A Vision

Here is an example of what smart businesspeople who actually have a vision for taking their businesses further are doing.

My sister runs her own job recruitment agency that she built from the ground with a friend. The two business owners cultivate each of their employees like a hot-house orchid. They are paying for the employees’ health insurance (remember, this is in Canada where there is free healthcare for everybody, so my sister and her partner are paying for their workers to get a very special cherry on top of a good free cake), dental insurance, classes and seminars, and often even spa visits.

These are very bright businesswomen who are highly educated and whose philosophy of approaching the job market is based on long-term investment in each worker. They refuse the contracts for temp job searches that come their way and despise revolving-door companies that chew down temp workers only to spit them out in a couple of months.

And you know what? Within just a few years of existence they have a better reputation in the city than the agencies that have existed there for decades. They are a small business but they have been securing such lucrative and prestigious conracts that, as we say in my country, the big agencies can only nervously smoke in a corner.

Treating employees right pays off big time. A tenure-track/tenured professor will do more to attract students, raise the prestige of the school and build up the department and the school in such a way that not even a batallion of hassled, overworked, indifferent adjuncts will provide enough “savings” to counterbalance this.

How can this be not obvious?

I suggest we start seeing the increasing reliance on part-timers in academia and business as stealing. Our message to administrators / clerks who eliminate full-time jobs and hire part-timers instead should be: “You are stealing from our school. You are robbing the university. You want a business model? Here is a business model for you: you are depriving our school of cash, both short-term and long-term. This makes you a thief.”

And that’s my vision.