The answer is simple: when you have to maintain an ongoing relationship with the person or people you just 'beat' at the bargaining table.
Anarchy often hides behind a smiling face...
And/or a resentful, complaining workforce...
You just landed that million dollar contract...
Now you want to keep as much of this money as possible in corporate and executive -- and your own pockets...
Unless you are negotiating with a union, you know you hold all the trump cards, all of the leverage and the power over that employee who walks into your office -- unless you really need the person that just walked in, and that person knows it, as he or she sits down in front of your desk.
Let's say that you just won a new bus contract, that you already have a fleet of bus drivers, and you want to give some of your drivers some extra work on this new contract. And/or depending on the number of hours needed to fulfill the requirements of the new contract, you dedicate a few of your drivers to this new contract only.
Let's say that you view the job as being 'easier' than the one that they have been used to doing, perhaps because this contract involves 'regular, ambulatory customers' as opposed to more 'physically challenged' wheel-chair and/or ambulatory customers. So you knock down the hourly wage for the drivers on this new contract down to $15 an hour -- with drivers being responsible for filling up their own gas tanks -- as opposed to the $18 an hour that they have been accustomed to. You argue that the drivers gas and work involved will be less than on their regular routes...
The drivers grudgingly agree, and you don't care too much about this complaining because 'all drivers complain' and you got the rate you wanted as you start off with a good team of experienced drivers on this new contract...
Until something not entirely foreseen and/or appreciated starts to happen on the way to the forum....
The drivers get out on the road and they start to experience that they are spending more on gas than was forecast. Gas starts to go up in price. The kilometers (or miles) driven is higher than you had told the drivers it would be...You start to hear more complaints but you just 'talk them off'...
But the problem is getting worse. Drivers being drivers, they talk amongst themselves. They are all in the same boat and they start to complain amongst themselves. Worse than that, they start to complain to customers. And these complaints eventually start to filter into the company that gave you the lucrative million dollar company.
Up until now, everything had been going well -- the contract-giving company has been happy with the performance of your company. People have been generally happy with the service...Service was faster and more direct...Except this 'poisonous attitude of resentment' that has been circulating in your drivers is starting to filter through to the customers and the customers are starting to turn around and complain to the company you are representing. Furthermore, drivers have been talking to drivers in other companies, and have heard about this one company that pays the drivers gas...And slowly, like carbon monoxide circulating through a garage with all the doors closed around it, this 'poisonous attitude' amongst the drivers is starting to kill your contract...
One driver say that he or she doesn't want to do the new contract any more...and another...and now you have to replace these lost 'experienced' drivers with 'less experienced rookies'...And mistakes start to be made on the routes...more complaints...More dissatisfaction starts to filter back to the company you are representing that gave you that wonderful, lucrative contract...
And you, fine sir, are starting to starting to 'suffocate' in your own self-made carbon monoxide...
Am I clear on this matter?
Do you fully understand the very wise principle of:
'What goes around, comes around'...
Do you understand the full extent of the principle of 'the invisible hand' in Adam Smith's 'free Capitalist Market'....(which wasn't meant to include a 'government bailout hand'...)?
Do you understand that if employees are coming and going in your corporation faster than customers are going through the turnstiles at your local grocery store -- this is probably not a good thing?
Do you understand the principle of 'corporate image'? -- that if your employees are walking around, during and after work, bad-mouthing your company, saying that you are 'cheap' or worse, that you are 'ripping them off', that it is likely only a matter of time before your 'bag of gold' starts to turn to 'fool's gold'?
Lucrative contracts can be flushed down the drain...all because an employer doesn't fully appreciate the fact that an employer's most valuable set of customers is the 'team' of employees that he or she has working for him or her.
You kill the morale in your team, and you slowly or quickly kill your suppliers, your lucrative contracts, and the rest of the customers you are supposed to be serving...
What goes around comes around...
'Cosmic justice'.
'Free market capitalist justice' -- Adam Smith style...
In the mystic but profound words of the second oldest recognized philosopher in Western history...
..................................................................................................................
Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
-- Anaximander, 610BC to 546BC
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Winning the individual battle -- or even a number of individual battles -- does not always mean winning the war.
In business, you can two 8 or 9 things out of 10 right -- you can 'win' lucrative contracts, you can 'win' individual battles at the negotiation table, you can put everything together structurally and dynamically -- and yet, in the end, you can still lose your business because you didn't do one or two important things right...
And in at least the last three companies that I have worked for, that 'one thing' that employers 'haven't done right' is they haven't 'treated their employees right'....they've treated their employees like 'pieces' or 'objects' to be used, abused, and exploited....
Didn't Karl Marx and Erich Fromm have something to say about 'worker exploitation' and 'worker alienation' and all of this can be traced back to Hegel's brilliant discussion and analysis of labor and the 'master-slave relationship'...
You see, I am here, and Hegel's Hotel is here, some 200 years after Hegel's most brilliant masterpiece was published -- 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' -- to continue to teach Hegel's most important message...and to build on it...modify it...and apply it in 101 or even a 1001 different contexts in today's world in the 21st century...
I am here to teach the principle of 'dialectic paradox'...
Which is simply a repetition of the message of some of our oldest Western and Eastern philosophers -- particularly Heraclitus and Lao Tse...
There would have been no Hegel and no 'The Phenomenology of Spirit' without Anaximander, and Heraclitus, and Lao Tse, and Kant, and Fichte, and Schelling...
All of these philosophers wrestled and grappled with the concept of 'dialectic paradox'...
Life is built on the principle of atoms and molecules coming together and separating, coming together and separating...almost sounds like the 'dialectic cycle' of 'marriage' and 'divorce'...
Lao tse -- and Daoism -- describe the 'healthy life' as being a balance between 'yin' and 'yang' forces...too much 'yang' (aggression) will generally create a self and/or social problem; so too will too much 'yin' (passiveness and inassertiveness).
The dialectic paradox of Adam Smith and Karl Marx is that they need each other.
Capitalism cannot be healthy without the presence of both the philosophy of Adam Smith and Karl Marx in its midst....Someone has to be present to protect the rights of the individual worker and the rights of the consumer/customer. Especially in today's 'globalized market' and monopolies where 'collusion' and 'price fixing' and 'gouging' all need to be monitored to help prevent employee and/or customer victimization...The 'invisible hand' in the 'free market' -- as long as it is not manipulated with -- will usually at least partly bring 'capitalist-cosmic justice' back to greedy, narcissistic owners...
But still, some legislation and legal protection to the employee and the consumer/customer need to be in place...In North America, this function is to some extent carried out by all political parties, although generally emphasized more by the 'left' parties than the 'right'....ignored more by the 'right' parties than the 'left'...
In Hegel's Hotel, metaphorically speaking, I bring Karl Marx into the same negotiating room as Adam Smith...with me, playing the mediator between them.
My movement is towards a more humanistic-existential Adam Smith-Karl Marx (Capitalist-Socialist; Conservative-Liberal; Republican-Democrat) dialectic negotiation and union.
Let the rhetoric fly!
-- dgb, May 14th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process....
