Bidness as Unusual: Give me equity or give me death - break up the rules

It's easy to sit across the table from Associated Wholesale Grocer President Doug Carolan and understand the management decisions he made to conclude that outsourcing warehouse and trucking operations in Springfield and Kansas City were key to his company's survival.

It's equally easy to take a seat opposite Teamsters Local 245 Business Manager Jim Kabell and understand his position representing more than 600 members. Those members trust Kabell will protect their interests and their jobs. Contracts, though renewed and renegotiated regularly, are an evolution to union members not a tri-annual re-creation building on hard-won terms from the past and addressing new issues as they arise.

The grocery business is one of particularly thin margins and Carolan has watched as distribution centers throughout the state have closed. National chain giants with their own independent distribution have increasingly entered AWG's region. So you can see Carolan's concern for reducing costs and increasing efficiencies.

On the other hand, I am aware of the importance of organized labor and the protections and benefits that accrue to its members. In the ahistorical United States, last Wednesday is the distant past. An appreciation of what collective bargaining has achieved for all of us whether we've ever been a member of a union or not, whether we are workers or management is indisputable.

I have sympathies in both camps. Dual citizenship, however, is not an option in this current dispute.

And that's the problem. Strict dichotomies of interests require a choice. Are you with us, or against us? This imposes an intellectual straitjacket on all of us watching the process unfold as well as on its participants. Two choices are all that are available. Labor. Or management.

In this case, what is needed is fewer choices. The conduct of business in the United States must eliminate "them" from the equation. I do not suggest any remedies that involve the titles we use or the dreamy ways we might plan our companies' futures so that we can all work together as one. Nor do I recommend any mantra for all of us to behave as owners.

What we need is everyone to be owners in fact.

It's our old buddy Jack Stack and the model he has put before us with Springfield ReManufacturing Corp. The future for each of us is brighter when the future for all of us is brightest.

Carolan complains that work rules contained in union contracts don't recognize the business needs of the company. Kabell retorts that company revenues have enriched owners and managers by the toil of his members.

The gaming that is going on from both sides of the table reflect the to-be-expected actions of each. Individuals make choices and act in their own best interest. Rather than change the game, let's change the interests and make them one.

To paraphrase 18th century French revolutionaries: Liberty, equality, equity.