Coyote Blog

Assume the following conditions:

1. I am increasingly liable for any dumbass thing my employees say or do.  It does not matter if it is absolutely against my values and company rules, if someone, say, uses a racial epithet with a customer or another employee, I will likely at least get sued.  Given my deductibles on insurance, I am out $20,000 a case even if I win.
2. Minimum wages have increased faster than the production value of unskilled, inexperienced laborers.
3. Obamacare is raising the minimum cost of a full-time employee by at least $2,000-$3,000 a year, not including the as-yet-to-be-define but likely expensive record-keeping and administrative requirements 
4. In states like California, the law increasingly gives employees the ability to make new claims on my income (e.g. fake workers comp and disability claims) or to even make themselves un-firable (by asking for a family medical leave, or claiming a disability, or claiming to be a whistle-blower).

Against this backdrop, what am I going to do?  I am going to hire more skilled and experienced workers who justify my minimum employment costs.   I am going to hire mature people less likely to get me in trouble via their immature actions.  I am going to hire people with a long work history so I can see there is not a history of scams and fraud.

In other words, I am going to hire older people.  And thus:

Of all the issues I raised above, the first one gets the least attention but in our customer contact business is perhaps the most important.  The cost of hiring a knucklehead is immense.  And the folks that do stupid stuff in 1 are often the very same people who try to take us in 4.