If HR professionals were cut in the mold of Suzanne Lucas, corporate America would experience a dramatic surge in productivity and morale. Lucas, a.k.a. the “Evil HR Lady,” has built a following of more than 56,000 on LinkedIn by speaking uncomfortable truths rather than spouting HR platitudes like “Every career path is valid and brings unique value to the organization” or “We’re rethinking how we define talent.”
Lucas last year scooped the Michigan media with a story about how Grand Rapids-based Meijer arranged for the arrest of a deli counter employee named James who allegedly stole some fruit cups and chicken over a period of months. Rather than confront James, who possibly had special needs, Meijer waited for months until the food he supposedly pilfered exceeded $100, the minimum amount required to have him arrested.
The story sparked online outrage when police bodycam footage of James’ arrest was made public. Lucas publicly chastised Meijer for its handling of the matter.
“I guarantee he is not the only employee who has stolen a fruit cup from time to time,” Lucas wrote in Inc. “It’s not acceptable behavior, but you need to address it carefully. Had I been the HR person in this case, I would have recommended progressive discipline.
“After the first incident, his manager should have given him a formal write-up, with clear instructions on what was and wasn’t allowed. If it happened again, then termination.”
Lucas’ LinkedIn profile says she has a passion for improv comedy—“honest, I’m funny”—but she wasn’t amused by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s recent mocking of newly confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin because he was a plumber before becoming a congressman and, later, a senator from Oklahoma. Mocking someone for pursuing a skilled trades career is personal for Lucas; her son is studying to become a carpenter.
“Kimmel may think plumbers are dumb, and a plumber couldn’t possibly rise to the level of a cabinet secretary, but many other people are seeing blue-collar work as a solution,” Lucas says in her latest Inc. column.
Lucas notes that Keith Sonderling, Undersecretary for the Department of Labor, recently announced $81 million in grant funding to help previously incarcerated people retrain for the skilled trades. She also couldn’t resist noting that Kimmel himself is hardly a model of academic rigor.
Kimmel dropped out of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and has only an honorary doctorate from the same institution, where he joked that he had worked harder on his commencement speech than on all the homework he’d had at UNLV.
Some American CEOs see the virtue and value of young people pursuing a trade career. Ford’s Jim Farley disclosed last November that the automaker was unable to fill some 5,000 openings for mechanics despite offering a salary of $120,000 a year.
“We are in trouble in our country. We are not talking about this enough,” Farley said on a podcast. “We have over a million openings in critical jobs, emergency services, trucking, factory workers, plumbers, electricians and tradesmen.”
Despite pocketing $134 million in compensation since joining Ford less than six years ago, Farley said he insisted that his Gen Z son “had a summer job where he learned how to weld, to fabricate, to really work with his hands, and relate to people.”
Farley said that if his son pursued a career in the trades, he would be “so thrilled as a parent.”
My Uncle Mendy was a plumber, and quite honestly, not a very good one. Growing up, the toilets in my family’s Toronto home were always overflowing, there was hardly any water pressure, and that water softener my uncle convinced my father to install meant we could never get the shampoo out of our hair or the soap off our bodies.
But my uncle, who spoke with a heavy stutter, was a savvy entrepreneur, and began importing and selling high-end plumbing fixtures from Italy, cornering a market that the major plumbing supply companies hadn’t yet tapped into. Eventually one of those companies, a well-known Fortune 500 corporation, acquired my uncle’s business for an unknown sum but I’m certain was a tidy amount.
Years later, I asked Uncle Mendy what happened to his business. He told me the Fortune 500 company put a bunch of MBAs in charge and ran the business into the ground.
That’s the hierarchy Kimmel’s joke reveals. A plumber builds a business. The people with the résumés he admires dismantle it.
Kimmel, who commands the lowest ratings of the late-night “comedy” shows, is a poster boy for Hollywood elitism and hypocrisy. Despite once dressing in blackface, Kimmel survived the cancel culture era, as did his former girlfriend, Sarah Silverman. In elite circles, some lines are treated as unforgivable while others are quietly overlooked. The dividing line isn’t the offense. It’s who commits it.
Faced with considerable online backlash for what was widely seen as deliberate mockery of plumbers, Kimmel doubled down rather than apologize.
“[Trump’s] apple polishers are all in a tizzy because I made light of the fact that his new head of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, before he was a senator, was a plumber. And now he’s the head of Homeland Security. Which is not necessarily the kind of résumé you might hope for, for the person in charge of protecting us from terrorism.
“Of course, they decided to twist that to say it was an insult to plumbers, which it was not,” he added. “I wouldn’t put a plumber in charge of Homeland Security for the same reason I wouldn’t call a five-star general to pull a rat out of my toilet, okay? We all have our areas of expertise.”
“Let me make this very clear,” Kimmel said. “I’m not upset that the head of Homeland Security used to be a plumber. I’m upset that he isn’t still a plumber, okay?”
Kimmel played a montage of clips of Fox News and Newsmax political pundits and hosts ridiculing New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s previous experience as a bartender.
Comparing Mullin to AOC is a false equivalency. After successfully taking over his family business, Mullin subsequently was elected as a Congressional representative and later to the Senate. AOC’s only experience before getting elected to Congress was working as a bartender.
The New York Post recently reported that AOC spent nearly $19,000 in campaign funds on a psychiatrist associated with ketamine therapy and labeled the expenses as “leadership training and consulting.” The allegation is comic gold, but Kimmel knows better than to aim that kind of material at a rising Democratic star.
The corporate media elite also has an issue with plumbers, as the late Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher learned the hard way.
Wurzelbacher confronted Barack Obama, then a United States senator from Illinois, when he was campaigning in a working-class neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, in 2008 and asked the Democratic nominee about his proposed tax increase for some small businesses.
In an exchange filmed in front of news cameras, Wurzelbacher said he was concerned about being subjected to a bigger tax bite just as he was approaching the point where he could finally afford to buy a plumbing business, which he said would generate an income of $250,000 a year.
The exchange was mentioned by Obama’s Republican rival, Senator John McCain, some two dozen times during the final debate of the presidential campaign, and Wurzelbacher achieved national fame as “Joe the Plumber.”
The media pulled out all stops to discredit Wurzelbacher, reporting that he was not a licensed plumber and owed $1,200 in back taxes. None of that answered his question. It simply made it easier to dismiss the man who asked it.
The good news for plumbers is that they can pick and choose their customers, as there is a national shortage of them—one that is expected to reach approximately 550,000 plumbers by the end of this year.
That’s why when my plumber shows up, I call him “sir” and give him the same respect I give my gastroenterologist before he puts me under.
If plumbers were to decide Kimmel isn’t worth the service call, it would be the first time one of his routines made me laugh hysterically out loud.