The Way Things Are - Thanks, Dr Shaklee

After listening to the latest dismal jobless report, I wonder that anyone still holds onto the idea of being an employee. This model of putting bread on the table seems old and tired. I think that some people are still doing it because their fathers have before them and that's all they know about earning.

In doing my genealogy I uncovered a few details of the lives of my grandfather, and great grandfathers going back to one born in 1810. Every one of them on two family lines worked in iron foundries. That's tough work! They were grateful for it.

One great grandfather came home from work one day, when he was about 45, with a cough. By morning he was dead from pneumonia. That was in 1894. He left a wife, two sons, and two daughters, one of them an infant. He worked long hours for someone else, for food on the table, every day of his life, with no end in sight. It's the way things were.

Today we don't typically die of pneumonia, and not at age 45. We don't work 12 to 16 hour days. But we do typically still work for someone else. And we get laid off by someone else, and our value is set by someone else. All for bread on the table, and a car and a house, and possibly even a plane or a boat or trips or clothes or education. You can bet the typical employer these days makes more from our efforts than we do, no matter what our occupation or salary.

That's typical. But some people have realized that they can make their way and even live their dreams by working for themselves. They can never be fired, or laid off, or undervalued.

Dr. Shaklee never worked for anyone as an employee. He had a different way of doing things. And he invented - literally INVENTED - a different way of being compensated. It combines the strength of a corporation with the independence of an individual business owner. He started paying people who wanted to be compensated in this way back in 1956, and his company has never stopped. And meanwhile a lot of independent folks took him up on it and broke the mold of generations of employees.

I've been fired twice. I'm not a great employee. I'm really glad Dr Shaklee wasn't either. Today I watch the scary statisitics of umemployment and realize I don't have to worry. Nor do I have a glass ceiling to bang against or obsolescense or forced retirement. Good thing! I'm not done and I'm glad there's no one out there telling me I am.

I could have been stuck, though. I didn't have money to build a new company myself! I needed to be able to bootstrap my way to success. Fortunately that's the way this company works. No limitations! No startup capital required! No name, no fortune, no experience required! Just a love of our fellow man, a willingness to work and serve, and a recognition that taking orders isn't necessary any more.

That's the way things are now, only most people don't know it.

I wonder how many more out there might appreciate finding out that there's something like this...