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Recognition

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There are many people for whom money is a draw. Indeed, it is one of the things which keep people going to a job.

The question is, how many of those people, even if they are well paid, would suffer their job if they were treated contrary to their wishes - shouted at, kicked, abused generally, harassed and so on; you get the picture? Not many, I would say.

For a person to be anywhere near good at his job, he has to like it. This is elementary psychology. He is a masochist who will willingly turn up at a place of work he dislikes to do a job he hates day in and day out and actually be good at what he does. Think about it - it doesn't make sense. And no employer worth his, her or their salt is going to pay enough to keep someone in a job he hates - especially if there's someone somewhere who is prepared to do it for less and better.

Bribing someone to do something they don't want to do leads to industrial strife. The seventies were, in Britain, a decade of strife on a massive scale - strife stirred up by neo bolsheviks like British Leyland's Derek "Red Robbo" Robinson and exacerbated by "loony" left-wingers like Ken Livingstone, no doubt, but it was clear that the workers of that era were discontented. They were discontented not because of a lack of money - being a nationalised company, British Leyland (for example) had money thrown at them. No - they were discontented because the disarray of the place made work practically untenable. This is attested, in the light of what I maintain above, by the now almost legendary poor and uninspired quality of the BL products of that period.

Of course, everything has its price, even if that price is beyond the reach of even the Bill Gates' of this world. But at the final analysis, the finished product still has to be worth the money the end user pays for it. If I have a factory producing widgets which sell for a certain price, if the only way I am going to staff my factory is to pay an astronomical sum in wages then the whole operation quickly becomes untenable. If I have a group of happy, contented workers, whose efforts are recognised, then they can theoretically be paid the minimum wage and still be happy: theoretically, because that is to reckon without the decency a responsible employer would have.

Happy workers generally mean happy customers. Recognised workers are generally happy.

Learn more about this author, Tabitha Hergest.
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