The world frequently disappoints us. We all hope people will prove honest and good neighbors. Yet we more often find ourselves on the receiving end of dishonesty and selfishness. When this is just one-to-one, we can attempt to arrange our affairs to minimize future losses or opportunities for conflict. But when the dishonesty is on an industrial scale, it ends up costing us all extra dollars, and there’s little or nothing we can do about it. Over the last two or three years, it’s been impossible to pick up a newspaper without seeing a story about rising auto insurance premiums, often caused by the rapidly increasing levels of fraud. That, as they say, is the tip of the iceberg. The wave of gangs crashing their cars and claiming medical expenses is only worth a few billion a year. Unfortunately, a few billion is peanuts. When it comes to Medicaid and Medicare, the FBI estimates the amount fraudulently claimed to be between $60 and 200 billion a year.
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Although it’s a slightly different issue, you are probably following the failure of Penn State to deal with the allegations of sexual assaults made against the football team’s former defensive coordinator. With two senior University officials resigning and facing felony charges alongside the alleged molester, the reputation of the football team and the University has taken a major hit. If we translate this into slightly less extreme situations in the workplace, there are always opportunities for employees to “abuse” each other, using the word in its widest form. It can be a boss bullying staff in the hope it will encourage them to work harder, or one employee finding it offensive to work alongside someone thought to be gay. Once there’s a sexual element, the seriousness of the matter grows rapidly. Offering better working conditions or other rewards for sexual favors can quickly become sexual assaults. There are two quite different issues that arise. When employers were still mostly human, they offered their employees a range of benefits in addition to pay. One of the more common add-ons was a group life plan. The general idea was to provide for the employees’ welfare through health, retirement and life cover, and so encourage them to greater effort. The advantage from the employer’s point of view was that it was usually cheaper to buy the various benefits in bulk than to add pay sufficient for the employees to buy as individuals. Since pay was low, it avoided struggles for the employees to buy their own benefits. Everyone was happy with this arrangement. As we move toward the end of the last century, this philosophy was retained in the public sector, but more greedy capitalists began chipping away at the benefits. As unemployment rose, there was always a good supply of labor queuing up for every job advertised. If benefits were cut and employees left, there were always people willing to take on the work. This allowed employers in the private sector to bank more profit for themselves, leaving employees held in their posts by the fear they would be unable to find alternative jobs if they left. |
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