I am seeing a lot of anecdotal evidence of people playing the system when it comes to receiving unemployment benefits. We have been seeking to hire a part time worker. The person who we were pursuing turned us down because they do not want to jeopardize their unemployment benefits, and they already have a part time gig where they’re paid in cash. I know of another person looking for a full time sales job, while getting by on unemployment and bar tending. I think one of the reasons unemployment statistics seem so peculiar these days, during this broad based recovery…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Tom Friedman, a superb columnist for the New York Times, asked a rhetorical question while being interviewed a few days ago by Charlie Rose: “Why hasn’t Egypt developed in the last 20 years like Taiwan or Singapore or India?” He could have added Israel or even Islamic Malaysia. Egypt has mineral wealth, tourism, water and millions of educated English speakers. It has the ingredients for success as a nation, yet it has floundered abysmally with enormous unemployment, corruption and lack of political freedom. We should be surprised that the revolt by its citizens has not happened sooner. The sparks of anger…
I’ve survived the Great Blizzard of 2011 in Chicago. Fortunately, I have the money to hire a fellow with a pickup and a plow to clean my driveway. For me, the storm was an event to celebrate, not fear, but I will still have to work around the aftermath for a few days. Over the last weekend, my wife and I visited friends in Austin, Texas, who have a different approach to Chicago winters–they avoid them. Ricky and Debbie have a home and business in Chicago but also spend lot of their time in Austin. They bought a home there,…
What do you do when business surges after you’ve been in backpedal mode for three years? This is the situation we find ourselves in today at Graff-Pinkert & Co., our used machine tool dealership, and judging by the surge in manufacturing just reported by the Purchasing Managers Index on Monday (the best since 1988), we are not alone. We have too many machines to get out the door in the next three months than our present shop personnel can handle. The options we are weighing include adding hours, adding employees, hiring part-timers, bringing in temps, and bringing in contract workers.…
Amy Chua is a law professor at Yale, but at the moment she is best known as an advocate of “Chinese mothering.” Following the release of her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, she wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal that has elicited the most comments of anything to ever appear in the publication. The thrust of her article is that her uncompromising demands for excellence from her two children including no sleepovers, mandatory piano practice, no school sports, and rote memorization of basic math principles combined with condemnation of any grade other an A (even…
I laud the Republican effort in the House to repeal the new health care law, not because it will succeed directly, but because it will rekindle the debate about how we balance the needs of the uninsured, share the costs, and allocate the control of health care in the U.S. Everybody knows the old system was a patchwork improvisation which developed over 50 years. We’ve adjusted to it over time, but it really isn’t serving us well with constantly escalating prices and 30 million uncovered. I do not pretend to know how to fix what ails the system, but I…
Mike Jackson, the CEO of AutoNation, the big publicly held consortium of car dealers, says pickup trucks are flying out of his stores. He sees this activity as a refection of the confidence of small business around the U.S. Jackson is predicting a two or three year ramp-up to the 16 million car build rate, which has traditionally been the standard of automotive well being. With GM and Ford solidly in the black at 11.5 million units they will be coining money at 16. My question is whether the auto infrastructure can quickly accommodate 16 million. From a precision machining…
There are at least three cable series currently chronicling the business life of pawn shops. What is the fascination with people borrowing against baubles or selling their junk to professional peddlers for rent money? I get a kick out of these shows and their genteel predecessor, Antiques Road Show, because the used machine tool racket that I practice is a bastard cousin of the pawn shop. I’m dealing in esoteric machinery which could be fodder for the furnace, or somebody’s stake to a fortune in Turkey or Topeka. But I’m not only a purveyor of oily, wreaking junktiques from the…
Richard North Patterson is one of my favorite authors, though I often find his novels hard to finish. He doesn’t just write a story, though he is a wonderful story builder and teller. He lays out a problem—one that has no easy answers—and then illuminates it from several points of view. He doesn’t make it easy for the reader. He challenges the reader with a variety of logical yet conflicting views. In the Name of Honor, his most recent book, plumbs the knotty issue of the court martial of a decorated soldier who kills his former commanding officer, the husband…
I’m writing this column two weeks before Thanksgiving. I think the business world has changed a lot in the past year, but many people are so focused on looking backwards that they may have missed it. Business in the domestic manufacturing world has turned decisively better, yet we see a torrent of auctions because legal bureaucracy moves slowly. The two big Detroit auction houses, Hilco and Maynard’s, have been selling off the rationalized flotsam of GM, Ford and Chrysler. These are the forlorn assets of yesterday’s Detroit and they will continue to pour into the system into 2011. Still, looking…