What it costs when employees don’t vote

THE EDITOR: A lot of people (that I interacted with) thought absolutely nothing was wrong with taking the two hours they were legally entitled to, to then not vote, but still be paid for the time. I mean, I even had a woman argue with me that I was wrong for not using the time to get home early.

Okay, let’s do some maths here.

Imagine you own a business, and your employees work for minimum wage ($17.50/hour). You give them the two hours they’re entitled to, but none vote. If your business employs five people, that’s only $175 your business lost – for nothing at all.

How did your business lose this? Because your business has to pay $175 for labour that was never given, that’s how. If you don’t understand the logic, give me $175 right now, and watch me disappear with your money. I’m pretty sure you will understand it then.

But what if you were the government? Then, as the ones running the public sector, and assuming 30 per cent of public servants voted, taxpayers lost at least $2.1 million (assuming 90,000 public servants).

Now, if one million people were eligible to vote, and 30 per cent of that number (about 330,000 people) chose not to vote but still took their two hours allotted for voting, that’s $11,550,000 gone straight down the drain. That’s just the public sector based on minimum wage salaries. Consider how many potholes that money can fix, then consider how many of the persons protesting about those potholes also robbed the taxpayers of those two hours.

I know a lot of people are going to hate me for this, but I think the government needs to consider whether this plays any part of why so many people simply choose not to vote for local government elections, and employ a policy of no pay (for the two hours) for people abusing the system this way, both as a hard deterrent against the abuse, and as a gentle nudging measure to vote. You don’t even need local government reform for that.

SHABBA DE LEON

Malabar