Getting a Square Deal

I am a businessman at heart. I owned my first small business when I was 19. I was selling t-shirts and wrestling memorabilia on a website. I had little success to speak of, but I was well supplied with drinking money. In retrospect, that was a really bad idea. During college I was also a radio show host with one of my buddies for a local radio show. Josh and Joe's Big @$$ Radio Show on WPWR 97.9 "the power of central New York"; which we parleyed into our own DJ business for weddings, birthday parties ect. I've been a wedding photographer while I was a journalist for the Connecticut National Guard and I've always been dabbling in something.

Finally the business bug has stuck , I am going to opening a business with one of my good friends. Its actually a concept that we have both been dreaming and scheming for years separately. We have even known each other for several years not realizing we both wanted the same thing. Now we are going to make a go of it. I've been working on setting up the corporate structure and doing product research. Which brings me to the point of this post.

During my commute home, I was listening to NPR and I finally learned the origin of the term "Square Deal". It was a fascinating piece on George F. Johnson and his corporation, the Endicott-Johnson Co. They made shoes but what he really did was develop loyalty and turn away from the cold bottom line in favor of a corporate family.

George F. Johnson was a pioneer of fair corporate practices for his day. His factories in the 1940's were not just factories. They included schools, medical clinics, pools, recreation facilities, child care, the 40 hour work week, 8 hour work days, vacation and sick time and he offered the most competitive salaries in his industry. What is better is the fact that he really cared about his employees. He even built home for his them that they purchase at rates far lower than the average cost of home ownership in the rest of central New York. These were not shanties either, these homes where dream homes for his laborers.

My LLC will probably be only a handful of workers. I doubt I will ever run anything as big as Endicott-Johnson. This is because I really don't have an interest in anything that big, not because of lack of talent. This little known piece of history has brought me to two realizations.

First, the corporate structure lends itself to be completely uncaring, so you have to take special interest in running your businesses with the highest ethics and morals. Whenever you give the legal rights of a person to non-feeling entity (which is exactly what a corporation is) it is easy to consider employees as just cogs in a machine. It takes people with heart and conviction to make it be about something other than the bottom line. I want to run my business with heart and conviction.

Second, I am lucky to have my current career in the Army. There are certainly some individuals who think of Soldiers as expendable cogs in the machine, but they don't make it very far in the structure. Despite all the controversies, problems, complaints and politics;  most of us in the military get a square deal. Certainly, we get a better deal than many in the civilian sector. Which is appropriate considering all that we are expected to give for that deal.