This morning, as I was walking to work, I bumped into Brendon Burns, our local MP. We walked and talked for a bit; our conversation turned to labor laws and employee rights. New Zealand as a country has historically been a champion of employee rights, at times (I feel) at the expense of employers, particularly employers at small companies.
Our discussion led us to an agreement: every employment law is aiming for the same thing. Essentially, they all want employers and employees to behave with a fair heart and with goodwill.
The problem, of course, is that there’s no way to legislate heart. What you legislate is specific behavior. No matter how good your laws, there will always be unethical and unscrupulous employers, and there will always be unethical and unscrupulous employees. So Brendon and I turned the problem around: how can we encourage people to behave with a fair heart and with goodwill?
(Brendon also pointed out, wisely, that every employer believes him- or her-self to be fair and reasonable, and there’s about as much chance that being true as there is of all of us being above average. But that’s a discussion for another day.)
Meanwhile, back at the VortexDNA blog, Nick Givotovsky was making some superb points about our responsibilities as consumers:
The fact that we ‘could’ get it more cheaply, or more rapidly don’t themselves alter the inherent quality of the product itself, in particular once the other costs involved in making something available cheaply and quickly are factored in. These hidden costs, including substandard labor practices, environmental footprint, resource wastefulness, animal cruelty, etc. contribute to the actual cost of a purchase (each purchase tacitly endorsing the practices that made that purchase possible). Some reasonable percentage of additional cost to support local business and avoid unnecessary hidden costs, or avoid tacit endorsement of objectionable practices, makes sense, ethically and otherwise.
But what about that last one; ‘better’? Taking away the convenience and economy benefits of fast and cheap, and getting to the higher actual quality of something that could be found elsewhere is where local loyalty I believe can, and should, fray depending on the amount and kind of ‘better’ involved, and the reasons for the ‘better’ in question.
…In the meantime, I would like to see a great deal more of the kind of transparency which you suggest could alone change the fast food chicken business.
If we knew what it took to make it, we wouldn’t want it or we wouldn’t care, depending on the particular product in question, and our own value system. If we were in a marketplace wherein the provenance goods and services and the practice of their purveyors were far more directly evident and actionable than they are at present, the choices we make as consumers could be more reflective of the values we hold as citizens.
So we’re back to the first question: how can we encourage employers, employees, consumers, citizens to think holistically, to appreciate that your cheap chicken must of necessity come from a battery farm, that your two-dollar toy must of necessity employ labor that may make no more than a dollar a day? To make matters even more complicated, how can we get people to consider that a dollar a day isn’t inherently bad, and may be a fundamental transitory stage of a developing economy? In short, how can we promote conscious consumption?
Here’s one place we can start: did you know that companies that give equal weight to shareholders, employees, customers, community and society consistently outperform companies that have a disproportionate focus on any one of those stakeholder groups?
I discussed this in the presentation I gave at WORLDCOMP’08 in Las Vegas. The bottom line is that, in addition to feeling good about doing the right thing, behaving holistically will actually improve your bottom line.
So, if that’s the case for companies, wouldn’t the same hold true for individuals? Maybe the success metric for individuals isn’t our ROI; maybe it’s a fulfilling life. Doesn’t it stand to reason that individuals who consider our own happiness, the happiness of others, and our contributions to society at large will have more fulfilling lives than individuals who only consider our own happiness?
What do you think about the way we live?
