is what you can get from me” And the employee stands on the other side, saying, “You don’t understand me and you never will. All you care about is how you can get by without me.”

But, where in the grand scheme of your business do you think you’d be making even half the money that you are without all the people who do the myriad of little things that you can’t do all by yourself? If you’ve got excess staff on the payroll for the amount of income you’ve got coming in, by all means you have to trim down to become more in line with income and output; that’s just basic business. But don’t blame taxes on the reason that you’re going to close shop. We’d all love to run away from taxes, but taxes are a fact of life. They pay for your basic infrastructure: the lovely paved streets, the snowplowing in the wintertime, those FREE schools that all kids get to go to regardless of class/parental income/or any other criteria, unlike many places in the world. Your taxes also pay for fire and police services, EMT service for when you are in a car wreck on a slippery, snowy day. I could go on and on. In the paraphrased words of Benjamin Franklin, in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.

And somewhere along the way to writing your back story, you forgot about the fact that we’re all in this together and we have a duty to help our fellow man. If that means giving them a job that suits your needs as well as theirs and paying taxes along the way to pay for all the basic services that make your modern life more, well, modern and comfortable, so be it.

And, just for the record, yes, in a rare alignment of luck and hope, I was briefly self-employed when I tried to have a go of running my own business and yes, at the time I paid what seemed like the god-awful high taxes that were required of me, including the self-employment portion of my tax-the part that most employees don’t fully understand or ever see. But you know what killed me? I was too cheap to hire someone to help me out! Because, like you, that business was attached to my hip like a 1-year old special needs child whom I thought no one else could care for besides me. So, instead I ran it myself and ran myself into the ground because I failed to realize the one essential thing: just how important employees are in the flourishing of many businesses.

So, why not just agree to disagree and continue living in the host/symbiont relationship in which we both need each other for differing reasons in order to get what we want and need. You might also say we’re both like light and darkness, we can’t have one without the other and we need each other to be complete and run this business together. You can run off, stick your head in the sand, and close your business if you really are tired of it all, but I’ll tell you what, no matter where you go, you’ll run into taxes and you’ll run into the host/symbiont relationship no matter where you go, even if you’re retired; it’ll just present itself in a new form.

And closing your business won’t solve any problems; it’ll only allow the problem to continue spiraling down. Now closing a business because it is failing and is not viable is one thing. But closing a business because you’re tired of paying taxes, something which we all must do whether we’re the employer or the employee, is just plain nonsense and, in the end, is rather selfish. All you’re doing is contributing to the myth that you seem to think your employees have created about you: that you were born rich and have never cared about a soul except yourself. And thus begins anew the reason for this whole debate.

Signed,

Your humble and worthless employee

We can try that for now. IF that continues to not work, then we will have to come up with alternatives. :-)

Ten Questions every US citizen should ask themselves in 2009:
http://www.rfdoc.com
(and the links in the article are very insightful)

Whether or not you agree with this anonymous letter, that probably was not actually delivered, and is likely a rant, it makes one point. That those of us in society who stick their entrepreneurial necks out to start a business, and toil within the bounds of risk and sleeplessness (often failing) in order to have their place in the sun, are not given a fair shake, nor the incentives, to do so, nor are they rewarded by society for it.

What price, economic freedom?