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!