David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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You are here: Home / Archives for hard work

You Need Money to Make Money

January 31, 2014 By David Griesing 4 Comments

The promise of a free market is that you can get ahead with hard work and sound investment.

In other words, you need your hard-earned money (or “working capital”) to make more money. But if you’re not earning enough to have money left over in savings at the end of the week, chances are no family member is willing to give it to you and no bank is willing to lend it to you.  Access to capital—or rather the lack of access—is changing the promise that you can get ahead if you work hard.

Productivity isn’t just about, or even primarily about making money, but money is part of it. Money makes a better life possible. Beyond the essentials, it buys time off for enrichment to read a book, connect with your neighbors or just smell the clover. It gives you time to think about the quality of your work, and not just recover from it.

rock up hill 300x250That’s why it’s a problem when those who want to work can’t earn enough to live on. Everyone in a community should be able to earn a living wage if they have the discipline, skill and desire, and everyone in the community has a stake in creating that opportunity. Escape from social dependence rests on the willingness to work and develop new skills.  Work allows “the pursuit of happiness.” A community that fails to support that kind of self-reliance and personal fulfillment is at risk of unraveling.

Productivity is also about seizing the opportunity to build new wealth with talent and elbow grease. It’s the Korean market in a poor Philadelphia neighborhood where the whole family works 8-12 hours a day, saving every penny, while the kids do school work between customers so they can get into Penn. The dream is that hard work, savings, and self-improvement will get you to a better life tomorrow. Our communities also used to support that dream.

Unfortunately, as you know, the news is full of statistics about threats to upward mobility in developed countries today (most recently in the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, published for this week’s conference in Davos, Switzerland). For the middle class, it’s become harder to live on what you earn. With reduced savings at the end of the day, increasingly it is only the wealthiest wage earners who have enough money to invest in an even better future.

Aside from the spigot of student loans, it’s been difficult if not impossible for most Americans to gain access to capital by borrowing money. You need capital to grow your business, and the kinds of companies I work with can’t get it from the banks, even when they’re doing well. In other words, unless the business owner has her own source of funds, she cannot finance her company’s future growth.

It’s the same for innovation. While there are more ways to crowdfund your brilliant idea, unless your family and thousand new friends can be your bank, bringing a new product or service to market is a longer shot than ever. Banks no longer come even close to satisfying the need that business owners have for capital.

Not so long ago it was different.

In his article “Less Innovation, More Inequality,” Nobel laureate (in economics) Edmund Phelps notes that American inventiveness and therefore general prosperity has been in decline for more than 50 years. Even with the disruptions of war and depression, from the1820’s to the 1960’s in America there was:

a frenzy of creative activity, economic competition and rapid growth in national income provided widening economic inclusion, rising wages for all and engaging careers for most.

Today, the consequences of the fall-off from a flourishing economy are becoming apparent.  New wealth is increasingly produced by and new innovation is increasingly funded by those who are rich already.

The fear is that this accumulation of wealth is creating the kind of permanent nobility last seen in 17th and 18th century Europe. Today, rich people increasingly go to the best schools with, marry, do business with, and eventually inherit much of society’s wealth from one another. (I’ve talked elsewhere about Charles Murray’s take on this relatively new cultural divide.)

In terms of your work today, these are some of the questions that are worth considering:

What happens to how you view your work when an economic system that rewarded talent, discipline and sacrifice evolves into an aristocracy?

What happens when only a fortunate few have access to the capital that makes future dreams come true?

An article in the Wall Street Journal last week noted:

For some, this would be a dystopian vision, skewing incentives across the economy, and making inherited wealth even more important to signaling social status.  It runs contrary to the idea of a meritocracy and equality of opportunity that many in the U.S., on both sides of the political spectrum, see as forming the bedrock of a just society.

It’s certainly a nightmare vision for those of us who believe in the ennobling qualities of work.

Clearly, it’s time to shake things up.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Entrepreneurship, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: American dream, aristocracy, class, class division, cultural divide, hard work, income inequality, meritocracy, promise, savings

Woody Guthrie on Work

November 20, 2012 By David Griesing 1 Comment

There’s been a lot written and said about Woody Guthrie lately. But even so, there’s nothing better than hearing the man in his own words.

My life bridges Woody’s time (1912-1967) and ours. I remember his voice “blowin’ in the wind” of the folk music and protest songs I grew up on. But it’s not so much his rhythms that have stayed with me, as what he kept saying—every single chance he got—about how hard it can be to work in America, and how much the men and women doing all that work deserve encouragement.

That’s never been truer than it is today.

We’ve also been hearing a lot from Woody because a comprehensive catalog of his songs just came out. It was his music more than anyone’s that captured the Depression-era exodus from Dust Bowl to California. Even if you don’t know his name, you know “This Land is Your Land,” the song that has become our unofficial national anthem. Woody’s best known for that kind of simple everyman wordplay paired with a catchy melody you’ll still be humming tomorrow.

 In his writings, like Bound for Glory and Born to Win–and in all that singing and strumming—Woody celebrated the men and women who go to work everyday in that unforgiving part of our country we often sweep under the rug. It’s the 47% that were grist in the recent presidential campaign, the half of America almost no one champions anymore. It is their blood, sweat and tears that pushes the nation forward. They’re the folks Woody Guthrie wrote about.

 

I worked in your town

I worked in your farm

My hands is blistered

From the elbows down.

I sing the songs of the people that do all of the little jobs and the mean and dirty hard work in the world and of their wants and their hopes and their plans for a decent life.

For I’ll take your words and use them not to rip you down, but to squeeze you up against the wall in ways that will put new life in your old pots

         Your old pans,

         And new grease, honey, in your old washy dishrag.

I’m out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, you can take pride in yourself and in your work.

I write what I see

I write what I’ve seen

I write things that I just hope to see

Somewhere farther along.

An uncle of mine taught me to play the guitar and I got to going out a couple of nights a week to the cow ranches around to play for the square dances.  I made up new words to old tunes and sung them everywhere I’d go.  I had to give my pictures away to get anybody to hang them on their wall, but for singing a song, or a few songs at a country dance, they paid me as high as three dollars a night. A picture—you buy it once, and it bothers you for forty years; but with a song, you sing it out, and it soaks in people’s ears and they all jump up and down and sing it with you, and then when you quit singing it, it’s gone, and you get a job singing it again.  On top of that, you can sing out what you think.  You can tell tales of all kinds to put your ideas across to the other fellow.

And there on the Texas plains right in the dead center of the dust bowl, with the oil boom over and the wheat blowed out and the hard-working people just stumbling about, bothered with mortgages, debts, bills, sickness, worries of every blowing kind, I seen there was plenty to make up songs about.

Some people liked me, hated me, walked with me, walked over me, jeered me, cheered me, rooted me and hooted me, and before long I was invited in and booted out of every public place of entertainment in that country. But I decided that songs was a music and a language of all tongues.

I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad.  Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.

As through your life you ramble

Yes, as through your life you roam

You won’t ever see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

Now we stood in the rain and cackled like chickens, absolutely lost and buffaloed.  Never before had I had anything quite so damn silly happen to me.  Our clothes were on crooked and twisted; shoes full of mud and gravel. Hair soaking wet, and water running down our faces.  It was a funny sight to see human beings in any such shape.  Wet as we could get, muddy as the ground, we danced up and down through puddles, ran around in wide circles and laughed our heads off.  There is a stage of hard luck that turns into fun, and a stage of poverty that turns into pride, and a place in laughing that turns into fight.

 

This Thursday, Woody’s son Arlo will be singing “Alice’s Restaurant” on the radio, like he’s been doing as long as I can remember. His dad is all over it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Proud of Your Work, Heroes & Other Role Models Tagged With: Dust Bowl, forgotten worker, Great Depression, hard work, protest song, Woody Guthrie

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David Griesing (@worklifeward) writes from Philadelphia.

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