During one of my gigs as a corporate guy, I treated a cadre of international internal auditors to a lavish dinner.
The boys were shocked. The corporation was showing them the love. Internal audit. Who is even cordial to internal audit? These are the guys who rat you out when your department submits travel vouchers that include a drink or two, even though corporate policy clearly states that the booze is on you.
“Why don’t we pay internal audit to eat out all the time, so they stop bothering us,” one grumpy, hard-drinking executive suggested to me.
He was on to something. Paying people not to do stuff is all the rage.
Of course, American farm policy has, for decades, experimented with paying farmers not to grow one crop or another, depending on which crop has the most effective lobbyist or which international free-trade agreement offended our sensibilities.
Now, the world is experimenting with all sorts of “please don’t do nothin” incentives to stay home and eat bon-bons.
In Spain, local fishermen are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars not to fish during the America’s Cup regatta this summer. The Spanish don’t want the watery version of a traffic jam during the yacht races.
Speaking of traffic jams, some companies are experimenting with incentives that encourage workers to stay home, to “telecommute,” to analyze contracts and prepare internal audit reports in their pajamas — in an effort to lessen the burden on the nation’s highways and shorten the line for the really delicious lunch in the company cafeteria.
Of course, when the computers are down and the IT department is off at some seminar on how to make our lives even more miserable, the telecommuters are being paid to do nothing, nothing, nothing.
Connecticut is experiencing some discomfort with its suspension rates in urban schools. At one New Britain middle school, for instance, almost half the student population was suspended at one time or another during the 2005-2006 school year. At Weaver High in Hartford, the educational excommunicate represented 44 percent of the student body.
If time is money, the kids were being paid to stay home. Assuming that every suspension was justified and certified according to the strictest standards of due process, the kids probably appreciated being tossed out of English literature class, to wander the mean streets, looking for drugs and stuff.
A strategy to encourage starving artists to do mediocre work, as opposed to no work at all, has become an essential tool of urban planning. Many struggling cities, including Hartford, have experimented with subsidized housing for artists who make below a predetermined income. Think about that. To qualify for the benefit, you must not be too good at what you do — or you will be ineligible for the program, with your brushes and canvas and stuff tossed out the window and onto the mean streets, where the bad kids from Weaver High are waiting for you.
There’s a delicate balance to all this, of course. Chicago has announced a one-day, unpaid furlough of expensive city staff, in an effort to reduce a budget deficit. In this case, folks will be unpaid to stay home, rather than paid to stay home — but some folks like that just fine.
Grumpy conservatives, who are, well, you know, so grumpy, suggest that the city might be better off if the city staffers stay home and mow their lawn.
In a sense, the paid-to-stay-home scenario could be a crafty conspiracy by fiscal hawks to test the tenets of zero-based budgeting. When I am elected governor of Connecticut, I intend to pay the staff of the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women to stay home for a day or week or month, just to see what would happen. Would women wander the tundra, dazed and confused about their “status,” because the commission staff was home watching “Oprah?”
There are negotiations afoot to pay the editor of the Hartford Business Journal to not work for a few weeks, so that the Cohen column could be 800 or 900 or 15,000 words long, without fear that said editor would whack it — which is sort of like telling Renoir that he uses too many colors.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
