5 Ways to Breathe Life into Workplace Conflicts: Outrunning the Law is a Good Thing

This post is the third in a series on managing workplace conflict.  I’ve been suggesting that taking a deep breath and reminding oneself that People are People or that Money Doesn’t Exist is a way to open up some breathing room in a conflict that seems inevitable or unresolvable.

My third suggestion: remind yourself that outrunning the law is a good thing.

As it turns out, the US really does have a minimalist approach to the law.

By and large, even if people think a situation is unjust, they are reluctant to legislate it into submission.

While there are, to be sure, those who spend a great deal of money keeping laws off the books when those laws would cost them even more money (or power or prestige or what-have-you), it is also the case that a general disinclination to multiply laws pervades the American populace.

Few people trouble about laws protecting that which they feel is secure.

Few people bother to unionize when they feel their employers are treating them justly.

Few people invite legislators and litigators and large men with guns and handcuffs into situations permeated by trust and fairness.

In the absence of problems, no one dreams up legislation just for the fun of it. We generally agitate for laws that solve genuine problems that we really experience.

If co-workers always treated women and ethnic minorities respectfully on the job, no one would bother with Title IX legislation.

If employers always ensured that their employees were paid reasonable wages, no one would care about the federal minimum wage. If those reasonable wages kept pace with inflation, it wouldn’t occur to anyone to bother raising the minimum wage.

If businesses and institutions gave extra consideration to people with temporarily disabling medical conditions–pregnancy, say–valuing their ongoing relationship with the employee more than a strict pay-for-work accountability or more than saving the company money by firing such people or refusing to hire people likely to get themselves into such situations . . . well, you get the picture.

Laws are proposed and established in response to perceived injustices.  Laws relating to the workplace are established in response to perceived injustices in the workplace.

One great way to avoid having a law enacted or enforced in your workplace is to prevent perceived injustices even when those injustices may be legal.

It is legal for an owner or an administrator or a manager to pay himself 20 to 500 times what he offers other employees.  But besides being bad for morale, such a practice tends to perpetuate the sort of wealth inequality that is bad for the economy as a whole.

If that practice leads to sufficient frustration or economic danger, it may be that the demand for government intervention increases such that legal limits to income disparity may be enacted and enforced.  This may take the form of traditional strategies like minimum wage legislation, mandatory employee benefits, and more sharply inclining progressive tax schedules.

Or, owners and managers could ensure that their own companies, at least, pay a just or even generous wage to their employees, even though federal law only sets a bare (scandalously bare) minimum.  They might find that it makes their companies healthier and more profitable.  But they’re also likely to find that going beyond the bare minimum that the law requires makes more stringent laws less necessary, less likely.

It is legal for companies to sell products whose materials and components were previously thought safe but whose safety is currently questioned–a particular class of pesticides, say.

If those products are subsequently proved dangerous, but are widely marketed, all sorts of regulatory interventions might be pursued.

Or, a company might proactively phase out the questionable products–even while they are still legal–simply out of a desire to be more cautious than the bare minimum that the law requires.  If those products are proved dangerous, but you’ve already stopped selling them, it doesn’t matter to you whether a law forbidding them is enacted or enforced.  You’ve already gone beyond–out-run–the law.

When you go farther than the bare minimum the law requires, the law can afford to be minimalistic.

This turns out to work well in smaller, interpersonal conflicts as well.  Taking a deep breath and asking yourself, “How can I go beyond the bare minimum here?” might just change the nature of the interaction.  Being more generous, more kind, more conscientious than the law, or company policy, or your job description, requires can go a long way toward crafting a workplace where people are happy to be at work.