Generally speaking, there are many fantastic, kind-hearted and honest bosses, businessmen and women in Jamaica. However, like everywhere else, there are many bosses and business owners who are unrepentantly selfish and heartless. Some treat their employees like trash; yet, expect absolute loyalty and respect in return. There is nothing in their business-DNA that causes them to believe that if they yell nicely in the woods, the sound will come back. First of all, they do not know how not to yell, let alone how to yell nicely.

For a great many, there is nothing inherently wrong in mistreating their workers because jackass already says, “The world nuh level.” These are they who slavishly cling to their misapplication of Adam Smith’s theory that, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest…”

Whilst it is true that people do business to make profit, and not because they feel sorry for anyone, it is also prudent for business owners and bosses to treat workers fairly, subscribe to sound business ethics and uphold corporate morality.

I spend a good chunk of my spare time watching

Billion Dollar Buyer andUndercover Boss onConsumer News and Business Channel (CNBC). By far, these two shows best reflect core elements of my thinking that “good” profit is a manifestation of how well employers treat and regard their employees. The shows also reinforce in my mind a key business philosophy which promotes small business empowerment, facilitation and expansion as quintessential for sustainable economic growth and wealth creation.

On the one hand, the

Billion Dollar Buyer is business-to-business in design. It features billionaire hospitality mogul, Tilman Fertitta. He goes around the United States, seeks out small businesses, up-and-coming suppliers, offers them special deals and partnerships [if they decide to partner with him]. He then places a huge “life-changing” order with them. It is not just placing big orders, he offers them sound business solutions. And, although Fertitta strikes a tough bargain, small business owners still get an opportunity to learn, innovate and scale. Imagine what a similar programme could do for Jamaica.

On the other hand, Undercover Boss is not the same as “undercover lover” — in case anyone gets the wrong idea. In this series, bosses go undercover to see how their businesses are doing, to assess efficiencies, quality, employee performance and morale, but also to get their hands dirty. Yes, these bosses go incognito, ingratiate themselves as ordinary employees to witness first-hand and hear all that is good, bad or indifferent about operations and “corporate’s” relationships with staff. At the end of each undercover visit, bosses meet with, and reveal themselves to team members they worked with throughout their visits.

There has not been a single episode of

Undercover Boss — particularly during the ‘come to Jesus’ moments — that has left me anyway but teary-eyed. The transformation, the willingness of the bosses to acknowledge their own flaws, weakness, short-sightedness, narcissism, stubbornness, and vulgarity has been remarkably effective for both employers and employees alike. I would not bet on anything similar happening in Jamaica. To begin with, logistically, it would be challenging, and given the relatively small size of the country, where business owners and bosses are well known, a similar programme would be less impactful.

That notwithstanding, given the systemic problems of classism in Jamaica, the lopsidedness of our ‘extractive’ economic structure, the deep-seated, though skilfully veiled, antagonistic, spiteful, distrusting and conniving relationship between employers and employees, some variation toCNBC‘sUndercover Boss could help to improve service delivery in both the private and public sectors. It could also prove useful in helping and familiarising many Jamaican bosses with the horrible conditions in which their employees toil daily. It could also bring greater awareness of the disconnectedness between corporate thinking, operations and outcomes.

Above all, a local version ofUndercover Boss could help bridge the chasm that years of classism have wedged between the “haves and the have-nots”. It is a chasm that makes the “have-nots” feel perpetually at a war with their “actual” and “ought to” selves; with many seeing themselves as inferior.

There are ridged class and racial barriers that continue to exist in Jamaica; albeit some 178 years after Emancipation and 54 years after political independence. More than any failure of government, past and present, these barriers have kept us poor, divided, marginalised and victimised. These walls of division are partly responsible for the confusion some experience between service and servitude. These barriers are the reasons some Jamaican bosses treat their employees with disdain and sheer inhumanity.

I cannot begin to relate the countless occasions on which I have either received e-mail or participated in telephone conversations with Jamaican workers who are at their wits’ end with their bosses. Some of the details would make grown men cower in fear — they are that chilling. There are instances in Jamaica where reputable companies and individuals hire people, work them like horses, cause them to acquire debt, just so they can buy lunch and pay bus fare to get to and from work, but when the “pay day” arrives, they give them all sorts of cockamamie stories about payroll system malfunction, erroneous bank transfers, and “blaa-blaa-blaa”. Desperation sometimes cause some of these people to be less discerning during the hiring phase.

Then, there are the barons of name-calling and maestros of the “claat” lines. For them, every response, initiative or noun comes with a prefix waxed and wrapped in yards of expletives — words over which they would unhesitatingly pull their firearms in defence of their significant other or children.

Their double standard does not stop there, they decry corruption in government, but encourage and facilitate it when it benefits them or their business. They pay their workers little or nothing, evade taxes, substitute well-earned and deserved salary increases with “kinds” and threats. So well connected are some, they have real-time information on employees who dare to look elsewhere for work; they never skip a beat in ensuring that no one else in the family of owners employ that worker.

Circa mid-December 2015, Sonia [not her real name] telephoned me after sending me several e-mail to talk about her boss and the job, but also to solicit my opinion and advice on the way forward. It was easy to visualise Sonia standing at the intersection of frustration, fear and hopeless. Frustration from the unappreciative, disdainful and callous way her boss treats her and the majority of her colleagues; fear from the reality that if she walks away from her job, there are no guarantees at all that she would find another job any time soon, given Jamaica’s high unemployment rate, especially among her (20 – 35 years old) cohort age group. And, hopeless because jobs for which she is qualified are going to “families and friends” and, in some cases, to expatriates. It is terrible, nuh true?

Her main complaint went, “The boss has a way of styling me, ‘Hey, gal’ or ‘Midnight’; ‘yuh nuh have nuh damn sense?’, ‘Yuh buy your degree down a Coronation Market?’, ‘Air-conditioning tun yuh inna fool’; ‘Di whole ah unnu tek unnu what’s it-what’s it not outta mi place’…”

Being the recipient of her one-sided story, I could only imagine the situations that would most likely cause a boss to relate to a professional in those terms. Therefore, I asked her a few questions. Although I’d already figured the reasons, I proceeded to ask her the obvious. The answers were just as remarkable as they were predictable, given the inelasticity of and adherence to the class system referenced above.

I quizzed, “So, why does he call you midnight? …Why would he ask if you ‘buy your degree down a Coronation Market? And what do you make of his suggestion that the air-conditioning is making you stupid?”

The pain in her voice became evident. She released an everlasting but equally depressing sigh. Then there was deafening silence. Well, up until I cleared my throat to serve notice that I was still listening. She broke down crying. “Sir, he calls me all those things because I refused, as a professional sworn to ethical standards, to deliver on some of the things he has asked me to do. I cannot and I will not do anything that offends my conscience, the law or jeopardises my profession or career. He calls me midnight because I am dark-skinned, with unprocessed hair and mi madda still live below Cross Roads…”

Suffice it to say, my advice to her was to let “the boss” know that she is not prepared, and would not be willing to acquiesce to those demands; and that she considers his utterances unacceptable, unprofessional, classist, vulgar, and unreasonable. She should serve notice of her intention to take the matter to the Ministry of Labour and to leave his place of employment. With the money she told me she has saved, she could easily reorganise her priorities and start her own business, and could do significantly better with less stress than obtains under the circumstances she described.

I was completely flabbergasted, honestly so, when she retorted, “Tek the matter to which Ministry of Labour, you crazy? He controls almost the entire Government…”

As if that were not bad enough, the conversation I had with a cousin who lives in the ‘country’ parts cleared all doubts. We were talking about the recent general election and of his expectations of the new Government. He said something about the power of the “money class”, but specifically of his employer, that I found quite instructive, if not shocking. He mentioned to me how much he was looking forward to the ‘$1.5-million tax relief’, as well as to the abolition of the auxiliary fees in secondary schools — he has two children who attend high school. It mattered not a farthing what my opinions of the tax relief were, all he knew was that he, like hundreds of thousands of other citizens, was looking forward to its implementation, whenever it happens.

He said, however, “Chris, you would never believe what the boss woman told us the other day. She told us not to expect any more salary increases for now, because the Government has already approved a big increase, and that the amount of money we going to get from the tax relief will be bigger than any increase the business could ever grant…”

He continued, “When I told her that tax relief is not a salary increase, she flat out told me that my opinion does not count, and if I disagreed with what she said, I could always leave because 20 others are desperately waiting to replace me for less…”

It is obvious there are many heartless, tough, and mean-spirited employers in Jamaica, and their exploitative ways know no bounds.

Burnscg@aol.com