Employee Free Choice Act: Pro & Con
Services Businesses
In a report released by the Economic Policy Institute the much debated Employee Free Choice Act, which adversaries say will kill jobs by forcing more employers out of business, found neither historical data or existing credible research, to back the claim.
In Still Open for Business, John DiNardo compares data on business failures among unionized and similar nonunion firms and concludes that unionized businesses are no more likely than nonunion ones to fail.
Writing Prompts
- After reading the report, you might share the findings with your employees in a newsletter.
- Has your firm’s trade association taken a stand on the Employee Free Choice Act? Explain your stand and how it differs or agrees with this report or the trade association.
- If passed, how will this legislation affect the way you do business? Will it change pricing or terms? Employee benefits? Recruiting and retention efforts?
Cap-and-Trade Rules
As reported in The Atlantic Monthly 3/27/09
EPA could draft a rule on carbon dioxide that contains language allowing it to be superseded by Congress when it
Keeping it Green
passes a cap-and-trade system or an outright tax on carbon emissions.
EPA would therefore be able to regulate CO2 without delay; if Congress failed to act, the EPA rule would stay in effect. The regulations could be written in a way that they tighten over time, thereby giving Congress (and industry) a political and economic incentive to supercede them. If Congress doesn’t act on climate change by, say, December of 2009, the Obama administration will face significant international pressure at Copenhagen to show its work. And at that point, the administration may well threaten to ask EPA to draft a rule, which could spur Congress into acting in 2010.
Writing Prompts
- How will this story outcome affect your customers?
- What advice do you have for clients who’ll be affected?
- Are you engaged in the political process? To what end? Do you want specific input from clients?
- What experience do you have with changing regulations that will inform how you’ll react to changes in this story?
- Prove you’ve got the expertise to handle anything that comes down the political/regulatory pipeline by citing case studies of your work.
G20 and the Greenback
EU leaders confer
This week’s meeting of the G20 will certainly address economic reform. But will it address the idea of replacing the dollar as the reserve currency?
If Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz had his way a global reserve system would be created.
Writing Prompts
- How does the current world currency situation affect your company and your clientele?
- What changes do you recommend to your clients’ holdings in light of today’s political-economic churn?
- If you were involved with currency trading or international business at the time that the EU adopted the Euro, you might reflect on that time and bring forward lessons applicable today.
- Do you or your company do business in China or Russia? These countries are advancing the idea of switching from the greenback.
- How will decisions made by the G20 affect mortgages in the US?
Kill your Darlings
Postal rates go up in May and there’s even talk of cutting service back to five days a week. This fuels desire for e-communications, particularly newsletters and mail blasts, which cost less and are more likely to be opened than snail mail.
Hold your horses. Just because you CAN send e-communications doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Further, if you don’t write well, your e-blasts might do your business more harm than good.
Tips for the intrepid, go-it-alone types:
- Give yourself a quota on passive voice. Writing 200 words? Three instances of “to be” is sufficient. You can do it. Search for “ing” in your document and re-write those sentences with active verbs.
- Discipline yourself. As a freelance journalist, I learned the importance of “killing your darlings” because print and airtime are scarce. What’s a darling? Force yourself to cut a sentence from a short piece or a paragraph or section from a longer one. If it doesn’t hurt to strike it, it isn’t a darling. Keep cutting! When you come across something you love that isn’t essential to the message — a darling– kill it.
- Single out your best customer or most coveted prospect and ask yourself, “Why does Janice need to know this?” If you can’t come up with at least two reasons, overcome your desire to hit the “send” button.
- If you simply aggregate news stories and personalize them with a cover note, you should blog, not blast.
When I speak at Connect the Dots March 9 someone will win a drawing for a free newsletter consultation. Will it be you?
Connecting the Dots
Delivered to your inbox the last Monday of the month
Whether you’re a business owner or employee, no doubt you appreciate the need to network. If you’re in the Charlotte, NC area Monday 3/9 at 6pm, drop by Connect the Dots, a monthly networking group sponsored by The PR Store .
I’ll be the featured speaker this month, talking about one of the things that gets under my skin: unsolicited newsletters. What makes so many people think that just because they have my email address I actually want their newsletters?
I posed this question to a group of fellow solo-preneurs, who pounced:
“Everyone else does it so if I don’t do it my competitors get ahead of me.”
“Why wouldn’t they want to hear from me?”
“It’s not illegal, you know!”
“They can always hit ‘spam’ or ‘unsubscribe’.”
“If I’m not sending out a monthly newsletter I’m not being professional.”
“I can’t afford to send brochures and postcards and besides that, no one opens snail mail anymore!”
“If I send them an email asking them to opt in, half my list will go away!”
When I went on to tell them they could incur a federal fine of $11,000 for doing so, they became frantic.
“No one’s going to turn me in.”
“Can’t get blood from a stone.”
“That can’t be right.”
Since I offer custom newsletter content, templates and management services I have a vested interest in getting the word out about CAN-SPAM compliance. But so does every business that sends out what’s defined as “commercial email.”
That probably includes YOU.
Hope to see you on March 9 at 6pm. I’ll be giving away a free newsletter consultation to one attendee. Hope it’s YOU!
