Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Instead of arguing about an ethical wage, it should be a community supporting wage.

Because Walmart is one of the largest employers in the country, but they pay their people so little, they were known for handing out, this is how to get on government subsidy things.

Welcome back to The Speaking and Communicating Podcast. I am your host Roberta Ndlela. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development. And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review. Now, let's get communicating.

Now, let's get communicating with our guest today. His name is Travis Schatchner. He joins us from Wisconsin.

He is an ethical employment advocate. He has a doctorate and teaches at a college. We will be talking about several topics today, especially when it comes to the four pillars of ethics.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Travis.

Hi, thank you for having me.

Thank you for being here. I'm excited as well. Thanks for being on our show.

Welcome. Please introduce yourself.

1:30

Ethical Wage Framework

My name is Travis Schatchner.

I have a doctorate in career and technical education leadership and bachelor's and a master's. My research is more into instead of a top down view of leadership, it's a bottom up and trying to flip the scale on its head.

I wrote a book based on that understanding called Employment Ethics Redefining the Employer-Employee Relationship.

I try to answer the question if we can allow all employers to make a basic demand of a level of work ethic, it's only fair in any relationship that both parties make an equal demand.

What could be the demand of all employees be able to demand from all employers to maintain a successful balanced relationship?

That would be ideal indeed, yes. But before we get into the nitty-gritties, you have all these qualifications on leadership. Why specifically leadership?

That actually comes from my family.

My family is a big education advocate, like my brothers and sisters have at least an associate's degree. I'm the oldest of six. I have attained the highest level of education in the entire family, but both my sisters have master's degrees.

My brothers are all constantly going back into education to get certifications and everything else in what they pursue. You start with your job, your fallback plan, that's your associate's degree.

And then from there, if you pursue anything else, that's your passion. So, I always looked at leadership as it's basically applied philosophy. You need to understand what you're standing for in order to be a leader.

So, you have to have a philosophy behind what you're pursuing in order to get people to follow you.

Instead of just going the philosophy route, I started going for my bachelor's in leadership and then into my master's and just continuing down that path. I'm also a veteran.

Wisconsin has some pretty solid veteran's benefits, and it's hard to say, hey, I can get my doctorate through my veteran's benefits.

So, you don't have to have student loans.

Once that cost is removed, it's really hard to say, I don't want to continue.

So, the dissertation I completed was in employment ethics, establishing it, and then developing a formula for an ethical wage, which is one that can be honestly budgeted based on government data. Like, it's supposed to be easily accessible.

This is a simple, budgetable wage based on what current budgeting practices are, which is following a 50-30-20 rule.

Which is?

50% of your wages goes to your needs, 30% of your wages goes to your wants, 20% of your wages goes to savings, and then that's how you spend your take-home pay. It was established in the OTS by Elizabeth Warren in her book.

It's been a followed practice because it was simplicity in its design. If you're doing it right, 50-30-20. And then like how you move the money around.

Like if you want a nicer car so you take out a loan, well, you got to make sure that your financial health is maintained so that loan goes into your need instead of a want. But you're making the sacrifice of future wants in order to meet that.

It was an interesting way to look at things, but it laid a foundational groundwork in that now with that, I can say, okay, what can we actually say is the core needs? So my framework was around someone who's willing to work with minimal schooling.

So my framework was a high school dropout with a criminal record who's like wants to turn their life around, who's an orphan. That person, if they're willing to work, what we say is full time, they should be able to afford a single bedroom apartment.

They should be able to afford meals every day and transportation to and from work. Your employer wants you there, so they should pay for your gas. Right.

So that's 20 average Americans travels 20 miles to work, 40 miles round trip. So then the government collects the data for average apartment costs, data for food costs, because that's how they figure out like SNAP benefits.

That's how they figure out housing benefits. They also collect the data on the average cost of gas. So now we have a simple source for that.

We take those three numbers, add them together. That's how much you should do in a month for the 50%. And then the other 20, 30, all you do is take that number and double it.

And then you add in your local taxes, your state taxes, your federal taxes, and you come up with this is the final number. So it's a very straightforward, simple process to do.

And then I use that as this should be the baseline wage for anyone who wants to work. And then from there, by establishing that flat floor, the understanding was it would allow all people to meet their needs set by Maslow.

And then with that floor, we can add in like, your job requires a bachelor's degree. We know how much the average person pays for their loans for a bachelor's degree. That is added into the needs.

And now we have a new number for employers who require a bachelor's degree. We have a new number for employers who require a master's degree. Or any other training.

Like, we can build on that because now we have a flat floor with easy, accessible numbers.

And have you found that those numbers, in practical terms, because you mentioned Elizabeth Warren, we have Congress still debating on the $15 an hour wage.

Oh, what I did was I looked at it for an individual and I also looked at it for an average family. Okay, we want to, instead of a single bedroom apartment, if it's an average family, you want a two-bedroom apartment.

It increased your food costs and stuff like that. And then compared that to what the actual numbers were. But after, when I was delivering the dissertation, it ended up being a generational study.

The study was from 2000 to 2020.

That's 20 years. And I think they have found that there hasn't been much of an increase in the minimum wage in a span of a decade or two.

It's not that there hasn't been an increase in wages. It's that what it ended up showing was that millennials just getting into the workforce were heavily under that ethical wage.

And Generation X, which is their generation, they were barely making that ethical wage. And it was constantly, like, everybody entering the workforce that you would expect to enter the workforce, their wages stayed very far under.

And I wasn't looking at what the minimum wage was. I was looking at what the actual average or median wage was. Just comparing what that median wage was to what should be expected to be a budgetable wage.

It was completely undermining itself. The ethical wage keeps up with inflation. Or when I was establishing it, it kept up with inflation because it kept the cost up.

The government was tracking that. The wages itself didn't increase. Like I said, I looked at families too.

And that was the sadder part because what I compared it to was the average dual income home and the dual income homes over that span of time actually lost money.

Wow.

Their actual take home pay went down and in real numbers. Everybody else went up, but the dual income wage debt, for them that ethical wage encroached and surpassed, their actual wage went down.

The chair of my committee was like, if you're not depressed, when you start looking at the data and analyzing it, you didn't find a problem. And the goal of this is to find problems and come up with solutions.

So it was a major problem that has yet to actually be addressed.

9:27

Corporate Wage Impact

What role can corporate play in this?

Because they obviously think corporate America is the biggest employer?

Corporate America and the government are the big employers. The problem comes in is that in corporate America, America invests a lot of money to not address the problem.

In the book, what I transitioned it to is, instead of arguing about an ethical wage, it should be a community supporting wage.

Because Walmart is one of the largest employers in the country, but they pay their people so little, they were known for handing out, this is how to get on government SNAP benefits. We know we're not paying you enough, but we're still making bank.

That has been a big problem for a very long time. We're in a very big struggle against it. The way I frame it in the book is that you have the employer and the employee, and what you have is competing resources.

The employer values money. That's their number one thing. They want to make profit, they want to make money.

The employee values time. I want to be home with my family. I'm going to dedicate what I can to get what I want, but I want to be with my family.

I want to be with my community. I want to hang out with my friends. So what's off balance in that core relationship is the employers, especially at the corporate side, at the big employer side, they don't value their employees' time.

Because of the profits they're making, they're able to wait for the employee who's willing to take the low wage that needs to take it.

There's that huge imbalance between value and time versus money is part of the imbalance in the employer-employee relationship.

And part of the employer not being ethical?

Yep. They're not acting ethically because they're undermining the communities that they hire from.

One of the things that the employers need is that they need a well-trained workforce so they depend on public education, but then they undermine education because they're not paying employees enough wages to make sure that the tax base is strong for

the schools. It feeds into so many other things.

Yeah, the ripple effect, yes. And this has been happening for a long time. I'm sure these conversations have been helpful.

I've only done my study over 20 years, and what I was looking at is this is a well-engrained thing.

The question is, who's going to come up with the solution, and what is the solution to this?

Because people are barely making it.

That's where the book comes from. It's like, sometimes we over complicate things, and we want to dig deeper into other little parts. But sometimes it's just getting people informed and not talking down to people.

My book was written for just an average worker. I don't know how to frame how I feel, but I know things are off. Where I'm working, I know things are off.

So it was written for that person who doesn't have any experience in HR, who doesn't have any experience in doing big stuff. It was written so that your average worker could just pick up something and then go, this is a nice way to frame my argument.

I get it. I get it. And it doesn't talk down to them.

It gives them examples in the real world. It gives them a framework to build their thoughts around. Defining work ethic and then defining the employment ethics, the four pillars of each of those and how they interact.

Using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, which tends to be a very common principle, is a core component to it. So that way it's something we can build on, build an understanding of. And then pointing out that these things already exist.

When we talk about work ethic, people have an image in their head already of that. I define it, but everybody has a little image of like, oh yeah, work ethic, everybody wants a strong work ethic.

No, you can't say strong if you don't understand what basic is. So what is a basic work ethic?

And then when I say employment ethics, that gets a little nebulous because we've spent so much time shouldering that work ethic, but not defining the counterpoint. So it's just a straightforward discussion between the two.

Right. Since you teach college students and you say your book is for the layman, have they gotten hold of the book and what are their thoughts on the things that you've discovered on your research?

The book just came out over the summer. And what I teach in college is little to do with what I wrote about. One of my favorite philosophers is Ludwig Wittgenstein.

He was a philosophy teacher. And the story goes that one day he was being followed around by a bunch of his followers, just like, hey, how can we better be better philosophers?

And they're begging him for input on how to like be better and philosophize better. And he told him, build a brick wall. There's enough philosophy people out here.

Build a brick wall. You can only really understand life if you live it. So you should work with your hands.

That was what he stood for. Like, if you really want to change the world, you need to put in the work. And so like, I don't teach leadership.

I actively didn't want to teach it. I teach industrial maintenance. I have a very technical background that funded my education.

But it makes it so that instead of me teaching people who think they want to be leaders, I'm actively developing people who are going to be leaders at the level that I'm talking about. I tell them like, make sure you're doing safety first.

I'm the first person to pat you on the back if something goes wrong. We're all mercenaries. If somebody offers you a better job, go chase that money.

You know?

Yeah.

And when I talk to my counterparts in the corporate world, who are like in HR and stuff, and they're talking about, like, why can't we hire anybody? And they're like, we can't keep anybody here.

And it's like, that's because you're not doing the things you need to do.

You're undermining all of the structures that would build a desire to stay with your company when you're saying, OK, we're getting rid of retirement packages and we're not really keeping up with inflation on wages.

And we're doing this and we're doing that. You're just justifying them leaving it. And the other side to it is a lot of white collar workers don't understand that they were depending on blue collar not moving around.

But white collar was allowed. It just took a few decades, but the blue collar guys learned the lesson that the white collar guys knew the whole time. I'm not going to stay here for a promotion that might happen in 10, 15 years.

If I can get a promotion tomorrow, that's a white collar mentality. Why can't the blue collars do the same?

Yeah, that is so true. Why not? And the opportunities are there.

16:23

Four Pillars Defined

Now, let's talk about the four pillars of ethics.

There's four pillars in each side of the equation. Like I said, I defined it in the book. It's work ethic, it's productivity, reliability, autonomy, and collaboration.

I need to know that you're going to show up on time. You're going to do what you're told. All employment is a team thing.

Even if it's a company with one employee, you still got to work with the person who hired you. You got to actively make, provide a service, make something that actually will make money. So those are the four pillars of work ethic.

And one thing that's overlooked oftentimes is who is able to hold the accountability on that. That's the employer. If I don't meet any of those pillars, the employer can fire me.

Right? On the flip side is the four pillars of employment ethics.

That is a safe and secure work space, a community supporting wage, a responsible impact on your surrounding environment, and my favorite one, which is an accountable professional relationship. We're not friends. I have enough friends.

I'm the oldest of six in my parents. I have family. I don't need these things.

I'm here to make money, go home and hang out with the people I want to. We need to have a professional relationship.

The catch is, unless you're in a very unionized country, employees don't have a lot of power in holding employers accountable for those four pillars. The people, employees, depend on the government to hold industry and businesses accountable.

For example, safe and secure workspace, that's OSHA. The community-supporting wages, that's laborers, labor and wages division, responsible impact on the surrounding environment, that's the EPA.

That one's actually really important because if your employer is poisoning the environment, the environment, yes.

You want an employer to really take that seriously because they're not just poisoning you, they're poisoning their legacy, they're poisoning their potential workforce in the future.

Erin Brokovich, yeah.

Yep. If you're poisoning your future workforce, you're limiting your legacy. You're limiting your growth.

So that one's really important. Like I said, my favorite one is the Accountable Professional Relationship. That's the communication and all that stuff too.

But that's controlled by the EEOC. We want to make sure that biases and stuff are minimized. We're not being discriminatory in any way.

My views are not impacting you, your views aren't impacting me. We're having a professional relationship. Asking anything more from an employee is pulling on guilt.

Not necessary at all.

19:08

Employee Agency

Since you've been doing this work for such a long time, what have you noticed have been the generational differences when it comes to ethics and employment dynamics?

This last transition where I'm at now with how I'm viewing things started with me when I started actually teaching, which was 10 years ago. When I was in the workforce, I didn't have this kind of framework.

And I was like, oh, I'm doing all this extra work and it's just normal. It's just like I got a job, I'm going to do all this extra stuff. Put up with a lot of stuff.

My second year of teaching, what happened was we had an employer, big employer come in to try to recruit some of my students.

They went through their spiel, talked about how successful the company was, how big they were, their international, all this stuff. And one student at the beginning raised their hand. And they're like, yeah, what do you want?

He goes, is your building air conditioned? And they went, no, why not? You talked about how you made over $500 million last year.

Is it too expensive to put an air conditioner in?

The air conditioner in the Midwest, like that's actually really important because if you have a 100 degree day with high humidity, so you're telling me that your employee safety isn't really important.

And as soon as that little gap started open, everyone just started asking, hey, you depend on overtime. Yes. Why?

What do you mean? Well, if you're paying overtime and you're still making money, that means that you could be paying me that overtime wage for eight hours work. Like it was brutal.

And I'm just sitting there in the corner like, there's a little part of me that was just clapping and cheering them on. And there's a part of me that's like, these guys are breaking everything that I thought.

But that's good though, because I think more than anything, what you've shared today, there's so much that employees of both government and corporations, they literally should speak up on this.

There's a lot of conversations that should be had when it comes to these issues, because a lot of people are unhappy, are struggling. And yet corporations, I mean, look at the CEO debate. CEOs are making hundreds of millions of bonuses.

Well, the employees are struggling with two jobs.

Yep. The catch is with some of this stuff, especially when I talk about the community supporting wage. I'm not against people making money.

But the catch is, is like, I know that the owners of Walmart are not going to spend money in the towns around me. I live in rural Wisconsin, northern rural Wisconsin. They're not coming here to spend money.

My community depends on those employees to spend their Walmart wages.

And if they're not making enough to support the community, all the small shops that could sell things that the that Walmart doesn't sell, all these small mom and pop shops in these niche communities, they're not able to support themselves.

That's where the big problem lies. Like I said, I'm not against people making their wages, but we need to have an understanding that the super wealthy CEOs are not going like Johnny Appleseed from village to village throwing out money.

If only.

They're making it so that they are the big dog in the area. And if I want to compete, I'm not competing with the local stores. I'm competing with an international brand who can undermine my sales and then go, whoops, we closed down four stores.

Yes.

22:31

Collective Action

What would be your last words of wisdom?

When it comes to employment ethics and all that stuff, what I've been trying to get people to understand is that they take responsibility by putting up their initial small fights. Don't take on additional responsibilities that you don't need to.

If someone's fired and then they or quits or retires, and then they look at you and say, well, you can take this on temporarily. No, because if we've learned anything over the last few decades, temporary is permanent.

Yep.

And the funny thing is a lot of the time, it's either you leave and the employers have tried to move that responsibility you had on to somebody else, or they've realized that their workforce is so overworked, they can't, and then they have to hire

like three people to do that one person's job. We really need to start putting down like, I am at capacity, I am not doing more. And it's something that has to go throughout.

I don't identify like people working on the front line, the busboy at the restaurant, anyone who is employed, middle managers need to be looking at people, looking up and going, I am not going to put more on these people who are depending me.

It needs to be a bottom-up push, but every level needs to recognize that those at the top are really exploiting us, all of us. We're constantly making the argument, these people aren't worth their money. What you end up arguing is you're worth less.

These are entry-level wages. So you're saying you're worth less. Instead of saying I'm worth more, everyone is in a circle arguing you're worth less.

You're putting money into the pockets of the people at the very top, because the only people that benefits is the people at the top.

Unfortunately, that's how it is. Yeah.

Yep. Less and you're worth less and everyone else is worth less. The ones at the top are the only ones that benefit.

You need to stop saying who's worth less and you need to be point. You need to point at your boss and go, you're worth more. His boss is worth more.

We are all worth more. That's the fight that's ahead of us.

And should definitely take that up. And before you go, please share with us again, your book and your website details.

My book is Employment Ethics, Redefining the Employee-employee relationship. But it's looking up employment ethics. It's available online at most stores in e-book format and you can buy physical copies.

My website is FTS Leaders. There are links to that as well as like I have little TikToks that I've put out on there about employment ethics and other conversations I've had around it.

Certainly much needed. Employment ethics and FTS Leaders by Travis Schatchner. Thank you so much for this conversation.

Very much needed. It affects so many people and I know that they will benefit from your insights today. We appreciate you, Travis.

Thank you.

Thank you.

My pleasure. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a rating and a review on Apple and Spotify and stay tuned for more episodes to come.