… in my experience with small business, there is an element that resents paying wages to its workers in the belief that the money comes out of their own pockets, thereby reducing profit. -- Roy Headlam, letter to The Australian.

In my experience too, Roy. With the exception of some very small business operators, like my local butcher who employs one assistant, far too many small business employers are what the author Knut Hamsun enjoyed vilifying as the "usurious merchant class". The very nature of their smallish businesses requires they hire people who are always going to move on. Why then treat these usually young folk as anything but expendable ciphers? Give them as little as possible and always vote for a government dedicated to making sure this is legal.

The reason these dubious citizens are whimpering into their cash registers about Kevin Rudd's change to the Unfair Dismissal legislation is that they will once again be forced to treat employees as people instead of fodder.

What Rudd wants doesn't seem to me to be so wildly unfair. All sacked workers will have access to unfair dismissal laws once they have served a probationary period in their workplace. The probationary period will be twelve months for workers in companies with fewer than fifteen workers, and six months for all others. How unfair is that? If you ask me, it still favours the employer. I'd make the probationary period six months and three months. Or none at all and sack the employer. But I jest. Or do I? Of course I do. Still, it's not certain. Babbling on here because ultimately none of any of this makes any difference. Read Scott Prasser's miserable but sadly true account, Australians are all conservatives now. Be that as it may:

Perhaps employers concerned about the time they may have to spend on fighting unfair dismissals should invest a bit of time and effort on good selection processes, proper induction and performance monitoring. Experience everywhere demonstrates that it’s time and effort well spent, and far cheaper than appearing before tribunals and courts. -- David Hawkes, letter to The Australian.

But fairness doesn't compute for most small business operators. Were slavery re-introduced and pay amounted to stale bread and gruel they would utter few words of protest.

I've worked for my share of merchants. Not all of them were Scrooges, but even so, I had to stay on my toes to make sure they didn't shaft me. It's in their nature to cut costs on everything but the houses they live in, the cars they drive, the lifestyles they so desperately want to achieve. People in business tend to succumb to humanity's worst traits, that of greed, avarice and pinch-faced ambition. Instead of seeking psychological help, they open a business.

The reason the world is so fucked up is because business runs all the governments. Exit, therefore, all virtue and enter the businessman's best friend, corruption. These governments in turn exhort young people to go into business: forget science, the humanities, the arts, get those MBAs and work your way up to the leafy suburbs.

But ultimately, what a waste of life, a life much like that of an ant, scurrying, building, nesting, fighting, dying. To spend the miraculous life counting money and acquisitions, all of which have the substance of sand slipping through fingers when the last moments are encountered, is monumental idiocy, a demeaning of the magical brain that defies both logic and illogic. For the brain can go where neither apply.

But that's what we've come to expect. The human race has historically been trained to accept lowered expectations. There is no expectation lower than to retire, having spent your whole life in front of an abacus, yours or someone else's.

-- Olney Garkle