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Commentary: A contest to determine the most employee-friendly law firm

By: dmc-admin//October 26, 2009//

Commentary: A contest to determine the most employee-friendly law firm

By: dmc-admin//October 26, 2009//

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This week marks a first for The Dark Side – it’s the first reader contest!

An award will be given to the reader who submits an entry describing why his or her law firm is the most employee-friendly in Wisconsin.

First, a word to the wise. If your firm has previously been honored by another publication, you probably shouldn’t bother entering this contest. Here on The Dark Side, we have rather different criteria than is usual for these sorts of things.

You will not get any points for spouting drivel like, “The firm is a more collegial place for everyone when work-life balance is a shared value.”*

This banality (uttered by an attorney at a firm honored by another publication) has no more meaning than, “The firm is a more collegial place for everyone when cannibalism is a shared value.”

There is also no point in citing your firm’s on-site child care, or generous paid maternity/paternity leave. These are not employee-friendly policies.

It is a gross misconception that such benefits are paid by generous employers. The reality is that an employer has X amount of dollars to expend on labor, and it can do so in the form of either salary or benefits.

So, when a firm offers generous leave, on-site child care and the like, employees with families benefit more than if those benefits were converted to cash. Those employees without families, who would much prefer the cash, are the true source of such benefits.

Thus, the employer isn’t being generous with its own money; it is merely using employees without families as cash cows to subsidize those with them. The former group, needless to say, would not call this very “employee-friendly.”

The same can be said for generous paid sick-leave policies. Ultimately, this is just the employer arbitrarily transferring wages from employees who never get sick to those who do.

Other firms that have been honored by other publications in the past boast of “free” tickets to sporting events. Of course, those tickets aren’t really free; they are paid for by the employees who have interests outside of sports.

No, what I have in mind by “employee-friendly” is more on the line of Ayn Rand’s description of Howard Roark’s architectural firm in Part 2, Chapter 10, of “The Fountainhead”:

“[Roark] did not smile at his employees, he did not take them out for drinks, he never inquired abut their families, their love lives or their church attendance. He responded only to the essence of a man: to his creative capacity. In this office one had to be competent. There were no alternatives, no mitigating considerations. But if a man worked well, he needed nothing else to win his employer’s benevolence: it was granted, not as a gift, but as a debt. It was granted, not as affection, but as recognition. It bred an immense feeling of self-respect within every man in that office. …

“One boy … tried to introduce the human in preference to the intellectual in Roark’s office; he did not last two weeks. … [T]hose whom [Roark] kept for a month became his friends for life. They did not call themselves friends; … They knew only, in a dim way, that it was not loyalty to him, but to the best within themselves.”

If that sounds like your law firm, please enter it in this contest. You can submit your entry by posting it as a comment to this column on the web at www.wislawjournal.com, or by e-mailing me at [email protected], or by mailing your entry to me at David Ziemer, Wisconsin Law Journal, 225 E. Michigan St., Suite 540, Milwaukee, WI 53202.

Because the winner of this contest may be subject to intense loathing in progressive circles, it will be your decision whether you would like to be publicly announced as the winner.

The prize for best entry will be the book of your choice by either Ayn Rand or Richard Epstein.

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