Pay What You Owe

After every group dinner, there comes a time to divvy up the check.

In the non-profit world, this can get a little tense. We often meet with donors, lawmakers, and other groups' officers at a corner bar about a half mile from our office. It's a great setting for after-work strategy sessions, but they don't do split checks. At all. And we don't do expense accounts.

Usually we write down our share based on what we ordered on the front. It's a good system. And people in our industry are pretty honest about these things.

For some reason this gets thrown out the window when we're talking about environmental cleanup. Sure, we still get a group tab - but the people who do the damage spend half their time saying they didn't do it. The other half of the time they lobby the rest of us to cover their share. When it comes to the damage done by invasive invertebrates, Asian carp, and other foreign species now squatting in the Great Lakes, well, the shipping companies have told states that it's everyone's problem. Shame they weren't so willing to share their profits.

We've thought about this a lot lately in the office. And we've come to the conclusion that the best analogy for the multinational shipping industry is the tobacco industry. It's another group of profit-seeking corporations which caused a lot of damage while leaving everyone else to clean up the very expensive, very painful mess.

No one wants to sue over a split appetizer. But when the numbers get into the hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe it's time to send in the lawyers.