Having to Defend Honest Profit? What’s Next?!

This column expresses the author’s opinion only and does not reflect the opinions, values or politics of the management of this magazine. I’ve thought long and hard about writing this column, and here’s why: this magazine is celebrating its 70th year of publication. It was conceived, and until very recently, published on the capitalistic model. It has supported and celebrated our industry for almost three quarters of a century. As have I. My bona fides: I have been in the plumbing industry for almost my entire life... since age six (helping my dad and granddad on weekends). The son and grandson of master plumbers, the father on a fourth-generation master plumber. My grandfather was an indentured apprentice from Europe, who emigrated to our shores in the late 19th century. My dad, who was an apprentice to my granddad, met and married my mom and they produced yours truly. I am now seventy-six years of age, retired, and in a way, the magazine and I have grown up together in the plumbing industry.

During my time on planet earth, I have been a helper, apprentice, journeyman, foreman and master plumber as well as a successful business owner. My last company is still in business, run by my oldest son, and is celebrating its 44th year of operation in the greater Phoenix area. So when I say that I have more than a passing familiarity with the trade and the industry, you can pretty much take me at my word.

Making a PROFIT!

Our industry is, was, and always has been about making a profit, doing what we do to advance the industry, improve the skills and education of those who make it a career and continue the long traditions and heritage of our trade. The people who take the risks and go into business in this industry are, and as far as I know, do it to improve their lives and make a profit. The operative word here is PROFIT!

So you can imagine my shock at reading not one, but two articles in the last issue espousing socialist ideology! Nothing could me more oil and water than socialism and capitalism, yet here, in this magazine, are two pieces that try to equate current “woke” theory with profit making without sharing “appropriately” according to someone who is not working in the industry, as a bad thing!

So it Begins 

First is the article about Ferguson (one of, if not the most expensive supply houses in the Phoenix area) implementing as department of Environmental, SOCIAL, Governance! In my humble opinion, you could just as easily replace ESG with the acronym DEI and all that it involves. It didn’t work out too well for Bud Light and hasn’t for many other companies who have “gone woke.”

The idea of hiring and bringing people into the trade based upon the spurious notion of DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION is ludicrous when one considers how difficult it is to find anyone even interested in making the trade a career in this day and age. Searching for “equality of outcome” instead of excellence of input and the desire to learn a trade might work for some office drone jobs, but “spinning the wrenches in the trenches” requires a dedication and real investment in time, education and physical input that few young people today are willing to put out. 

Trying to develop a woke corporate culture in an industry notoriously individualistic at its base will not go well. No matter how the terms are couched. Oh, it might work well for large conglomerates like Ferguson and a few others, but the overwhelming majority of plumbing shops that I know of and have known do not fit that profile in any way.

Fully 98% of the plumbing companies that I have known are built by hard-working people from the ground up, by dint of hard work (read 16 hour days, sometimes 7 days a week at the start) who have no time or inclination to coddle their employees who may, or may not, have what it takes to invest in a trade career. These companies are not giants, as in the “Book of Giants,” but rather are small, medium or large shops built for one reason... to make a profit and improve the lives of the owners as well as the employees.

And Continues

Which brings me to the second article, “On Being a Good Corporate Citizen” (pg. 42 of the May issue). George Orwell would be proud of that double-speak. In said article, much is made of the fact that some at the top make as much as 344 times what those at the bottom make, as if that is some panacea for social equity! Notice, at no time are the billionaires like Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates chastised for making as much as 50 million times more than their least paid employees. This selective chastisement is typical leftist claptrap. No one I know of now, nor have known, has gone into business to make a “social statement” nor does anyone have right to tell them what to do with the profits they make. Social pressure only works if you aren’t busting your butt to make a living while the rest of society crumbles around you and tells you that you aren’t doing enough for those less fortunate. When you’re busy trying to grow your business AND make a profit doing it (why else would you be in business?) the last thing on your mind should be “social justice.”

The rhetorical question is asked, “Imagine a company that was only about making a profit.” To that, I would say, not only YES, but HELL YES! Why bother to put out the time, money and effort of going into business if you aren’t going to make a profit?!

Sad to think that this type of thinking has permeated the trades and this publication. I may have lived too long! Long live the guys who have dirt under their fingernails, cuts and bruises from hanging that cast iron, sweating in the hot sun doing that underground and making a PROFIT!

The Brooklyn, NY-born author is a retired third-generation master plumber. He founded Sunflower Plumbing & Heating in Shirley, N.Y., in 1975 and A Professional Commercial Plumbing Inc. in Phoenix in 1980. He holds residential, commercial, industrial and solar plumbing licenses and is certified in welding, clean rooms, polypropylene gas fusion and medical gas piping. He can be reached at [email protected].