Not really a big rant. Not really that upset but a little…irritated.
The company I work for recent wouldn’t interview my sister because they have rules against nepotism. She has found another job so no big deal.
Ok, Ok, sounds good…except…
The current owner of the company inherited it from his father who inherited it from his father.
There currently is a 20 year old guy hanging around learning the ropes who will be the new owner soon…who just happens to be the son of the current owner as well as a few related family members working in various positions.
Company rules against nepotism? Give me a friggin break.
I don’t understand. Would you have been the one hiring her and/or supervising her? If not, how could it be nepotism? According to the dictionary, nepotism is “the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs”, and it has nothing to do with what you described.
My father worked for a company with a No Nepotism rule. The owner just didn’t want to deal with all his employees looking for jobs for their kids and other relatives. My wife works for a large non-profit, they are trying to avoid the appearance of impropriety with a No Nepotism rule. I work for a company that encourages nepotism, they just hired the father of an employee, several couples work there, several employee’s children and other relations have been hired. Being related to an employee won’t just get you the job, you have to have the experience and pass the same tests as everyone else, but after that point relatives are preferred, it helps keep a close-knit environment where people cooperate and look out for each other.
Your confusion stems from the fact that you’ve confused “employment” and “ownership”. Ownership is often inherited. Employment never is, in modern systems, and “nepotism” only applies to the latter.
Or is this more like my 6-year-old’s version of “unfair”: “I didn’t get what I wanted! WAAAH!” :rolleyes:
No, the OP is asking a quite reasonable question. If being a relative disqualifies you from being an employee of a company, why doesn’t it disqualify you from owning the company? Isn’t the owner a more critical position than an employee? So the company should have higher standards, not lower ones, for choosing the owner than it has for choosing the employees.
However, there are legitimate, practical reasons for having a policy of not hiring related people; when I was at Safeway, family members were never placed in the same store, because if there was some family emergency, they wouldn’t have a large portion of a store’s staff suddenly having to take off.
Rules against nepotism are about protecting the value of the company (by ensuring good and effective workers) for the owners, by keeping employees from rewarding their (potentially less-qualified) family members with jobs paid by the owners hard-owned money.
The OP makes it clear that the family members in question aren’t just the owners of the company; they’re also managing the company.
Shouldn’t their interest as the owner of the company be to hire the best possible manager rather than to let the company they own be managed by a potentially less-qualified family member? Hiring the best possible manager would be protecting the value of the company.
The value of the company is determined by the owners.
If they find it more valuable to be able to employ Cousin Debbie than they do to increase revenues $10,000 a year the most qualified candidate would it is their right to do so.
I don’t know, should it? If it’s not a publicly traded company, it’s up to the owners to decide what is best for it. If you were told by an expert in real estate that it was best for you you remodel your kitchen and add a new master suite to your house, would you feel obligated to do so (assuming you could afford it)? Of course not.
Yes, but there’s no reason for the same rule to apply to employees and owners, or that it would be applied for the same reason. It could be a good rule for owners, it could be a good rule for employees, but it may not be a good rule for one just because it applies to the other.
You might also be butting up against the rule that goes something like “If you’re an owner/CEO/big client/donor, the rules don’t apply to you.”
One CEO would have the front desk mark down everyone who came in at 8:01 am or later, but we knew he himself would stroll in “ten-ish” (more than once in his “ten-ish” whites with his racquet in one hand and an ice cream cone in the other).
But, I must admit, it worked well. We always got more done while he was working on his serve…
That’s not protecting the value of the company. It’s sacrificing the value of the company for the sake of family members. Which isn’t necessarily wrong but let’s not pretend it’s something it isn’t.
Then explain why the rule is good. Assuming every rule you don’t understand must be a good rule is foolish.
It’s the capitalist fallacy: people just assume every decision made by a business must be a good decision because a business made it.
Which is absolute nonsense. Capitalism doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t even claim to work like that. The underlying principle of capitalism is that some businesses make good decisions and some businesses make bad decisions and the marketplace separates out the good from the bad.
People claim to believe this. But when you point to a particular example and say “Here’s a business making a bad decision” there will always be people who will deny it with the argument you just made.
