Cheap Labor - Lessons from the Gridiron

It's crunch time in the US when it comes to valuing the labor of American workers. It seems that cheap labor is corporate America's game plan week in and week out. That theory has been put through repeated rigorous testing in many labor markets in the US in recent months. Workers across the US are hurting from the constant threat of outsourcing their labor to anyone who will do it cheaper. One obvious example is now playing out in the 2012 National Football League season.

Pre-season NFL games were different this year. In addition to out-of-practice teams and inexperienced rookies, there were incompetent referees to contend with. NFL management seemed to view referees as interchangeable parts. After a few games and a short learning curve, no one would even notice or even care any more.

Bazinga! The entertainment value of NFL football has been compromised. Every game has been co-opted by a sideshow of incompetent replacement officials. Games have turned into long, tedious affairs where play-by-pay announcers have turned into critics of the lame officiating we get with each and every game.

Monday night's Packers vs Seahawks fiasco the latest and worst example greed trumping everything else. The outcome of that game was decided wrongly by incompetent, inexperienced officials. It would have been easily affordable to have experienced, competent referees on the field. Apparently the NFL management moguls could not spare a slightly larger fraction of their profits to ensure the integrity of the game.

There are many management-labor and life lessons to be learned:

• You get what you pay for. Quality costs money.
• Short-term profits based on cheap labor can lead to long-term problems with compromised product quality.
• Compromised product quality can alienate and shrink your customer base.
• A shrinking customer base generates less profits in the long run.

Football and working life have become increasingly complicated. If we expect excellence from those doing difficult high-stakes jobs, we need to pay them. Greed and outsourcing have become the enemies of quality in America. Respect for workers and the resulting quality of what they produce and the integrity of their experience are hard to quantify. Yet we sure do notice when they are gone.

I'm not sure how NFL football affects things like presidential elections. It seems clear we have gone too far down the path of producing cheap stuff by not valuing workers. If we really want to value people we need to value what they do and honor their work.

The value of work is a powerful subtext to the current race for the White House. Presidential attitudes toward outsourcing matter and hold powerful consequences for American workers. Mitt Romney would probably have hired replacement refs. I doubt Barack Obama would have. We might all think about how we value our work and the work of others when we vote on November 6th.