A small meat processing plant
The owner works alone. He is able to slaughter, cut and process 2 hogs a day on his own. The sales of product from 1 hog covers his shop expenses for the day as well as the cost of both hogs. His wages come from the the second hog as well as profits to be spent back into the shop for growth and expansion.
His hours that he spends in the shop go something like this:
What are this owner's options available so that he can run his business properly and still have a life?
Option #1Solution: One employee was hired and trained to do the following; clean and sanitize the shop, wrap and package the finished product, operate the equipment and to bone certain pieces of meat.
Once the employee was trained, production increased to processing 3 hogs a day and still leaving the owner with the time to do all the other stuff that needed to be done and lowering his hours to 10 - 12 hours.By paying his employee with what was the profits from the second pig, his profits still actually increased by spending the time and money on hiring help. He used to make at the end of the day profits from 1/2 a hog (the second hog), now he is making profits from a whole hog (the third one), therefor increasing his profits by 1/2 a hog. So, in essence, his employee doubled his profits and also gave him a hefty tax deduction at tax time.
By hiring and training a third employee he was able to increase production to 6 hogs leaving him with a profit of 2 hogs.
As you can tell from the above scenario, which is based on an actual meat shop's history, you can see how employees can increase productivity and wages. Even hiring someone who won't be working directly with the finished product, such as a meat cutter or packer, can save you time, which does turn into dollars.
For example, this meat processor hired a secretary. This secretary fielded calls, answered correspondence, kept the files and records in an orderly fashion. S/He could even take care of the regular bookkeeping and make them ready for the accountant. As most owners don't take an hourly wage, they take what they need for their personal living expenses from all profits shown so that they still make a wage and also show a profit. (Just an accounting way to separate money for the owners use and money for shop upkeep). If you would break down this sum of money into hours with the 5 or so hours saved from doing these duties himself his personal wage actually increases per hour. Productivity also increases because these hours can now be spent producing his product.
This scenario will be used as an example for the pages dealing with "Employers and the Union". I will be linking this page to those one. If you want to keep this page open while reading over the other ones you can simply open up a new browser. You can do this in MSIE by clicking onto FILE then click NEW and then click WINDOW. A new browser window will open up which you can use to navigate this webpage or others while this window stays right here.