It began with one of the cockier tellers asking politely to be paid a mileage rate commensurate with driving on Vermont roads, something that might cover at least the gasoline of driving up and down and up again to cover shifts in different bank branches. He hinted that car wear from those mountainous and often caustic roads might also be a cost covered by the bank if tellers were expected to drive. He might also have been asking for an hourly rate raise to account for these hours given over to driving. He presented this as a representative voice for all the tellers who are being shunted up and down the state to cover shifts in our chronically short-staffed company. Some branches are so chronic, they have never actually had sufficient staff in the branch and rely on other branches for tellers every day. This falls particularly heavy on the central branches, and Montpelier most of all — where the cocky teller is supposed to work, where he maybe works two or three days a month.
Now, this couldn’t have been carried off by just any teller. This complaint came from one with a rather influential daddy. But by all accounts, it worked. Well, there were no raises handed out, but the mileage allowance was increased for the first time in about a decade, and there has been a noticeable reduction in shipping tellers around the state. In fact, it might have been a factor in closing one of the underperforming branches.
Not only the tellers were affected. We have been severely short-staffed since the 2023 flood, and moderately stressed since coming back from COVID. (I recently heard an apparently serious suggestion from one employee to another that “you could maybe slip on some ice” to get a day off…) One might think that human resources would be aggressively pursuing job candidates. But it turned out that HR has been sitting on applications and resumés for months, some for so long that the application “expired” (whatever that means…). Now, suddenly there are interviews for open positions throughout the company. In fact, many weeks after the person who used to share my workload walked out, there are interviews happening now. There may be a new hire on the horizon. Maybe… And it might all be down to this kid in Montpelier who is tired of tire replacement and extra oil changes for the sake of a bank teller job… well, him and his daddy, anyway… (Though I might have helped move along the hire in my own department by hinting that I was going to start putting the overtime that I am working on my time card…)
My first thought when I heard this story was “That’s brilliant!” Only, let’s go further. Let’s demand to be paid for all commuting at the same hourly rate we make when at work, plus the inevitable overtime pay for two to three hours every work day because there is no housing any closer to your job than a 60-90 minute commute each way. Let’s insist on car wear stipends if the job requires local travel but does not come with company provided transport. Let’s require travel pay that begins the minute we leave our homes and does not go off the clock until we are back home again. Do you know how fast that would shut down commuting and travel!
Think of all the things that are ameliorated with the end of that form of business subsidizing, making business pay for the transport it demands of its workforce. There would be less driving, of course, less need of gas and car maintenance and road infrastructure. There would be more teleconferencing and a near cessation of business travel. We’d see a sharp reduction in emissions as we saw with the COVID shutdown. Air travel would be gutted, with the whole “business class” seating section made obsolete. There would likely be a switch to more remote work. And this, in turn, would also eliminate much in the way of management jobs (which is mainly why we were forced to go back to the office after COVID, to be managed).
For jobs that require physical presence, business would be incentivized to ensure that affordable housing is available within a very short commute. If all businesses are forced to do this, then the quality of the housing may even be adequate for living, as businesses compete with each other for employees. The company that has an agreement with the local slum lord is not going to get the best applicants. Business would also pressure local communities to be more vibrant, with more needs met locally, because the smartest people, the best potential employees, will probably forgo a car altogether when there is no longer a need for a long commute to wage work. If business wants the smart people, then you’ll soon see the Chamber of Commerce pushing for better amenities. Things like urban food deserts and haphazard waste collection would be much reduced. There might be more to do. Might even see better funding for schools and child care.
But why stop with transport? What about all the other ways we subsidize business?
We have welfare to accommodate the low wages paid by business. Make business pay welfare costs as part of payroll taxes, and I suspect there would soon be no need for welfare except for those on actual disability. If Amazon and Walmart want to fight minimum wage increases, then they can pay the cost to society instead.
Then how about job training… Our education system is little more than work-force grooming. Kids aren’t taught to be competent adult humans. Instead, we teach job skills, which are not terribly useful skills in real life. American education is all job training, by design. Our education system was developed to foster an “educated” work force, meaning a population that comes into adulthood with the skills industry needs, not the skills and knowledge a human needs. (Which are both sort of inimical to being a docile and easily managed laborer.) So make business pay for its own education system. Then perhaps cut that system out from the real education, reserving it for graduates of a true education. We could have an education system that actually taught our children how to be adult humans in the real world, not just reading/writing/arithmetic, which are useless skills if you don’t know how to think, to act, and to be well in the world. And business could pay for its own training.
And while we’re in academia, why don’t we make business pay for research and development as well? Not merely to acquire the tools and ideas, but royalties paid to the researchers themselves, for as long as the idea or tool remains an integral part of the business — which may even mean paying the royalties to designated heirs. This is not giving money to universities and national labs. This is paying the actual people who have worked on the research — which means we are going to have to name those people, beginning with all the women who have been crucial to all the discoveries and development of the modern era and who have never received even thanks for their efforts, never mind fair compensation. To the contrary quite a few paid for their contributions with their lives…
This bring us to all the damages that society has to bear, all the harm done by business that we have to pay for, individually and as a society. None of us wants that harm; few of us benefit in any way from it. So make business pay for the harm it does. Tax business for the waste it generates, with volume-based sliding tax rates. Penalize business for dumping waste rather than processing and remediating harm. Charge land and resource reclamation taxes for destruction, particularly to the air, soil and water which every human body in society needs. We pay for the harm that business does, with our tax money in the case of things like Superfund sites, and with our poor health and impoverished communities — which we also pay for in taxes and in increased health care and insurance costs. So why not stop subsidizing business harm! Make business pay to clean up the mess and remediate the harm it does and watch how quickly harm is eliminated. If harm is a business cost, then business will stop causing harm.
Here we might come back around to transport, which causes more harm than anything else. Transport is the majority of carbon emissions. Transport destroys land and breaks up communities. Transport directly causes extinction through moving opportunistic species and through habitat destruction and indirectly causes extinction through climate destabilization. Transport enables the gulf between work and home. Transport allows business to create wage slaves in poor regions of the world and incentivizes off-loading harm to distant places. Transport makes harm possible at global scale. So make business pay full the full costs. Make business pay transport taxes, import taxes, export taxes. Make business pay for public road maintenance and shipping infrastructure like ports and railways. Take transport out of the hands of private profit-seeking entities and nationalize it. Or better yet, internationalize it, and make all users pay for it, again as a volume-based scale, sliding upwards for large volume. Currently, our system incentivizes the proliferation of transport, not its reduction. More money is made if there are more miles of transport, to the obvious detriment of all. So of course transport is rampant… make it cost what it truly costs this planet and business will stop doing it.
I am not the first person to suggest de-subsidizing business. This is quite an obvious way to end the harm. So why not! Be like the kid in Montpelier — especially if you have the voice of privilege — and start demanding what is owed to you. Make no mistake, the entire world of industry is in your debt. It could never pay you what it owes. And it knows that… and spends quite a lot on messaging to keep the majority of us from knowing.
But we can’t take on capitalism whole. We can’t take on the airline industry or mining or palm oil plantations or the engorged leviathan that is waste disposal (meaning, dumping elsewhere). We can’t get rid of oil and plastic. But we can tax them locally. We can change zoning laws. We can set local tax rates to favor local business, and local production most of all. We can raise the minimum wage locally and penalize short term rentals and flipping of homes through property taxes. We can create a local basic income paid out of a pool of tax monies collected from businesses that do not pay living wages. We can create more cooperatives and make it easy for employees to own their business. We can adopt local currencies and charge higher exchange rates to harmful business. We can revoke local and state business certification and tie business licensing to society needs. We can make local reclamation zones and require business to pay into funds supporting those projects. We can create fees and local taxes that support the efforts of organizations that are already doing the work of remediation. We can levy and enforce fines and prosecute every infraction. We can kick business our of our schools and create more toll roads and push the Chamber of Commerce to adopt goals and values that favor the community first — which also supports local business by creating a vibrant local market.
All of this is in our power and it is all powerful stuff. It is all small but with large consequences, particularly as more communities take up these practices. And the best part is that the same things that help people, help local business. Because local business is people. It is people-scaled, but it is also actual living people. There may be corporations, but they are small and the stake-holders are your neighbors. The better off everybody in the community is, the more opportunity for community business. Maybe not for wealth extraction, but trade and service and production. A healthy community needs all that. So, small and responsible is good for business.
And all it takes is a little effort from each of us, a night spent haranguing the city council, a few hours of writing letters to a regulatory board, an afternoon going door-to-door with a petition, perhaps a stint on the school board. And a continual good-natured battering of Chamber of Commerce members down at the pub.
Of course, it helps if those with a voice are brought on board. Find the daddy of the bank teller who is being forced to destroy his car to subsidize staffing issues. I’m sure that guy has leverage and opinions on the car bills. He could probably be swayed to think things and say things that are in alignment with the needs of those who have no influence. But if you have the advantage of privilege, then use it! Don’t expect someone else to do that work. Get out there and get it done.
I am not sure that my employer quite understands the changes that have been set in motion. The gossip chain spread that story within days. Now, we all know that we have leverage. We can demand. Wouldn’t it be great if such a thing were to happen in your community!
So what’s stopping you…
