Say you’re running a small business and you want to do right by your employees. You want to pay a good wage, offer good health care benefits, support worklife balance. But you’re swimming in an ecological niche where most of your competitors pay crappy wages and no benefits. Treating your employees better would give you a small advantage — turnover is less, and more dedicated, skilled employees tend to gravitate to your shop. But in your niche cost is king, and this advantage is overwhelmed by the costs of treating your employees well. If you live by your values, your business will die.
Right now, the deck is stacked against you. What if we turned it around — tweaked the ecosystem so the rules favored your values? In short, we could follow Principle #2: Stack the Deck in Favor of the “Good Guys.”
Sometimes Stacking the Deck is about just giving good folks a small edge — offering tax credits for businesses that offer certain benefits, creating a fast approval track for developers who’re creating a Smart Growth development. This approach has the advantage that it’s not dictating outcomes — nudging, if you will.
But sometimes nudging isn’t enough. If we want an ecosystem in which offering good health care benefits or good wages isn’t a death sentence for your small business, we’re going to need to reshape the ecosystem so competing by treating workers like crap isn’t an option.
Reshaping the ecosystem doesn’t always mean using the government. I used to work at a union that was helping workers organize low-wage small service businesses in a city. One of the interesting things I learned working on the campaign was that once in a while a small business owner would admit — privately — they were happy about the union drive. They wanted to pay their workers a living wage. But so long as their competitors could pay abysmal wages, they’d lose every contract if they followed their values. If the workers won a citywide master contract, the small business owners could stop competing based on how crappily they treated their workers and start competing on quality of service.
Stacking the Deck doesn’t ask for the impossible. In keeping with Principle #1 — We Can’t Control the Economy — it tries to be sensitive to the realities that organizations face. If small businesses in an ecological niche can’t afford the current cost of health care benefits, we can’t just insist they pay for it. Either we need to reshape the healthcare ecosystem so small businesses can comfortably afford it, or we need to reshape the ecosystem so everyone gets high quality, affordable healthcare and they don’t get it through their job.
And Stacking the Deck isn’t a panacea. We can’t magically create a world where the Good Guys always win. But here and there, we can do what we can to give them a leg up.
