Education Scholarship Tax Credits And Undercover Boss: Feeling Good While Fixing Nothing
You remember Undercover Boss. The mostly-reality show shows a high-level executive putting on a disguise and going out into the trenches of the company. There, they'll meet real employees--often employees with touching hard luck stories. At the end of the episode, the boss meets the employees and metes out a sort of justice--"You get a car, you get a college fund for your kid, you get retraining, and you get fired."
The moments in which a struggling employee receives a bonus, or money for medical treatment, a car, or some other much-needed benefit are feel-good TV, as long as you don't think about them too hard. While some bosses on the show gain insights about their whole system and try to address them, too often the insight is more along the lines of, "I just learned that I don't pay my people enough to afford to raise a family, so I'll give a nice bonus to this one worker and leave the rest of my employees to continue struggling."
At the end of the episode, the boss hasn't fixed anything. A couple of employees have won a sort of TV lottery by getting the attention and charity of their boss, but "Let's hope some of these folks get lucky now and then," is not a sustainable plan for a business. Bosses should not be congratulating themselves for little acts of generosity when they should be asking themselves why those acts of generosity are necessary in the first place.
Betsy DeVos is proposing to use similar acts of charity and luck to CONTINUE READING: Education Scholarship Tax Credits And Undercover Boss: Feeling Good While Fixing Nothing
