In 1999, I was in St. Louis with Martin Luther King III as we led protests against the state's failure to hire minority contractors for highway construction projects. We went at dawn on a summer day with over a thousand people and performed acts of civil disobedience.
One way to become more attractive as an employer to millennials is to offer different kinds of contracts - not only the classical contract of indefinite duration, but also to be open to having more contractors and flexibility.
America has two clear tiers of workers: contractors and employees. The former have few regulatory protections; the latter have many.
At the White House, everybody works for the same person. They're all part of the same company. But on Capitol Hill, they're all independent contractors. They all work for themselves. That's a formula for getting news.
The implication is that this basic idea we have that we are controlled by our genes is false. It's an idea that turns us into victims. I'm saying we are the creators of our situation. The genes are merely the blueprints. We are the contractors, and we can adjust those blueprints. And we can even rewrite them.
Whenever people in Washington complain about spending cuts, they mean spending cuts that would affect defense contractors. They want to massively increase spending cuts everywhere else in the budget.
Why is Caterpillar bad if we create a new job in India or China to receive U.S. exports? It makes no sense to me. We want to drive all the exports we can from the United States. We want to concentrate on all those consumers, outside contractors, customers outside the United States that we possibly can.
We call it ‘demo therapy.' We're therapists on top of designers and contractors and real estate agents and we really sometimes have to push people past their comfort zone and show them what they like, they just didn't know that they like.
I have never been on the trail of developers or contractors.
I will not do work that isn't done well or right. Stuff happens - things break, contractors don't come through - but I don't want to be responsible for not doing something correctly.
