I am a huge proponent of small business not corporatised business in the same way I am all for local and regional autonomy, because the dissemination of power means more diversity and more choice for more people.
Which is one of the reasons I love living in the country: the decentralisation of sovereignty, and why I love being a part of the blogosphere: the decentralisation of information.
Last night I taught the final class for this term's course on blogging. Just as I felt when I taught English in Thailand, I felt so proud when my students got the hang of what they were doing.
Here is a snapshot of what some of them are doing:
4 comments:
Congratulations, teacher Meg. I've looked at all four linked blogs, and I think they are a credit to you - and to the bloggers. I am proud of you. xx
OK - this is actually one of my bugbears.
Small business is actually the devil spawn.
No, really.
Staff in small businesses are much more likely to be poorly treated, be without benefits, harassed etc., as well as not paying their fair share of taxes because of book cooking.
This is not to say that corporatised businesses are paragons of virtue, but they are much more regulated and are more likely to follow government regulations than do small businesses.
The difference is that corporatised businesses are much larger in scale, so when they do wrong, it's much more noticeable. The shafting of workers, the shoddy food handling, the lack of tax paying is more prevalent in small businesses, but it's done in smaller increments that are much less scandalous.
And I say this having worked for my parents in fish and chip shops in my younger years and at a franchise video store. These small businesses sucked big time -- my parents sucked big time as employers. I have been better treated in larger corporations.
Anyway, that's what I reckon. We can still be friends even if we disagree on this, right?
Of course we can still be friends!
But after we have all died because governments allowed big business bosses in expensive suits to suck the life out of the Earth in the name of shareholder profits, I hope my version of heaven comes true and not yours: heterogeneous, diverse and not a shopping mall in sight.
I hope Milton Friedman is rolling in his grave.
I agree- small business stinks!, especially fish and chip shops and video franchises.
But surely Meg was talking about really, really small businesses and self-employed people, not about poorly run sweat shops run by people who just are not competent and are ignorant about how to deal with other people they might have working for them.
Actually we need a mixed economy: big businesses and government departments, small businesses (even fish and chip shops) and self-employed people who have some kind of skill they can get by on. And in that context it's great that people can pick up new skills in community learning places, eg how to blog or whatever.
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