So.

I've gave an example in my last post of Government-funded stupidity. Whether you chalk it up to stupidity or just ignorance, it's a good example of people put in a situation to make decisions on things they had no expertise in. Did they mean well? I can't really think otherwise. But did they know enough about what they were doing? Obviously not.

There's always going to be stupid people in the workplace. The law of averages promises that. The aspect of stupidity I'm trying to single out, however, is that portion that is company mandated, as my previous example indicates. "Stupidity" probably isn't the best word for this kind of ill, as the items in the list cover the gamut from blatant ignorance to poor communication to practical larceny. All of it has a negative effect on Average Joe Worker.

Think on the following situations, and see how many apply to you:

• A CEO records a record year for bonuses while slashing jobs.
• A member of upper management announces that there will be no job cuts until a precious few months later when such cuts become "Inevitable"
• A policy is put in place that is counterproductive

An interesting example of the second bullet happenened to a friend of mine, who works for a popular hotel chain. The hotel he works at is measured against other hotels by a single metric: Increasing profit. In essence, the hotel has to not just keep showing that it's making money, but that it keeps making MORE money then it did before. So even if the hotel has a good month it might not be good enough if they "only" made the same amount as they made in the prior month.

Let's think about this somewhat mathematically for a second. The hotel has a fixed number of rooms. If the same number or rooms rent out a month, you're going to have the same amount of money coming in. So how do you raise profits? Well, assuming that they can't just add rooms (Which seems sensical) what avenues of possible adjustment are there?

1. Get more people in the rooms you have
2. Increase the cost to the customer per room
3. Decrease the cost associated with running the hotel

So let's see. If we get more people in the rooms, profits go up. But there's only a fixed number of rooms, so we can only have so many people in the hotel. If we tend to run mostly full most of the time, we're not going to get a lot of gain there. Not to mention that you can't just magically create more customers reliably. You could potentially draw more customers by dropping prices (Which makes it that much harder to show a profit) or by advertising, which again cuts into our income, but that's about it.

If we increase the cost per customer, we'll end up with more income, but eventually we'll have fewer customers due to competition from other chains (The "WalMart" effect). We may be able to get more customers by lowering costs, but again that's a narrow range to play with.

So we come to the third option - cut costs. Figure out ways to provide the same service less expensively

So the hotel tries a number of things. They get creative. They raise costs a couple bucks, they fire the dude who never really worked anyway, we change our advertising around. Profits go up. But after a while, the company is looking grimly at you again: "Is that the best you can do?"

This cycle continues, and finally you're in the hard position of nowhere left to grow. The rooms are as full as they're going to get. You can't really cut any more people without descreasing the quality of service. Any more price increases are seriously going to start costing you customers. So what's left?

Fire half your support staff and make the other half work twice as hard? Or hire not quite twice as many people, but make them all work half-time so that you don't have to pay any of them benefits? Cheapen services like laundry & food? Put off maintenance and let the hotel get a little shoddy - and when you do fix things, do the cheapest most superficial job possible? Or outright hire illegal immigrants because you don't have to pay them much of anything and you can always act saintly and surprised if INS turns up? What do all these items have in common?

To an extent, they're all varying degrees of unethical. Note I didn't say "Illegal", I said "unethical" (Although "unethical" by and large contains "illegal). You're trying to convince people that they're getting the same quality of product, but you're doing it through means that degrade the product or degrade the people providing that product.

Now, I'm not saying that every cost-cutting measure is inherently unethical. Replacing workers with robots or some other automated service? No problem - You're providing the same quality of service at a reduced cost. Figuring out ways to reengineer your process to be more efficient? No heartburn here. Business owners should constantly be looking for "better" ways to do business.

So when is it unethical, and when is it merely good business? Where's that line?