Employees are not the problem

Something came home for me today that I realised I have been aware of for a very long time but have not articulated well before:

The conversation around pay (and conditions) for employees has nothing to with the ability of employers to run their business.

This is so important I’ll say it again, but differently:

If an employer (or the industry broadly) sucks at selling their programs, or communicating their value in the marketplace, or running their business profitably, that is not a problem for the employees, nor is it a problem caused by employees.

If your boss says “the customers won’t pay”, then your polite response (in a respectful discussion about pay and conditions) should be “I’m sorry, that’s not my problem as an employee. And we’re not talking about your business model or the market conditions right now, we’re talking about my pay.”

And if your peers say “the industry will collapse and customers will walk away and participants won’t get the valuable experience they need in the outdoors in order to transform their lives and save the world!”, then you should gently slap them into next week and then say to them “the problem is not that customers can’t or won’t pay, the problem is that we do a poor job as an industry of communicating and valuing what it is that we as professionals do and the impact that has in our communities and on the health of our nation. But that is no reason not to talk about how I’m living below the poverty line, struggling with the impacts of this work on my physical and mental health, and have a hard time finding the balance in my personal relationships due to the impacts of my job.”

I’m not saying that employers shouldn’t play hardball with their staff. They are trying to make a profit and are bearing a lot of risk.

And I’m also not saying that employees shouldn’t be a part of the solution (the solution needs to be an industry wide collaborative effort for sure).

But conversations that say that employees are the problem are a load of codswallop.

Employee wages are not the place to make programs sustainable. Employees should not be “subsidising” programs by sacrificing better pay. Employees are not responsible for the price of outdoor programs. Employees are not to blame for customers baulking at prices.

Employees are not the problem.

It’s rubbish, and it needs to be called out.