[Translated from broadcast by Kein Kommentar! 11 December 2002]
If the government opposition accuses the government of always saving only the big corporations from bankruptcy while “small business” quietly dies; if the re-elected government publicly promises to go to any length to “promote small business”; if the media testifies with the relevant statistics to the impending “fall of the middle class” this much is certain: here are conditions that need and deserve our concern and sympathy.
1. “Small business” earns our concern and sympathy
They are the basis of “our growth,” from which we all live, the many “small” but better quality businesses employing between 5 to 500 people. They constitute “small business” and compile the largest part of “our Gross National Product.” When they pursue their business they increase not only their own private wealth. The profit they gain is the backbone of “our economy.” With their business activity they carry out the all-important national service: they increase the national wealth.
They are also the ones who donate the scarce commodity on which so many in the nation depend: “jobs.” Who constitutes 99.7 % of all national enterprises, who employs 60 % of all those employed? If they employ and dismiss people in accordance with their cost calculations, if they invest in a more or less large working staff for their profit, then they untiringly create – and at enormous personal expense – the desired “jobs” which serve millions in the country.
They are not among those capitalist beneficiaries who only invest their money. They are capital that “produces,” so they are beyond everyone’s quiet suspicion that they are un-deserving of their enrichment. Finally, they are not the large anonymous corporations in which employee managers oversee the fates of businesses in the service of “shareholder value.” They personally take on the risk of competition for financially strong customers, and risk their own money when they have it increase. Surely they invest not for themselves, but untiringly overwork themselves in pursuit of business.
Employees may be grateful if their users – completely “personal” in their position as owner and boss – set up the working conditions that the difficult business of successful profit maximization simply requires. The command of these bosses ensures a personal working climate. Even if they do not always carry a collective bargain agreement under their arm, they make their earnings as a genuine operating family in which the boss, as far as time and circumstances permit, still keeps contact with his “co-workers” and appreciates their proven employment for the enterprise – also personally.
The dedication of these many untiringly creative, daring entrepreneurs is what makes the national location a “blossoming landscape.” Because their business has its “homeland” here they are not subject to the suspicion, like the multinationals with their international location decisions, of neglecting again and again their obligations to growth and the interest of jobs in the national location. They are closely connected to the community, rooted in the country, regionally or nationally engaged. They are reliable national businesses, striving here in close co-operation with the policy of the upswing of the country so that it goes according to plan when they fulfill their political responsibility by filling orders, even if they have procured foreign cheap workers and use the local soil for expansion of their business abroad and strive for increased export successes.
And they are always threatened as “small” employers by the powerful, competition-controlling enterprises and the foreign competitors that try to make the traditional national market contentious for them. If they have no other meaning than to expand their profitable business, to open new commercial opportunities with credit, to conquer new market positions in the country and abroad, in short: to become larger – to create and sometimes equal the jump in the stock exchange, then they fight to withstand the often superior competition and assert their talent and abilities to get by in a difficult market.
This honorable condition, from the craftsman up to the mechanical engineering enterprise with over a billion sales in family hands, is the personalized symbol of successful private enrichment that constitutes the wealth of the nation, the representation of the national interest in the capitalistic use of country and people, thus in the extensive increase of this wealth on the location taken care of by it and for it – that means capital as a national institution, the epitome of the interest in the global success of the capitalist competition taking place on national soil. And as such, the preferred object of national concern.
2. “Small business” needs our concern and sympathy
Because even with all their untiring striving it is notoriously difficult for them. No wonder. In the end they are, as said, “small” and thus probably endangered enterprises. If they make their best efforts to promote their business, capture market shares and fill market gaps, edge out competitors from the market – in short, if they compete over profit maximization and increase their profits – then they are always having difficulties because they are always much too small, only regional or national, underway in risky ventures only through their own private business drive and their own capital, compelled to constantly make special efforts in competition, special “innovations” and business “acumen,” without having the whole world and limitless credit available for successful “commitment.” As they are threatened by the punishment of the decline of their success and they want to assert themselves in an always particularly difficult environment. In short: they are the epitome of capital in need.
Thus it is in all our interest that they need special state welfare. They need not only state orders and subsidies, but a welfare service that comprehensively takes care of their competitive emergencies and is principally concerned with them. Namely, so that their competitive power is finally promoted, despite their notorious lack of capital, in conditions that guarantee their profit yielding success. This success depends not so much on innovation, boldness and financial risk, but on the mass of capital and credit to finance “jobs” which guarantee the worthwhile application of labor. Because of the smaller size of their capital, they lack the means of business progress – that is, the “technological innovations” and “rationalizations” that make workers redundant – on the same scale as that which is at the disposal of the big companies, they are – united here with the compassionate public – all the more to compensate themselves by falling back on special measures towards their workers. They have a particularly high number of employees – and thus “portion of labor costs.” Thus it is also certain that they suffer more than all the other businesses from the obstacles that face them as employers, with all the payment and work regulations in the way. A state that grants the trade unions much too many rights and influence, which only makes business difficult all the time for free employers, with regulations for normal work time and overtime, grounds for firing and industrial safety – and taxes too. They simply need more freedom to make use of their beloved co-workers as mercilessly as is simply necessary for the success of their business. One can see that they are notoriously lacking from the fact that they create the worst working conditions in their enterprises and pay the lowest wages, that they constantly provoke the legal limits to work time and payment or disregard them entirely. Therefore they must think about how their cost burden, which is just their workers, can be lowered without a cost cutting increase of productivity. And they see: one can do this only if one challenges, daringly enough, the long established social protections that growth-oriented “small business” never simply abides by anyway. If these entrepreneurs, in their operational practice as employers, already clarify so irrefutably what freedoms to claim – state sanctioned or not – when profitably managing their valued employees, then it also stands for the state liberation from the burdens of wage payment, limits to overwork, and laws about restructuring and layoffs: in short, simply the cheapest and freest disposal over the workerforce. Too much consideration for the employees can’t be afforded by small business, which is simply fighting for sufficient yields so as to follow its duty to “create jobs.”
Finally, “small business” is the recognized cutting edge in cheaper wages and freedom from regulations, a synonym for the economic necessity of low wages. And for this reason this status is no antagonist of the “big guys,” the national and international corporations; it is the synonym for the general claim of capital to unconditional state support: for the requirement of state-regulated exploitation conditions that guarantee the merciless mobilization of unpaid work for capital.
Always, whenever “small business” is spoken of
3. Politics is on the test stand
as to whether it follows orders seriously enough. Newspaper-reading workers may worry together whether “small business” experiences the promotion that “we” need. And whether or not they, with much too many workers still having all their grandfathered “living standards,” stand in the way of the growth on which we all depend.