As Companies Offer 'Paid Pet Leave,' Politicians Search For a Purpose

Nina Hale is a Minneapolis-based marketing company that recently upped the stakes in the employee-benefit arms race.  It now offers what the New York Times  describes as “fur-ternity leave.” The latter will allow for employees “to work from home for a week to welcome new dogs or cats.”

Readers can laugh all they want, but the new benefit is obviously no laughing matter for Nina Hale.  While pundits on the left and right promote and accept the fiction that wages in the United States have stagnated for decades, a much happier reality continues to intrude on all the manufactured pessimism. As opposed to businesses stiffing their workers, they’re in fact going out of their way to divine creative ways to retain them.  As the Times went on to report:

“In recent decades, many companies in the United States have overhauled their perks in an effort to retain employees and entice new recruits. Tech giants like Facebook and Google have gone further, providing gourmet meals in cafeterias, gyms at work and day cares on site.”

There’s a lesson in all of this.  And it’s one that lefties like Bryce Covert and faux limited government types like Sen. Marco Rubio on the right would prefer to ignore: when companies and their owners prosper, so do their workers.  They prosper not necessarily because their owners and bosses are generous, but certainly because their owners and bosses prioritize wealth creation.  They understand that the path to wealth multiplication is paved with well-compensated, well-treated employees.  Just as the best sports teams and the teams that want to be the best fall all over themselves trying to lure top talent with handsome pay packages, so do traditional businesses. Not according to Covert and Rubio.

As Covert put it not too long ago in the Times, pay for American workers has merely “muddled along.” It has thanks to “the power of a few consolidated employers to hold down pay.”  To read Covert is to realize that the Times editorial-page writers don’t very carefully read the newspaper they write for.  We know this because Covert would like her readers to believe that American businesses have an aggressively Dickensian feel as exploited employees labor under subpar working conditions in concert with compensation that’s suppressed by the dominant “few.” Apparently Google and Facebook didn’t get the memo about ripping their employees off, nor did the management at a lesser-known business like Nina Hale.  Rubio seemingly didn’t get the memo about employee-benefit one-upmanship either.

Seemingly still beating himself up over his pathetic showing in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Rubio’s self-flagellation comes in the form of the Senator obsequiously pandering with the money of others.  Among other things, Rubio has called for legislation to foist the cost of child-rearing on all taxpayers, “get tough” on China policies so that the paychecks of every American don’t stretch as far as they once did, and then last week he called for federal subsidization of “paid family leave.” Under Rubio’s plan, parents would get to collect Social Security benefits while taking time off of work in order to care for a newly born or adopted child. 

Rubio comically bills the above legislation as costless since those who dip into Social Security will have their retirement payments delayed, but that’s not serious. Public choice theory reminds us why it’s not serious.  Rubio’s generosity with wealth he had no role in creating will merely inspire copycats within the political class. 

But the main reason Rubio’s plan isn’t serious has to do with Nina Hale’s institution of “fur-ternity leave,” along with the endless perks showered on employees by technology giants like Google and Facebook.  About the benefits previously mentioned, can any reader – left or right – say with a straight face that they believe them to be rather unique to the companies mentioned?

Before readers reflexively answer yes, stop and think for a minute.  The owners and top executives at businesses want to win, and they want to get rich while winning.  To placate the overly sensitive, some company shareholders and executives may actually be – gasp – greedy….If so, or if not, can readers point to American companies that are prospering by relentlessly underpaying their workers all the while scrimping in all ways possible when it comes to benefits? Are Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft (the five most valuable companies in the world) actually just glittering fronts for sweat shops?

Back to reality, businesses of any kind quite simply cannot stay on top if employee turnover rooted in stingy pay is the weekly norm.  More realistically, great businesses remain great via compensation and benefits packages that engender loyalty among their employees.  Crucial here is that the most valuable companies in the world are nearly all U.S. companies. Based on the previous truth, can any reader truly believe that wages and benefits are stagnating?

Goodness, even Nina Hale is offering “fur-ternity leave.” Since it is, can readers imagine what the biggest and most financially successful companies in Minneapolis will soon be offering, not to mention other businesses around the country. 

It’s all a reminder that private sector businesses are already doing for their employees what Rubio would like taxpayers to do.  Whether it’s gyms, gourmet food, maternity and paternity leave, along with pet health insurance and leave for same, the private sector is unsurprisingly way ahead of the political class.  Whatever pols can do with the money of others, companies can do much better with their own.

Engaging in the obvious, the true path to soaring pay and perks is prosperous businesses as far as the eye can see, yet the cost of government is what weighs on the prosperity of those businesses. Rather than building a faux legacy of compassion, Rubio should prove he really believes his oleaginous rhetoric by relentlessly working to shrink the cost and scope of a federal government that exists as a big, ugly barrier to greater corporate wellbeing.  The problem is you, Sen. Rubio.