"If people are not willing to work then they are lazy. If they are not willing to stay gainfully employed they are lazy...Work for anyone but yourself and your value is what is set by your employer and you are expected to make money for your employer or you no longer have a job...Part of the problem is that we have bread laziness and inefficiency into our folks letting them think that they do not have to work to earn a living."

Sounds like part of the message here is that you ought to put up with whatever your employer wants to dish out, and if not you're a lazy bum. The employer rules, and anything else is irrelevant.

Of course businesses have the right to try to make a profit. But there are some things that are, or should be, off limits. And there are other things that are best avoided because of long-term consequences that won't benefit anyone. (I'm sure everyone can think of examples.)

--Constance Warner
On Nov 27, 2009, at 1:30 PM, Rev. Stewart Marshall wrote:

I don't know where you got that, but you cannot have a business unless you are making a profit.

There is a difference between making a profit ethically and making a profit unethically.

I think that is the real difference. Unless you feel businesses should not make a profit?

I happen to be in a business that deals with ethics and morality, and I can tell you they are not much better than anyone else in that area.

But I go back to my original question. Do you feel that a business has a right/better yet has a need to make a profit?

Stewart

At 12:21 PM 11/27/2009, you wrote:

Now let me get this straight.  You are saying that employers should
screw as much work out of their employees as they possibly can,
regardless of labor laws, custom, the health of their workers,
human decency, and the employers' long-term best interests and
enlightened self-interest?  And if the employees don't roll over
and play dead, and put up with any crap the employers want to dish
out, they're lazy bums who think the world owes them a living?

That's a recipe for the kind of in-effect slavery similar in kind,
if not in degree, to what we used to see in coal country. (Remember
"I owe my soul to the company store?  That's based on real life
conditions.  I grew up in West Virginia, and we remember those
things.)  It's also a recipe for labor unrest and class warfare.
In W. Va., for example, aggrieved workers made quite a lot of use
of dynamite--pretty destructive, but very small potatoes to the
damage an aggrieved computer programmer can do, depending on where
he is placed and how angry he gets.

And as for the Gulag--when I was a kid, I wanted to be a
Kremlinologist.  I know a lot more about that system than the
average person today.  I don't think we need to have a situation be
100% as bad as the original Gulag archipelago before we deplore it
and do something about it.

--Constance




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