Many lawyers, small business owners themselves, have watched in disgust as the rhetoric and roll-out of stimulus monies have somehow managed to avoid them. Trillions of dollars may well be going somewhere, but not to them and not to serve the purposes needed to keep small businesses alive when revenues disappear overnight.
The talk is about keeping employees paid, which to any decent business owner is important. We need our employees. Most of us care about them and are deeply concerned for their survival. And the plan is that when this is over and the doors are unlocked, the phones start ringing again, we want them back in their chairs doing their jobs.
But for that to happen, not only do employees have to survive. So do small businesses. So do small business owners. Apparently, no one in Washington or the media has the slightest grasp of how small businesses function.
The scale of the economic damage is breathtaking. In one recent poll, more than half of all Americans under the age of 45 said that they had lost their jobs or suffered a loss of hours.
Some businesses may survive the crisis by shedding workers now, but they face long-term costs, too: the loss of trained and experienced workers, the uncertainties of hiring new ones.
One might suppose that in the fertile minds of the New York Times editorial board, the only thing small business does is give employees a place to go on Monday mornings and collect a paycheck from Friday. Put aside that businesses have to do, you know, business; they pay rent, they pay for telephones, they pay for the raw materials and supplies they need to conduct business. They figured out how to thread the thousand regulations that dictated their operation and paid the required fee that every regulation carried.
Here’s the kicker, the owners of small businesses aren’t billionaires using their pocket change to buy yachts and caviar, but people who saved their pennies, took a huge risk by investing in a business that was as likely, if not more so, to fail than survive, and fought every day to make it a success. When the phone didn’t ring, they sweated, unsure if they would ever get another client, another sale, another customer. And if they did fail, the employees said “bye” as they walked out the door to look for new jobs, leaving the small business owner to ponder how she would tell the kids that there would be no dinner that night.
Now that “rainy day” has come — the day when they held back reserves to keep their baby afloat, their family fed, their dream alive — they are castigated as the evil capitalists for not taking whatever they may have earned, saved, and using it for the good of others.
I’m really tired of reading how business owners are “forced” to layoff workers. No one made them do that. They *chose* to do that. Not saying it isn’t a hard choice, during a hard time, but to say they were *forced* obscures their agency AND casts owners/CEOs as the victims.
Money doesn’t grow on trees, unless you’re the federal government or a member of the Times’ editorial board. But even if it did, and it doesn’t, there remains a monumental disconnect between this grasp of how and why employees get jobs and paychecks and where the money comes from and goes to. Without these businesses, and without their owners, there are no jobs. All the entitlements which the needy demand have to come from somewhere, have to be paid by someone. That someone would be a business owner.
But what of their “agency”? Isn’t it merely a choice to lay off employees rather than feed one’s own family, raid their life savings, mortgage the house to pay the health insurance that carries a mere $16,300 deductible and co-pay?
When you take the risk of starting a business, it’s with the expectation and hope that you won’t be working day and night for the sake of paying employees, but you get to make a living out of it as well. No one takes the risk of starting a small business to run a charity for the benefit of employees or customers. If they work hard and smart, they get to enjoy the fruits of their effort and risk. This isn’t a crime, but the incentive to create a business, and with it, the jobs businesses provides.
Small business owners are allowed to earn a living, even a good living. There is no evil in succeeding. And there is no evil in not wanting to take a lifetime of success and give it away when a deluge, not of their making, comes.
This isn’t to say all small business owners are saints. Then again, neither are all employees, some of whom are less than competent, honest and reliable. When an employee gets a better deal elsewhere, he leaves with nary a thought of leaving his former employer in the lurch. But that’s the deal, part of what it means to own a business.
Our economy is a symbiotic beast, despite anything Bernie or AOC tell you. Employers need employees, but employees need employers as well. Those who play one off against the other, as if it’s just another game of good and evil in the war of entitlements and “rights” to whatever makes your life easier, fail to grasp that economic survival means that both survive, not just the employee.
Unlike economic displacements of the past, this one might well be overcome if there is a way to bring us safely out of sheltering and fire up the engine of business again. Employees can go back to their old desks and employers can turn on the lights, crank up the copy machine and start answering the phones. But that can only happen if the employer can remain in business, carrying all the costs and duties of running a business. And employee salaries and benefits are only one part of that deal, with the rest of the responsibilities of keeping a small business alive falling on the shoulders of the owner. Don’t make the small business owner the villain.
Discover more from Simple Justice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
I’m solo, with four regular employees and an off-site nurse paralegal. I live and work in a smallish downtown. It’s nearly all lawyers and government offices. As I sit here in my office on a Saturday, I count 32 coffee shops, ice cream shops and restaurants. Exactly two are chains–Starbucks and Subway. Exactly 4 of the 32 were open yesterday.
When the Swamp governor ordered the restaurants closed three weeks ago, I stood outside my office, watching a couple hundred restaurant workers walk to the parking garages. Many were in tears. They didn’t know what would become of them. I swore that wouldn’t happen to the pals that theoretically work for me.*
I get to work. For the first time since Henry VI, lawyers are essential. I get to wander my smallish town. All around, the restaurants tried to keep people working by doing takeout only. For most, it didn’t last long–they just couldn’t make it work. Every one of the owners I know, and I know many, wrestled hard with the grave question of what to do with the employees. One, a close pal, sat in this office and cried like a baby, but not for himself.
My pals and I will make it. I called in receivables and clients responded as I knew they would. They’re good people. We’re good until Fall–longer when I stop paying me, which is inevitable. I can take it better than can they. We are very fortunate we don’t have to rely on customers walking in the door or delivery of the widget to make the engine run.
But for the others around my smallish town, it ain’t the same. Yes, they went out on a limb to start their business; sometimes, way out. Yes, they poured 18-hour days into eking a profit. Now it’s gone, maybe forever. For many, the dream is lost, and they too don’t know what will become of them. When I talk to them, they give voice to what will happen to the dream. That voice is short-lived, as they always turn, and every one of them, to the grief they feel for employees.
Maybe my smallish town is different, but I doubt it. It’s for sure different in the head of a nitwit columnist.
*I’m a lawyer. One of the first things I learned was I work for them because they get to tell me what to do.
Had a chat about this with a lawyer of our relative vintage. He had reserves. He was ready for a rainy day, even though it’s going to mean pain. I’ve also heard from some younger lawyers. Some never had the chance to prepare for a rainy day. Others never believed it would happen to them. Most were living and working hand to mouth. They won’t survive and they know it.
Not just smallish towns. We look down our local main drag in Brooklyn: it’s a solid row of shutters. Laundromats, barber shops, nail salons, 99-cent stores, one-man cellphone repair stores, all the little Mexican and West Indian restaurants. Looks like the last scene in “On The Beach.”
You didn’t mention the hipster coffee shops. What about the hipster coffee shops?
Not in OUR neighborhood! Only takeout coffee from the bodega. Maybe other stimulants behind the counter if you ask.
Heh. There’s more than one “local” main drag in Hipsterville.
Al Capp.
“What’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the U.S.A.!”
Just want to say thank you for saying so eloquently what I am feeling. My heart breaks for the people with small children who cannot come to work at my restaurant because government said I had to close, for the young couple that was planning to get married in November and now are using their wedding money to pay rent, for the single Mom who thought she would be able to help pay for her high school aged son’s college. My heart breaks for my family, who is watching their restaurant that has been open for 48 years sit shuttered and empty. We will all be fine, but it will never be the same.
No need to thank me, and I’m frankly not a heart-breaky kind of guy. What I am is real, and pain for one doesn’t come at the expense of pain for another. This is hurting a lot of people, and the fashion trend of separating the world into good and evil is destructive and counterproductive.
While the lyrics may not accurately reflect the current situation, the bottom line is the same.
Now if only Steven Mnuchin can figure out a way to tack on a “fee” to all these Paycheck Protection Program “loans” to mitigate all the current and forthcomming defaults on that couple hundred billion the banks loaned out to the shale oil industry we can have everything humming by the end of the month?
Or will the FED be buying some of that debt?
Your readers need to know esteemed one…. and with all this business acumen of yours as of late, can we expect the rundown later this week once all the “evidence” is in?
P.S. How many zeros are there in a trillion? And please tell me you didn’t invest in migrant oil camp motels?
Loosen the mask, JB. It’s impeding blood flow.
I can only think of a few worse ways to “save” small business than what we have chosen, and I really had to think hard.
No, EIDL (at a total of $10 billion for 30 million businesses) and PPP don’t save anything and won’t halt the destruction of small business and the commercial real estate market. Aggregate demand is just beginning to spiral out of control. For example can you attribute a 95.5% drop , YOY, in people clearing TSA checkpoints on Saturday , entirely to fear of getting sick from flying?
It’s not just spiraling demand, it’s contracting supply.
There’s a depression coming, sold under the name of long -term unemployment insurance supplied at a rate high-enough to actually eat and afford housing (great ideas I have to solve that but not the subject here)
No tears expected for my massive CRE losses , because there was a 3 mile long line of cars waiting to get food this morning. Maybe I’ll just have to settle for 10 cloned copies of my dog and fewer first class vacations.
Most SME (small and medium sized) business owners I know are totally fucked. Even the dog-sitter who relies on people vacationing.
I’ll be having none of the “flipping on the light switch” and “V shaped recovery ” nonsense.
Some of us are old enough to have enough savings, so I’ll be certain to take full advantage of that awesome $300 above- the- line charitable contribution provision to assist my fellow man.
Order up another $20 trillion and about 20 years to get back to where we were 10 year ago .
In the meantime , we’re going with a totally crazy takeover of credit markets to keep otherwise zombie businesses afloat.
Well, I grant one thing to our government. It figured out how to simultaneously solve the wealth disparity while resolving the Medicare and Social Security deficits.