The 10 Best Employers To Work For (You Will Be Surprised)

Thanks to a mentor . . Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds . . .


The insecurity of self-employment can generate a far more resilient life and mindset.
There are all sorts of "10 best companies to work for" lists, but I've assembled a slightly broader list: The Ten Best Employers To Work For. Without further ado, let's go to number 1:

1. Yourself

Surprised? Expecting Google or Zappos? The National Security Agency? Nope, not even close. It's you--yes, you, Bucko. You're the best employer to work for. OK, on to the rest of the list:

2. Yourself
3. Yourself
4. Yourself
5. Yourself
6. Yourself
7. Yourself
8. Yourself
9. Yourself
10. Yourself

Aren't you glad I didn't make this a "100 best employers" list?

Before you start nitpicking the list: yes, there is only one of you, so the list is somewhat repetitive.

And yes, there are some downsides to working for yourself. For example:

1. There's no point in leaving a snippy note on the fridge to the sneaky co-worker who stole your bagel: oops, you ate it during coffee break #3 without noticing. Dang, accepting responsibility sucks.

2. When you launch a full-blown rant against your psycho, control-freak, demanding boss, you're doing so in front of a mirror. Sigh--it's just no longer fun blaming the boss.

3. Excuses don't fly too far with clients and customers.

4. Nobody cares when you show up or how productive you are except you.

5. Shouting "Take this job and shove it" isn't quite as satisfying.

All those stupid regulations you chafed under: gone. All those impossible demands that stressed you out: gone. All those shiftless, incompetent co-workers: gone. Time cards: gone. Staff meetings: gone. People to blame for your troubles: gone. Paycheck: gone.

Do you really miss anything but the last item? But really, wasn't that paycheck the chain that bound you to serfdom?

Here's the dirty little secret of the U.S. economy: you're already working for yourself now unless you're in the Armed Forces or a civilian equivalent. The clock is ticking on all those promises of pensions and benefits for life you think separate you from the self-employed entrepreneur. Maybe the promises pay out for a few more years, maybe even a decade, but they are impermanent for the simple reason that the promises made (and the nation's debts) far exceed the economy's ability to pay those promises and debts in dollars retaining today's purchasing power.

Either the promises will be broken/defaulted, or a $2,000/month pension will buy a loaf of bread and a gallon of gasoline. There is no other end-state other than default or inflate-away-the-debt/promises.

You already know how "valued" you are by your corporate/agency employer. All that rah-rah "team-building" stuff is nice for the younger employees who are still naive enough to believe the propaganda at face value, but once the layoffs start again (if they ever stopped), then all that rah-rah cheerleading loses its sparkle.

Many employees are waking up to find themselves in 1099 nation: no benefits, no tax withholding, no matching 401K, no status as an employee, just a contract and a 1099 statement at year end.

In a sense being self-employed simply means stripping away the artifice that somebody else is going to take care of you or give you "free money." Once we understand the promised security is bogus, self-employment doesn't feel so risky--it feels like embracing the risk that is hidden behind the flimsy facade of team-building, "guaranteed" pensions and all the rest of the unpayable promises.

The self-employed person generally trades "security" for job satisfaction. The compensation may be higher or lower, but it will likely be lower. The earnings will likely be more sporadic and uncertain.

People Are Beginning To Realize Self-Employment Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be

But ironically, perhaps, the insecurity of self-employment can generate a far more resilient life and mindset. Instead of counting on Big Brother in one form or another to provide retirement, the self-employed person builds their own human, social and financial capital. Those who rely on Big Brother are terribly vulnerable should Big Brother fail to make good on on his extravagant promises to 310 million people.

Gaining power and control over your life doesn't come cheap. Does anything really worthwhile come cheap? Knowledge, tradecraft, experience, networks of trusted suppliers, expertise: none of them come easy or cheap. All must be gained the hard way.

No wonder self-employment is down. It's tough to scratch out a living as an entrepreneur. It can be wearisome, but never as wearisome as a job you loathe.
Fewer people choose to be self-employed (USA Today, 9/11)

In August, 14.5 million people were self-employed, down 2.1 million from the most recent peak in December 2006, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The number of "incorporated" self-employed workers — those who incorporate to gain legal protection and other benefits — began its decline in 2008. Last month, 5.1 million people were in this category, down 726,000 from August 2008.

Unincorporated self-employed — at 9.4 million last month — has changed little since last spring. It's hovering at its lowest level in 25 years, says BLS economist Steven Hipple.

Working for others is a good idea while you're building skills and networks. By all means, work for someone else while you're learning the ropes, and give them 150% value on the paycheck they hand you. Heck, if you find a decent employer, work part-time for them while you build your own income streams/career. You might even work part-time for several like-minded people and yourself on the side.

Interestingly, this survey found that the self-employed often see their work as helping society. How many employees feel that? I mention this as an example of the intangible benefits of working for yourself.

Take this Job and Love It (Pew Research)

The Rise of The 1099 Economy: More Americans Are Becoming Their Own Bosses (Forbes, 7/12)

According to research by Economic Modeling Specialists International, the number of people who primarily work on their own has swelled by 1.3 million since 2001 to 10.6 million, a 14% increase.
This rise is partially reflective of hard times, and many of the self-employed earn only modest livings in fields such as childcare and construction. However the shift to self-employment is likely to accelerate in the future, and into higher-paying professions, for reasons including the ubiquity of the Internet, which makes it easier for some types of business to use independent contractors, as well as the reluctance of large firms to hire full-time employees with benefits.

How can self-employment be falling and rising? It depends on how you count the self-employed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) divides the self-employed into two categories, incorporated (about 5 million) and unincorporated (about 10 million). Incorporated self-employed people are often professionals such as doctors, accountants and attorneys who value the legal benefits of a corporation or LLC (limited liability company).

To further confuse things, the BLS counts the incorporated self-employed as "wage earners" because they draw paychecks from themselves. So right off the bat we find a confusion between 14.5 million (total BLS self-employed) and the 10 million (the unincorporated self-employed) reported by the BLS as self-employed.

Self-employment in the United States (BLS)

The private research firm mentioned above clearly counted those getting 1099s as self-employed, even if they are contract workers laboring alongside employees, as is often the case in Corporate America. It appears there are about 7 million people in 1099 nation, hence the other total of self-employed you see in print, 22 million.

So the conventional self-employed may be declining while the involuntary self-employed (those getting a 1099 instead of a paycheck) is rising. Of course it's rising: the ObamaCare neutron bomb is about to go off, making employee benefits unaffordable to businesses large and small.

ObamaCare: The Neutron Bomb That Will Decimate Employment (February 22, 2013)

Right now the self-employed--an enormously diverse mix of everything from micro-sized eBay businesses netting a few thousand dollars a year to professional corporations--comprise about 10% of the workforce (14.5 million self-employed, a total employed workforce of about 142 million). Add in those now getting 1099s instead of paychecks (7 million) and perhaps 14% of the workforce is self-employed (or at least responsible for paying their own quarterly taxes and healthcare insurance--slick move, Corporate America!).

For reasons I will discuss tomorrow, this number is very likely to rise.

But why, you ask, is working for yourself so great? I'll tell you why. Where else will you find a boss who knows your foibles, flaws and strengths so well? Where will you find a more forgiving boss, one who really understands what makes you tick? What other employer will give you the day off to go fishing because you really need a break? What other employer is going to let you keep everything you earned for the enterprise? And best of all--where else can you be boss and not have to deal with employees?

Original article with links here: http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar13/10-best-employers3-13.html

Don't Bother With The Minimum Wage

(I am a regular contributor to various publications including The Dollar Vigilante, . The article below, appearing today, was written by my editor there, Gary Gibson. I commend it to your review. The original article can be found here: http://dollarvigilante.com/blog/2013/3/26/dont-bother-raising-the-minimum-wage.html and my columns can be found here: http://dollarvigilante.com/search/node/Karger).

Elizabeth Warren just realized that the minimum wage should be $22 if it had kept up with economic growth. She suspects in her tender, socially conscious heart that greedy employers have been shafting the lowest level employees. But she's laying her suspicions on the wrong bunch of people. She might want to read up on the currency debasement of the central bank, the command economy vampire that sits at the center of America's supposedly free market economy.

Follow (The Debasement Of) The Money

Before 1965, quarters and dimes were 90% silver. Quarters from before 1965 are currently worth a little over $5 and dimes are worth a little over $2 based on the silver content.

But the government had to stop making money with any actual precious metals because the central bank had been debasing the money supply for decades to fund the expansion of the welfare/warfare state. Roosevelt first debased the $20 bill which used to be a certifacte for one ounce of gold, way back before 1935. Thirty years after the debasement of the paper dollar, silver coins had to be debased as well. A few years later in 1971 Nixon would legally and figuratively "remove" every scrap of gold from paper dollars. But first in 1964 all the silver was quite literally removed from all new coinage.

Minimum Silver Wages

The minimum wage was $1.00 from 1956 to 1960. It was $1.25 from 1963 to 1966. Keep an eye not on the dollar figures, but on the metal content...

The minimum wage in the two years before 1966 was five 90% silver quarters. That 90% silver $1.25 is roughly $25 in today's money. Let me be clear: if the minimum wage had stayed at a mere $1.25 an hour and the central bank had not debased the money supply forcing the reduction or removal of the silver content, minimum wage workers would have been roughly two or three times better off today in terms of real purchasing power than they currently are with a nominal minimum wage nearly six times the nominal amount prior to 1966. Because of money supply inflation, the minimum wage is nearly six times as high...but buys roughly half as much...or less.

Put another way, a pre-debasement quarter can still buy you a gallon of gas...with change left over. A gallon of gas cost about 15 minutes of minimum wage labor in the early 1960s. Gas has actually gotten cheaper relative to gold and silver money since then. A minimum wage worker in 1963 could work for ten minutes, then send the wages of those ten minutes (two 90% silver dimes worth about four of today's dollars) forward in time and buy a gallon of gas. It takes today's minimum wage worker about three times as long to earn that same gallon.

Every nominal increase in the minimum wage after the silver was removed from the coinage has been a lie.




Real purchasing power of the minimum wage peaked in 1969. It should come as no great shock that was almost dead center between when silver was taken out of the coinage in 1964 and when gold "taken out of" the dollar in 1971.

Capitalism didn't leave the bottom earners out in the cold. The central bank has been stealing from the poor and giving to the government and the well-connected.

So, to all you minimum wage-earners: a tiny percentage of the population is indeed stealing from you. But it's not the "capitalists". It's the fasco-communist central bank on behalf of the US government. You're getting more by government decree, but you can buy a whole lot less. Don't worry, however. Every other wager earner at all levels is harmed, too (which is why it's more important than ever for all of you reading this to get the best advice possible not just on how to keep inflation from picking your pockets, but also how to multiply your purchasing power in spite of it.)

Living On Less

From a New York Times article last week that sounds as if it could have come straight out of Why Work Isn't Working Anymore . . .

For sure the lesson is the same. Employers who understand can learn to come from a place that motivates employees to be more than work drones and mindless consumers.

Living With Less. A Lot Less.

By GRAHAM HILL
March 9, 2013

I LIVE in a 420-square-foot studio. I sleep in a bed that folds down from the wall. I have six dress shirts. I have 10 shallow bowls that I use for salads and main dishes. When people come over for dinner, I pull out my extendable dining room table. I don’t have a single CD or DVD and I have 10 percent of the books I once did.

I have come a long way from the life I had in the late ’90s, when, flush with cash from an Internet start-up sale, I had a giant house crammed with stuff — electronics and cars and appliances and gadgets.

Somehow this stuff ended up running my life, or a lot of it; the things I consumed ended up consuming me. My circumstances are unusual (not everyone gets an Internet windfall before turning 30), but my relationship with material things isn’t.

We live in a world of surfeit stuff, of big-box stores and 24-hour online shopping opportunities. Members of every socioeconomic bracket can and do deluge themselves with products.

There isn’t any indication that any of these things makes anyone any happier; in fact it seems the reverse may be true.

For me, it took 15 years, a great love and a lot of travel to get rid of all the inessential things I had collected and live a bigger, better, richer life with less.

It started in 1998 in Seattle, when my partner and I sold our Internet consultancy company, Sitewerks, for more money than I thought I’d earn in a lifetime.

To celebrate, I bought a four-story, 3,600-square-foot, turn-of-the-century house in Seattle’s happening Capitol Hill neighborhood and, in a frenzy of consumption, bought a brand-new sectional couch (my first ever), a pair of $300 sunglasses, a ton of gadgets, like an Audible.com MobilePlayer (one of the first portable digital music players) and an audiophile-worthy five-disc CD player. And, of course, a black turbocharged Volvo. With a remote starter!

I was working hard for Sitewerks’ new parent company, Bowne, and didn’t have the time to finish getting everything I needed for my house. So I hired a guy named Seven, who said he had been Courtney Love’s assistant, to be my personal shopper. He went to furniture, appliance and electronics stores and took Polaroids of things he thought I might like to fill the house; I’d shuffle through the pictures and proceed on a virtual shopping spree.

My success and the things it bought quickly changed from novel to normal. Soon I was numb to it all. The new Nokia phone didn’t excite me or satisfy me. It didn’t take long before I started to wonder why my theoretically upgraded life didn’t feel any better and why I felt more anxious than before.

My life was unnecessarily complicated. There were lawns to mow, gutters to clear, floors to vacuum, roommates to manage (it seemed nuts to have such a big, empty house), a car to insure, wash, refuel, repair and register and tech to set up and keep working. To top it all off, I had to keep Seven busy. And really, a personal shopper? Who had I become? My house and my things were my new employers for a job I had never applied for.

It got worse. Soon after we sold our company, I moved east to work in Bowne’s office in New York, where I rented a 1,900-square-foot SoHo loft that befit my station as a tech entrepreneur. The new pad needed furniture, housewares, electronics, etc. — which took more time and energy to manage.

AND because the place was so big, I felt obliged to get roommates — who required more time, more energy, to manage. I still had the Seattle house, so I found myself worrying about two homes. When I decided to stay in New York, it cost a fortune and took months of cross-country trips — and big headaches — to close on the Seattle house and get rid of the all of the things inside.

I’m lucky, obviously; not everyone gets a windfall from a tech start-up sale. But I’m not the only one whose life is cluttered with excess belongings.

In a study published last year titled “Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century,” researchers at U.C.L.A. observed 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and found that all of the mothers’ stress hormones spiked during the time they spent dealing with their belongings. Seventy-five percent of the families involved in the study couldn’t park their cars in their garages because they were too jammed with things.

Our fondness for stuff affects almost every aspect of our lives. Housing size, for example, has ballooned in the last 60 years. The average size of a new American home in 1950 was 983 square feet; by 2011, the average new home was 2,480 square feet. And those figures don’t provide a full picture. In 1950, an average of 3.37 people lived in each American home; in 2011, that number had shrunk to 2.6 people. This means that we take up more than three times the amount of space per capita than we did 60 years ago.

Apparently our supersize homes don’t provide space enough for all our possessions, as is evidenced by our country’s $22 billion personal storage industry.

What exactly are we storing away in the boxes we cart from place to place? Much of what Americans consume doesn’t even find its way into boxes or storage spaces, but winds up in the garbage.

The Natural Resources Defense Council reports, for example, that 40 percent of the food Americans buy finds its way into the trash.

Enormous consumption has global, environmental and social consequences. For at least 335 consecutive months, the average temperature of the globe has exceeded the average for the 20th century. As a recent report for Congress explained, this temperature increase, as well as acidifying oceans, melting glaciers and Arctic Sea ice are “primarily driven by human activity.” Many experts believe consumerism and all that it entails — from the extraction of resources to manufacturing to waste disposal — plays a big part in pushing our planet to the brink. And as we saw with Foxconn and the recent Beijing smog scare, many of the affordable products we buy depend on cheap, often exploitive overseas labor and lax environmental regulations.

Does all this endless consumption result in measurably increased happiness?

In a recent study, the Northwestern University psychologist Galen V. Bodenhausen linked consumption with aberrant, antisocial behavior. Professor Bodenhausen found that “Irrespective of personality, in situations that activate a consumer mind-set, people show the same sorts of problematic patterns in well-being, including negative affect and social disengagement.” Though American consumer activity has increased substantially since the 1950s, happiness levels have flat-lined.

I DON’T know that the gadgets I was collecting in my loft were part of an aberrant or antisocial behavior plan during the first months I lived in SoHo. But I was just going along, starting some start-ups that never quite started up when I met Olga, an Andorran beauty, and fell hard. My relationship with stuff quickly came apart.

I followed her to Barcelona when her visa expired and we lived in a tiny flat, totally content and in love before we realized that nothing was holding us in Spain. We packed a few clothes, some toiletries and a couple of laptops and hit the road. We lived in Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Toronto with many stops in between.

A compulsive entrepreneur, I worked all the time and started new companies from an office that fit in my solar backpack. I created some do-gooder companies like We Are Happy to Serve You, which makes a reusable, ceramic version of the iconic New York City Anthora coffee cup and TreeHugger.com, an environmental design blog that I later sold to Discovery Communications. My life was full of love and adventure and work I cared about. I felt free and I didn’t miss the car and gadgets and house; instead I felt as if I had quit a dead-end job.

The relationship with Olga eventually ended, but my life never looked the same. I live smaller and travel lighter. I have more time and money. Aside from my travel habit — which I try to keep in check by minimizing trips, combining trips and purchasing carbon offsets — I feel better that my carbon footprint is significantly smaller than in my previous supersized life.

Intuitively, we know that the best stuff in life isn’t stuff at all, and that relationships, experiences and meaningful work are the staples of a happy life.

I like material things as much as anyone. I studied product design in school. I’m into gadgets, clothing and all kinds of things. But my experiences show that after a certain point, material objects have a tendency to crowd out the emotional needs they are meant to support.

I wouldn’t trade a second spent wandering the streets of Bangkok with Olga for anything I’ve owned. Often, material objects take up mental as well as physical space.

I’m still a serial entrepreneur, and my latest venture is to design thoughtfully constructed small homes that support our lives, not the other way around. Like the 420-square-foot space I live in, the houses I design contain less stuff and make it easier for owners to live within their means and to limit their environmental footprint. My apartment sleeps four people comfortably; I frequently have dinner parties for 12. My space is well-built, affordable and as functional as living spaces twice the size. As the guy who started TreeHugger.com, I sleep better knowing I’m not using more resources than I need. I have less — and enjoy more.

My space is small. My life is big.

Graham Hill is the founder of LifeEdited.com and TreeHugger.com