The Golden Rules, don't get them mixed up!

The Society Golden Rule:

'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. This is still a good standard to live by.  It helps people get along and be polite and helps keep an orderly society. 

The Business Golden Rule:

'He who has the Gold, makes the Rules'. While this statement may be controversial, it's still the law of the land in the world of the workplace. 

Important to remember: 

Never mix the two up! They are not the same. 
It's hard to enforce the societal 'Golden Rule' in the workplace, although workers have been trying for generations and will be trying until the end of time. Good Luck!

There will always be those who get drunk with their own ‘power’ and want to impose their standards on everyone else. They can make a lot of noise and sometimes make headway in their efforts. We’re moving towards regulating what people can and cannot do in their car (cell phones, seatbelts, etc.) and who knows where that will eventually lead. Never mind that the people whining are not the purchasers of said vehicles, they just want everybody ‘safe’. They really just want everybody to be just like them, anxious all the time mostly. Of course there are those that are in that camp that are so calm & bored, they can’t wait to die. Looks like they're headed around the food & nutrition bend!

Entrepreneurs and Corporate Moguls have always taken substantial risk to build and sustain successful businesses only to have worker-bees want to make demands of more & better pay, time off, benefits, etc. I offer no argument that the pay discrepancies are incredible and that the societal Golden Rule should be considered in offering workers a 'living wage'. However, there has been no workforce that has been able to successfully demand and get Employers to give up more money if there’s no desire to.

  It's morally decent to pay a good wage, it's even smart; because a happy worker is a productive worker. We can talk all day long about the benefits of paying employees more money but at the end, the employer will always have the option of shutting down the business for any reason he wills. Ohio is an ‘At Will’ Employment state. If there’s no written contract, you work at the employer’s will.

This includes his or her desire to hire scaps, stop protesters, and even end the demands of the workforce for more money. (See Business Golden Rule).

It seems to me, in a weak economy, it makes more sense to encourage entrepreneurial opportunities. The effort to fight business owners for more of their money could be spent fighting for programs to encourage people with a better understanding of the societal ‘Golden Rule’, and perhaps even better character to get started building their dreams. Of course, there is the risk that once the have-nots, become the haves, they may have a different view of payroll situations.

 Student interns are now debating and even suing to demand pay for work when they were hired under the terms of a non-paid intern. In the old days, workers with less experience made less money, notwithstanding education. Sometimes they even worked for free to get the training, experience and networking necessary to get a foothold in an industry. Many entrepreneurs did hard work for little pay for long periods of time to gain the necessary tools to become moguls. Why doesn’t this generation feel the need to follow that path? Of course, the self-made moguls wouldn’t have done it if they didn’t have to, but they did and look what happened? We have many modern conveniences because they stuck it through to grind out a career in uncharted waters.

 Many older workers have tried to have their voice heard among the younger generation that you must work your way up the ladder, not just graduate and step into a thriving career. Some professions offer that scenario but most don’t. Often there is much time and effort with little pay involved in success. Of course there’s the old fashioned way to wealth—inheritance. But for most of us, success comes at the end of little sleep, hard work and lots of time.

 It’s time to come back to reality. If you don’t own it, you don’t get to run it!

That’s just my opinion. What’s yours?