Candace

Talmadge

Read Candace's bio and previous columns

April 28, 2008

Goodbye to All That, Part I: You Don’t Need Corporate America

Napoleon Bonaparte once scorned his nemesis, England, as, “a nation of shopkeepers.” 

He was onto something we Americans would be wise to consider and act upon now that our globalized, corporatized, debt-laden economy is coming unglued. It’s time to become a nation of “shopkeepers” in the form of micro-businesses providing valuable goods and services locally, thus avoiding the oil-induced exorbitant costs of nationwide and international shipping. 

These tiny neighborhood businesses could focus on jobs that cannot be off-shored, outsourced or otherwise destroyed by vulture capitalists growing fat off the death of decent-paying employment. In other words, the so-called global economy isn’t working for the majority of us, and it’s time to kiss it off as far as we are able to do so. 

Instead, let’s try for a sustainable, locally-based and driven economy that respects and protects the environment and provides more stable employment with livable wages. This is about taking our economic fate into our own hands instead of thinking that we have to work for someone else to survive. That lie keeps us entirely powerless to improve our economic lot in life. 

First step: Take the incessant calls for more math, science and engineering majors with a hefty grain of salt. Who do these so-called experts think they are fooling? There’s a reason today’s college students and school children shy away from these types of majors and coursework, and it’s not necessarily because they are young and/or dumb, or that the topics are typically taught in a way that makes them mind-numbingly boring (which they are). 

In fact, young people are pretty darn smart. They know that in the days of HB1-B visas, outsourcing and off-shoring, those once much-vaunted “high-tech, high-wage” jobs may still be high-tech, but they are not so high-wage anymore. Companies that used to employ U.S. math, science and engineering graduates have outsourced or off-shored their jobs to low-pay countries. If that’s not possible, the businesses lobby seeks to raise the HB1-B visa quotas, claiming that they cannot find any “qualified” U.S. citizens to fill the jobs. Then they import cheaper labor that is very easy to keep in line because it relies totally on employment status to be in this country legally. 

The preceding has been going on for decades now. Small wonder that young people show less and less enthusiasm for spending tens of thousands of dollars to obtain college and post-graduate degrees for jobs that all too often simply disappear or, if they remain, pay much less thanks to HB1-B competition. 

To heck with it all. Nasty good riddance to soul-destroying and ever-more costly commutes to places of employment that suck up more and more hours for puny to no increases in pay and declining (if any) benefits. So long to loyalty that goes only from employee to employer, and rarely the other way around. This may sound bitter, but it is merely a relentlessly realistic assessment of where most of us stand in the corporate food chain. We’re at the bottom, the bait on the hooks, chum in the waters of the business profit-feeding frenzy. 

It doesn’t have to be this way, but this is no call to reform American business through yet more laws or regulations. We have plenty of those on the books, and see how well they are working. Business has demonstrated time and again to be beyond redemption, and the current political process is so corrupted by corporate donations that it’s almost impossible to tell where business leaves off and government begins. 

Instead, let’s vote with our feet and, ultimately, our pocketbooks as consumers. We can walk away from the entire sorry mess and use some of that ingenuity and creativity for which this country is well known and even still admired. There are plenty of ideas for micro-businesses that don’t involve franchising, which is another can of worms and usually rewards the franchisor at the expense of the franchisee. 

In future columns I will look at two such tiny businesses that have sprung up not far from my neighborhood. Both contribute to the health of our environment and/or our bodies and were founded by former employees who escaped the corporate reservation and are far happier for it.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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