One Thing Leads to Another

(This post is actually the origin of “You Get What You Pay For: Low-Wage Locale vs. Qualified Workers”, posted Sept. 15^th . This is the wordy version.)

 

May 28, 2021

 

You know how you get the germ of an idea, and one thing leads to another, and pretty soon you’ve got a whole scenario in your head?

 

There was a company whose Accounts Payable department was not getting discounts for early bill payment because goods in the warehouse weren’t being entered as Received in the computer system. If the accounting department doesn’t see that the goods are received, they won’t pay the invoices; and money that could have been saved by early payment was being tossed away. 

I thought that either they needed more help unloading and doing quality control checks, or the procedures might need streamlining. I was betting on the former, but couldn’t rule out the latter, either.

So then I started wondering how the company was trying to recruit more workers. Were they going with Indeed.com, or the DOL website, or Manpower, Inc., or doing something else?

Then I started wondering about the workers themselves. The state where the warehouses were located had a dismal record for public school education. Did the business locate its plants there because labor was cheap? If so, they weren’t increasing the tax base much, which meant that education wasn’t being funded, which in turn led to…a substandard labor pool to draw from.

So, then I started thinking that maybe I could convince somebody in the company to actually visit the plants, and the cities they’re located in, and look around. Start by looking at whether the plants need more staff; then look at procedures; then look at the quality of the staff they’ve got, and the quality of the labor pool they could draw from if they needed to replace the current staff; then work with school and civic leaders to invest in local education…

By the time I got done with the scenario in my head, the company was a Public Benefactor, schools were humming along nicely, and the prospects of young people had improved dramatically.

 

All because some invoices at company headquarters in another state weren’t getting paid very fast.

 

So far, the scenario is still in my head, but I’m hoping to get it into somebody else’s fairly soon.