AT The American Thinker, Don Wilkie explains why he moved his small manufacturing business out of Detroit. He blames government. But when one reads carefully, one discovers it wasn’t government so much as a corrupt and dishonest workforce. In order to get one good employee, Wilkie had to hire eight. But the workers he fired in order to get that one good employee came back to haunt him when they accused him of violating their civil rights or said they had been injured on the job in order to get Workers Compensation benefits. He had to go to extreme fortress-building measures to make sure his buildings were secure, but these were nothing compared to the problems with the workers. He writes:

After a period of time, my insurance company put me in what was called the “Assigned Risk” pool. What that meant in practice was that my Workman’s Compensation insurance costs doubled overnight.  Every new employee hired became a huge financial burden not in terms of wages but in terms of Unemployment and Workman’s Comp costs.

But perhaps the scariest thing that could happen to an employer was being summoned in front of the Civil Rights Commission, to face charges of “Wrongful Discharge.” Here you had to prove a negative, that you did not violate someone’s rights.  This happened to me three times.  If the Commission determined you were guilty, which were two out of three for me, the remedy was to pay all of an employee’s wages from the time he was separated from your employ to the time of the Commission’s finding.  Since the system moved very slowly, an employer could be faced with paying as much as two years’ salary.

This was enough to get me and hundreds like me out of Detroit. I could build a stronger “fort,” but I couldn’t beat the system.  That, however, wasn’t the end of what our government did to Detroit. [cont.]

This is the standard line throughout the conservative news media: government killed Detroit. But if Wilkie’s observations are correct, the people of Detroit had an awful lot to do with it.

— Comments —

Forta Leza writes:

Don Wilkie seems to ignore the facts that (1) unemployment insurance is the law of the land everywhere in the US; (2) workman’s comp is the law of the land everywhere in the US; and (3) employment discrimination is illegal everywhere in the US for companies such as his with 15+ employees.

So when he says that he moved his company, it could not have been to get away from these laws. And the reason for Detroit’s problems could not be these laws.

There’s no nice way to put this: The reason Detroit is having problems is that it is run by black people and so it is having serious problems just like most political entities run by black people.

Debra C. writes:

What’s missing in Forta Leza’s quibble over the businessman’s recounting of his experience in Detroit of being “brought before the Commission” and regulated out-of-business is, shall I say, a certain naivety about the workings and motivations of the victim class — itself brought to its full-flowering of sinful human potential under a state that seeks to remedy by force perceived injustices, and these always to the benefit of the poor, witty bitty worker who in reality would rather sit home on his couch with the government checks rolling in than do an honest day’s work.

Perhaps Forta is unaware of the craftiness of the gamers in our society. They have always been with us, but rarely in history has state policy been employed to perpetuate their kind as it does now.

Please follow and like us: