Insight, analysis & opinion from Joe Paduda

< Back to Home

Sep
1

Labor Day Special Edition

Happy Labor Day Weekend readers!

Make sure to thank the folks who work hard every day to make our lives better – teachers and support staff, building trades, healthcare workers, factory folks, agriculture and food workers, public safety, transportation, public works, and everyone else we often take for granted.

Here are a few articles of interest…worth thinking about as you watch parades, cook up your masterpiece on the grill, and enjoy the opening of the College Football season.

What’s been top-of-mind for me is how we’ve commoditized our workers, thinking of them as “expense” instead of an “asset”.  One of the most reprehensible anti-Semitic, racist, nasty people in business – Henry Ford – recognized employers need to pay their workers enough to buy the goods they make. Somehow we’ve forgotten this, along with the truth that workers are people, have intrinsic value, and deserve to be treated as such.

The best employers I know think of their workers as assets, not expenses. They know that when people feel valued and respected, those people do amazing work.

Here in upstate New York, one of the best employers I’ve ever come across is Tessy Plastics, a privately held company with about 900 workers that makes everything from those tiny plastic thingies that close ziplock baggies to surgical stapling devices used in gall bladder surgery.

Facing the loss of their largest customer fifteen years ago, Tessy relied on its workers to bounce back and become an amazingly successful company. I know a lot of Tessy employees, and they love what they do, work incredibly hard and smart, and as a result Tessy is doing very, very well.

We all can learn a lot from Tessy.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of worker risk and abuse out there.  First up, a reminder of how some workers are mistreated, abused, and oppressed by scummy bosses.  Thanks to workerscompensation.com for the heads’ up.

Law enforcement officials in New Jersey busted a company that was allegedly taking advantage of undocumented workers, cheating them and their clients in multiple ways, including money-laundering.

The explosion in the Arkema chemical plant outside Houston is another reminder of the risks faced by workers, risks that almost always are ignored by all of us until something catastrophic happens. Fortunately none of the 60 workers were at the plant when the storage trailers started exploding, but public safety workers were.

For those looking to help out with donations, the Greater Houston Community Foundation is one site that’s been thoroughly vetted.

Have a great weekend!

 


3 thoughts on “Labor Day Special Edition”

  1. Joe,

    The mistreatment of workers and their commoditization are called “laissez-faire capitalism”, and having lived in Texas for three years, I know that state to be one of the last bastions of true, libertarian, free-market, entrepreneurial capitalism. Why else would they be a non-subscriber state for comp? Cowboy capitalism is harmful to healthy employees, but not the bottom line.

Comments are closed.

Joe Paduda is the principal of Health Strategy Associates

SUBSCRIBE BY EMAIL

SEARCH THIS SITE

A national consulting firm specializing in managed care for workers’ compensation, group health and auto, and health care cost containment. We serve insurers, employers and health care providers.

 

DISCLAIMER

© Joe Paduda 2024. We encourage links to any material on this page. Fair use excerpts of material written by Joe Paduda may be used with attribution to Joe Paduda, Managed Care Matters.

Note: Some material on this page may be excerpted from other sources. In such cases, copyright is retained by the respective authors of those sources.

ARCHIVES

Archives