By J.D.R. Brown (The Cascade) – Email
Date Posted: September 22, 2011
Print Edition: September 21, 2011
Mr. Fowler,
Nowhere in any of my articles will you find me opposed to enterprise or employment. As you correctly point out, Sodexo – a French company with revenues of 15.3 billion euro in 2009 – employs many thousands of individuals in operations all over the world. Such prolific industry is laudable, if only because it demonstrates an organizational expertise that was exceedingly rare until this last century. But such bureaucratic accomplishment does nothing to abrogate either Sodexo’s fundamental condition or its business practices.
As a middle manager in a robust, multinational company, you are very likely aware of globalization and the benefits generated by the free flow of capital. And while great wealth has been generated during this Second Age of Globalization, inequality and injustice grow and continue to fester. Sodexo regularly employs workers here on campus for wages as low as $9.75/hour, and often without pension or medical benefits. A full time worker would earn $18,720 per annum in pre-tax income, which is 31% below the median income for a single income earner in British Columbia. With the costs of basic necessities like housing, and the absurd increases in the real cost of tuition that have occurred over the last thirty years, I would not call that a living wage.
I am not so naive to think that companies have ethical obligations the way moral agents do. On the contrary, most corporations are bound by law to endeavour to provide profits for shareholders. So let us drop this pretence of Sodexo’s altruism and recognize that there is one and only one goal for Sodexo: profit.
This single-minded focus is not, in itself, a bad thing. Rather, the excesses of greed and the unrelenting base calculation of “economic good” can and do conspire to generate injustice. The mechanisms of the market cannot provide justice anymore than the courts can generate wealth. But it is to the law and its foundation of reason that we must look for insight and guidance for right action.
In your case, right action is to pay your workers a living wage, to provide them with superannuation and medical insurance, and to give them the freedom to organize democratically and bargain collectively. Is it really so mysterious why your burgers suck when you have such underpaid, dispirited people working for you? I do not think so.
Work gives us purpose and it ought to give us dignity, too. Giving alms a few times a year does not excuse your niggardly wages.
Yours,
Jack Brown
Opinion Editor
The Cascade
