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The Domino Effect

This week a client of ours bounced a check. He's a dentist and he bounced a check.

I mean, we've had to hound people for payment, but we've never actually gotten a bounced check before.

But lets back up a bit and start from the beginning. The state of Washington has the worst economy in the country right now, it's official. Washington is in that little northwest corner of America where people who couldn't stand other people moved to in order to get away from everybody else. Washington has the highest number of millionaires per capita in the United States. Washington houses Bill Gates, the world's richest man. We've got miserable rainy weather - it rains more here than anywhere else in the country. We've got a gold rush - get rich quick attitude about money. We've got the highest suicide rate in the nation - nobody seems to know why, but people like to blame the weather. And now we also have the worst economy in the country - thanks to the simultaneous collapse of the dot.com industries and Boeing's decision to lay off 50,000 workers in the wake of the September 11th bombing.

There have been so many dot.com and Boeing layoffs that there isn't anybody with any money left to spend on anything. The local newspaper is running a series on "how to cope with the recession" following one family's adjustment downward. There are stories in the news of people with PhD's waiting tables in hash houses.

Temp agencies are telling people to just plain go away. For those of you that are blessed with not knowing, a temp agency is a particularly nasty American invention that allows employers to hire you on for as little as four hours or as long as a six month renewable contract, without ever declaring you a permanent employee. This means that under state and federal law you have no right to unemployment insurance when your employment is terminated. It also means you have no health insurance, no dental insurance, no life insurance, and none of the other perks afforded a real "permanent" employee, like retirement plans and stock options. At last count, America's largest employer was "Manpower Inc." - you guessed it - a temp agency. Temp agencies are where you go when you are desperate for work, any work. And right now, in Washington, they won't even talk to you.

It's not as if I haven't lived through this before. I went through it twice in Michigan when the American automobile industries imploded in the brutal 70's and then again in the mid 80's. Support industries like parts manufactures and mining for iron and copper ore - everyone that fed the auto industry was thrown out of work. And everyone that supported the people that fed the auto industry was thrown out of work. During college I worked third shift at a diner for tips that I literally counted in pennies. Unemployment in some counties was as high as thirty five percent. Regional recessions can be the worst, because while the rest of the country is relatively fine, there is no national movement towards providing relief - like you would in cases of natural disaster.

The last time this happened I almost ended up homeless. I got downsized from a national appliance chain and ended up waiting tables again. I moved from living in a rented house to a rented room. Then the "landlady" pulled a scam on me that I had never heard of before or since. One day after moving in, she made me move out - at gunpoint - and kept my money. Going to the police might have helped, but she'd spent the money and it wouldn't have given me a place to stay. Between first, last and deposit on the room, she had taken all I had.

I had no family left in Detroit. All my friends were doubled and tripled up because times were hard. My ex-landlady took pity on me and let me back into my old house "for a couple of days". While I panicked, not knowing what I would do, a very kind distant acquaintance offered me his couch until I could get on my feet again. I had given him a place to stay when he was going through a nasty divorce, and he heard about my plight and wanted to return the favor. I missed being out on the street by two days.

I moved to the most prosperous area of the country so I wouldn't have to face this kind of scenario again.

Back to the bounced check, This is a big check. To us it means Christmas and the ad campaign that is supposed to pull our design firm out of it's financial slump. We should be outraged. We could contact a lawyer. The bill is already four months past due. I mean, who's recession is this anyway?

But if people aren't beating down our doors to get their logos redesigned, they may not be beating down our client's door to get their teeth cleaned. There is enough hardship to go around. No sense in adding to it. When the client finally calls back, we'll work out some kind of payment terms. Because he's in the same boat we are. And the boat's not gonna stop leaking unless somebody is willing to make some sacrifices and help their neighbor - even in this god forsaken neck of the woods.

Somebody's gotta stop passing the buck.

In his book "One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Globalization" William Grieder speaks at great length about the dangerous connectivity between cause and effect in our great rush to be the last one holding the hot potato of bad consequences. I highly recommend it, if you haven't already read it. Grieder thinks we are headed for a world wide depression unless we stop passing the buck from one economy to the next, like so many dominos on a gymnasium floor.

You see, there is something dangerous about the richest state in the richest country in the world suddenly having the worst economy in the country. World ecomonic growth is all but based on the assumption of neverending American expansion. But America, at her root, is not expanding. We have lost our manufacturing base. We are losing our high tech base, because even that is being contracted out to other countries. We cannot continue to buy the goods that the world is wanting to sell us while we are shipping our employment overseas. And the strange part is, as profitable as American companies continue to be, they do so, like Boeing, at the expense of their workers.

American companies like Ford grew rich by making machines their workers could afford and then paying their workers enough to buy them. But that was back when the average CEO made 40 times his entry level worker, not 400 times his entry level worker.

Who will be buying what in this brave new world?

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