Earlier this morning I spent an interesting hour on Wisconsin Public Radio debating the proposal of Sen. Glenn Grothman (R–West Bend) to allow employees to work seven consecutive days without a day off.

WPR played, at my suggestion, some appropriate music …

… though they could have played this too (which I didn’t think of until after the show):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ms79633njIg

Listeners got the chance to voice their opinions, and they were overwhelmingly opposed. That could be a manifestation of WPR’s overwhelmingly, reflexively anti-conservative demographics. It also could be evidence that what I’ve always heard from employers about the work ethic of the Wisconsin workforce isn’t true anymore. It also could be a sign of the dysfunctional relationship between Wisconsin employers and employees. It could also be a sign of our increasingly stressful times. (Which aren’t going to get any better, by the way.)

As readers know, at StevePrestegard.com something is either right or wrong based on its merits, not on whether or not it’s popular. Since I entered the full-time work world a quarter-century ago, I have never had a job that was limited to 40 hours a week, five non-holiday weekdays a week. In the news business, news has to be covered whenever it takes place.

I don’t think I have a work ethic superior to anyone else’s. But what I learned from my parents and others I’ve worked with is that work takes as long as it takes to be done well. The comment from a minister from Ladysmith reminded me that God wants and expects us to be productive. That’s evident from Genesis through at least Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians.

The argument I made on the show for passage of Grothman’s law is flexibility for employers. In today’s business world if a customer wants a product the customer needs it now, not next month or next week. Manufacturers do not keep parts in stock anymore, because inventory costs money. As for retail businesses, many are open seven days a week, particularly in tourist areas. If a business has a customer, it has to serve that customer whenever the customer wants to be served if that business wants to stay in business. (Unless you’re OK with waiting until Monday to have the furnace that died on Saturday fixed.)

None of those who opined during the show seemed to be employers. There remains a remarkable amount of ignorance about how business works, and perhaps that’s employers’ fault for not telling their employees how their businesses, their areas of business and the economy work. So here are some potentially harsh truths:

• Businesses exist to provide a product or service to their customers. Businesses do not exist to employ people.
• The number one responsibility of a business is to make a profit for its owners. When a business doesn’t make profits, or enough profits, doesn’t take place, customers don’t get served, and therefore employees don’t get paid.
• An employee is employed to serve the business’ customers. In an at-will-employment state such as Wisconsin, you are there as long as your employer wants you there, and no longer.
• An employee costs probably 50 percent more than his or her gross pay to the business. That’s because of the cost of various government-mandated benefits, as well as benefits employers provide to attract and retain employees.

Since a lot of my work has involved covering business, I’ve met a lot of business owners over the years. I’ve written before that, to paraphrase William F. Buckley’s comparison of the Harvard University faculty and the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book, I’d rather be governed by the members of any chamber of commerce than any elective governing body. Business people earn every cent they get, because every cent they get comes from a customer who decided that that business’ product or service is worth their money, more so than the potential alternatives.

Business owners work nights, and weekends, and holidays already. They get virtually no respect in this state from elected officials of a certain party whose name starts with D, and little respect from the allegedly smart people who get paychecks from  a unit of government. The contribution of any business to its area far outweighs the taxes it pays, which is why I argue here that the correct level of business taxation is zero.

In addition to the general anti-business rhetoric listeners heard (and can read on Cardin’s Facebook page) today, I always find amusing how people ignorant of business feel free to tell a business how it should be run. The opposing view this morning said that businesses should hire more people, ignoring the fact that it costs less for a business to give its existing employees more work than to hire more employees. It’s unclear to me why a business should hire more people if there’s a reasonable chance that those people will have to be laid off if business dries up. (That makes me wonder how his union, which by the way is a business too, is run.) People are employed based on the business’ needs — businesses do not exist to employ people.

There was both an on-the-air comment and an online comment that some people work seven days a week already, so there needs to be no law to approve that practice. That’s a nicely small-L libertarian view that doesn’t mesh with reality in this very unlibertarian state (other than in alcohol issues) of ours. In this state, based on experience, it’s not that anything not specifically prohibited is allowed; it’s the other way around — anything not specifically allowed is prohibited. I suspect some business owners have inadvertently found that out.

If you believe the callers I heard, you would assume that every workplace is a 19th-century sweatshop, or would be if those evil businesses had their way. I work in a field that by reputation is the pits in terms of workplace environment. (Journalism, it is said, puts the word “fun” in “dysfunction.”) I wouldn’t say that about business, but then again I’ve dealt with more of them than apparently WPR listeners have.

It may be that some negative opinions of business come from people dissatisfied with their employers. (I always wonder where reflexive anti-business attitudes come from — someone’s own experience, the experience of someone that person knows, or what they claim to know based on what they’ve read.) Some of them may be dissatisfied with their work as a result of poor personal decisions they’ve made in their past in such areas as their own education — failing to make themselves more valuable in the workplace through education and training. I’m not unsympathetic to that, but I’m not sure what can be done about that, and government cannot undo, for instance, getting stuck in bad jobs because you had to go to work because you had a family younger than you should have.

The one comment after the show that brought up an original point was what happens to an employee of two businesses when employer A wants that person to work overtime when that person is supposed to be at employer B. I don’t have a good answer for that, and I suspect that, thanks to the wonderful job the federal government and current presidential administration is doing with the economy, that is likely be an increasingly prevalent dilemma.

The fact is that in a healthy economy (which this is not), employees always have the last word, because they can choose to work somewhere, or not. The evidence is the roaring 1990s, where minimum-wage jobs paid more than minimum wage because that’s what it took for employers to hire and keep employees. That’s obviously not happening now, which is why the state needs to be actively pro-business. I’ve argued here before that state policy is less anti-business, but it’s really not pro-business when bureaucrats remain free to enact regulations actively hostile to business and businesses and everyone else are all (still) taxed too much.

Now I have to go back to work.