Rich people love to outsource, and for a while, nobody in the world was richer than Americans.  That’s why, after we ran out of industries to outsource, we began to outsource our families.  Kids are too childish and messy, so we send them to daycares.  Old people are, too, so we outsourced them to the nursing homes.  We don’t even have the decency to in-house our nursing homes, so we outsourced those to the Mexicans and Filipinos.

Three hundred years ago, we also did our outsourcing in-house.  Instead of having the Mexicans do our farming, we imported some black people and forced them to do it for free.  Undoing this has been the whole trajectory of the past 100 years, with mixed results.  We no longer export labor to other races for free.  Now you have to pay the people who do all your work for you, and somehow you try to get richer doing it.  This is called capitalism, and the trick is to pay as little as possible.

That’s why you still export.  Doing things in-house in a constitutional republic means the neighbors get upset about their rights, but if they’re unemployed, you can just blame the Mexicans you imported or the Chinese you exported labor to.  It’s a simple sleight-of-hand that works when you call it free trade (for the Republicans) or anti-racism (for the Democrats).

The goal of exporting everything for cheap was to lie around planning what to do with your money while other people have to wipe you and your whole family for pennies.  This is the definition of success.  But eventually the people you exported labor to catch on and want to export all the work for themselves.  Ursula Burns, a black woman named after the sea witch in The Little Mermaid, was one such person.  Her story of exporting her family was described by CNBC, in an article they tastefully titled “The first Black woman CEO in the Fortune 500 on work-life balance: ‘You don’t have ‘to go to all your kids’ games.’”

Long story short, she didn’t go to all her kids’ games.  CNBC says she didn’t even pay attention while she was there.  She says the “work-life balance” argument is silly, and if you go all work, you can have somebody else do the life for you.  So (I kid you not) she did crossword puzzles at her kids’ games and made her family members watch the kids — a genius trick that tied up the oldest people with the youngest.  She says she raised (wink wink!) two “unbelievably good kids.”  Nowhere mentioned in the article is how the kids feel about her.

This last part is important, because there are only two groups who can judge how you raise your kids: your kids and the people they deal with.  And there are only two groups of people who can judge how you run a business: the customers and the people in the business.  We don’t have a record of what the kids say because CNBC doesn’t care, but unfortunately for Ursula the Sea Witch Burns, we have a record of what the hires say.  And she had one of the most hated records in the history of Xerox.

Time Magazine, in fact, lists her as one of the (quote) “9 CEOs with the absolute worst reputations” and says that while she raked in millions of dollars yearly and oversaw big raises for upper management, she didn’t give any raises to rank-and-file employees, and she laid off so many that she had to call the police to the layoffs.  During her reign, over two thirds of the employees had a negative opinion of her.

In fact, over about thirty years, Xerox went from being rated one of the happiest companies to work at to being one of the worst.  This wasn't all Ursula’s fault, since she was the CEO only from 2009 to 2016 — but she was part of it.  Before she was CEO, looters took over and started selling and cutting off parts of the company willy-nilly, and this made running the company into the ground look profitable.  This is what happens to great companies when the smart leaders die off and the new ones don’t have any ideas.  But eventually the amputations had to slow down, and the company had to focus on other expendable things, like raises.  Jobs they used to do in-house were exported to other companies they could pay even less.

Ursula Burns was still unable to run things profitably.  She bought Affiliated Computer Services for 6.4 billion dollars, and Time Magazine said it turned out to be a dud.  She had a huge spike in revenue the first year, and then things went sideways. Two years after she stepped down, Xerox, after a 115-year run, was no longer an independent company.  She pissed off the majority who worked for her, and CNBC wants to know how she managed her work-life balance.  Her answer was to tell you that she didn’t.  She didn’t manage either end of it.  She both looted and overbought for her company, and when she finally showed up at her kids’ games, she decided to do crossword puzzles.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company — a massive success in the American sense: filthy rich, expert at exporting.

Julius Burke is a pseudonym.

Image: pasja1000 via Pixabay, Pixabay License.