The emphasis of government policies, officials and pundits on the promotion of electronic, non-cash money has a clear drawback: people can lose grip on their spending pattern and current cash position. So abolishing all cash-money is not the right way to fight corruption, large-scale crime and terrorism

Perhaps everybody knows the feeling. You are in a shop with your purchases, walking to the cashdesk where the point-of-sale terminal is. And then you wonder:"Will I have enough money on my current account to pay my purchases or not?!" 

The feelings of embarrassment when the terminal responds: “You have reached your spending limit for this period. Please try to pay differently”, and you have to tell the cashier that you can’t pay for your purchases, are enough to thoroughly ruin your day... Or even longer when you have to wait a few days before your paycheck / salary transfer comes in.

Another precarious situation is when you spent money that you had reserved for other things – the rent, the electricity bill, the holiday or the mortgage repayment – because you were unaware of how much money you already spent from your bank account that month and you didn’t have online, real time insights in your current account at the time that you needed it most.

A third risk of having a non-cash money system is that one off-invoices and bills are being sent and collected exclusively through digital services (internet banking and email), so without a version on paper. That is very convenient for companies and the (local) government bureaus as it strongly reduces their mail and banking expenses, but not for people who always relied on the mailman for bringing their bills and invoices: elderly folks and computer haters / digital illiterates.

All these situations are the inevitable result of the fact that you nowadays pay electronically mostly, via internet banking and point of sale terminals – at least in The Netherlands – and not in hard cash or through paper transaction forms anymore. Cash, that you collected at your bank, where you also dropped your money transaction forms, or ATM once a week.

In those earlier times it was easy: you collected enough cash for a few days or a week and when it finally ran out, it was simply gone: you knew exactly how much you spent that week. You did your all your regular payments (i.e. mortgage, rent, electricity, doctor's bills and all else) via transaction forms or cash payments too. Except for an early credit card, it was impossible to spend more money than you carried, except for regular shops where they knew your name and your face and they trusted you to pay your dues in time.

These days many people totally lose track of their spendings, as they don’t check out their bank account every day and don’t carry cash anymore, but use their bankcard for everything. And for some, mostly older people, internet banking is a hurdle that they hardly can take. Only at the moment that they discover that there was too much month in their salary or benefit payment, the alarm bells ring: often in a supermarket or a shop, or when their invoice payments start to bounce.

The latter was the subject of an article in De Telegraaf: the largest daily paper in The Netherlands:

Increasing numbers of Dutch people have a hard time to maintain grip on their spendings, due to the mounting digitization of payment services.

As a consequence these consuments lose track and give up on it. Consequence: they fail in applying for benefit / allowance money for which they are entitled and also run a risk of getting into financial trouble.

From the annual report of Humanitas, a large volunteers organization in The Netherlands, it became clear that last year 13.832 people came in for help with their home administration, a 13% increase year on year. Budget information bureau Nibud also speaks of a growing problem, hitting youngsters as well as elderly people.

According to Humanitas this is a consequence of the growing complexity of financial services in The Netherlands. “Many elders have minimal computer skills. Due to the digitization of financial services and the termination of paper invoices and accompanying information by many institutions and authorities, they lost track of what money comes in and gets out”, according to a spokespreson of the organization.

But also many youngsters are clueless about their finances and the digitization of payment services, according to Nibud: ”Many of them don’t know how to apply for allowances and benefits at the governmental digital portals. Or they have problems with ticking the right boxes, when it comes to the electronic application for for instance their study benefit”, according to a spokesperson for the organization.

The consequences are quite clear, according to Roeland van Geuns, lecturer Poverty and Participation at the vocational college ‘Hogeschool van Amsterdam’. “In many cases such people don’t receive and use public benefits for which they are fully entitled, due to lacking digital skills. They don’t apply for a healthcare benefit, as they didn’t even know they were entitled to. And when they do know, they are still clueless upon how to apply for it anyway.”

This particular article was focusing on the problems of people who don’t know how to wrangle their computer and use internet banking. But as I tried to explain in the first part of the article, this problem of disconnection between people and their financial situation is broader.

This is particularly worrisome and important, as more and more pundits and government officials advocate a strong reduction in the global amount of paper cash (Euros and Dollars), in order to hamper and counterattack the large circuits of black, criminal money that are crossing the world nowadays. Money that is used for the funding of crime and terrorist attacks or for the bribery of government officials around the globe.

One of those pundits, Kenneth Rogoff, advocated a moratorium on the usage of large banknotes: €100, €200 and €500 or their dollar and yen pendants, in an op-ed in Het Financieele Dagblad:

The $100 bill is accounting for 80% of the staggering cash amount of $4,200 per capita in the United States. In Japan, the ¥10,000 (roughly $100) is responsible for roughly 90% of the Japanese cash amount. The cash possession per capita is almost $7000 overthere. All this money is enabling growth of the underground economy; not the official one.

I don’t advocate a cashless society, as this will neither be feasible nor desirable for the time being. Nevertheless, a cashless society would be fairer and more secure. With the increasing usage of bank cards, electronic money transfers and mobile payments, the usage of cash in the legal economy has decreased, especially for middle and large-scale payment transactions. Research learned that only a small percentage of the large banknotes is held and used for payments by common people and SME companies.

Cash makes crimes, corruption and terrorism easier, as it is anonymous, and large bills are especially problematic as they are so easy to carry and hide. A million dollar in $100 bills fits in a small attache briefcase and a million in $500 dollar bills even fits in a lady’s purse.

Fair enough: there are other ways to bribe an official or to evade taxes or to carry out other forms of financial crime. But most of them have very high transaction costs (for instance uncut, unpolished diamonds) or carry a more than average risk for disclosure (bank transfers and credit card payments).

Admitted, Rogoff builds a strong case for the cashless society, but as he pointed out himself, it is not feasible and desirable for everybody yet, especially the elderly.

And there is one big drawback to electronic money alone, that cannot be mitigated easily. What happens with your non-cash money when the bank, where it resides, turns out to be not safe. That happened to my wife, who had a bank account at the Russian Sberbank in the Nineties of last century:

However, this is not the only thing that is haunting this former Soviet statebank. In 1997, when the Russian ruble collapsed, countless Russians (among whom my wife) lost the lion share of their life savings, stashed at the Sberbank: sometimes for thousands of dollars per person in savings.

All these people received the crisp message from their local Sberbank: “We’re sorry, your money is gone! It has vanished! Next customer, please!”

It will probably still take a few decades, before Sberbank loses this image of a bank which lost billions in embezzled money, as a consequencey of massive fraud and corruption. As it is like John Goldsmith stated in his wonderful book “Bullion”: “money does not vaporize, it just gets another owner”.

This example shows in a sourish way, that eventually the only party that knows that you own a certain amount of electronic money, is the bank that keeps it for you. When this bank (especially in less safe countries with a much weaker central bank and/or central administration) is gone, so is your money. This is an undeniable risk of electronic money that is not true for cash money, in particular when it is stashed in a safe or deposit box that can be reached at all times.

So please be careful before you declare cash money a thing of the past, by totally moving all money transactions on behalf of the goverment and (SME) companies to cyberspace. For many people cash money is still a tangible tool for taking control of their expenses and keeping their financial health in order. It is also a tangible proof that they really own their money: money that cannot be simply taken away by a plummeting bank or a cash-strapped government in a thorougly corrupted country. 

Corruption – the killer of honesty, the economy and national stability in countries all over the world – must be dealt with fiercely, but that is a (supra-)national government job. Not a thing that one can simply blame on the sheer existence of cash money. That would be too easy for the people in charge.

It’s time to appreciate the workers again and to look at them as the mortar of every company; even if they come with an administrative hassle and their productivity looks inferior to output robotized and digitized services

It doesn't seem the most pleasant of times for being a worker in a large company.

Litterally at the minute that I started to write this article, a news alert popped up that the large Dutch bank ABN Amro is going to dismiss up to 1375 “superfluous” workers (link in Dutch).

And also at other financial institutions, commercial service providers and insurance companies there is a continuous search for ways to replace ‘expensive, time-restricted and basically unreliable’ workers with digitized and robotized services that can be operated around the clock the whole year through, in this increasingly 24x7 economy.

Instead of such large companies having thousands of employees in large office towers who provide manual services on behalf of their customers during working hours alone, the customers are taught to service themselves via the ubiquitous online channels or the upcoming robotized telephone, chat and whatsapp services:

“Do you want to have a loan, a mortgage or an insurance policy?! Please visit our website at www.yourloan.com (fake address) and fill in the online application form. Your application will be serviced within 48 hours, after you uploaded all the forms and necessary documentation! And if you want to receive our standard insurance policies really quickly, please use our latest Whatsapp service!”

The obvious result is that the lower and mid-level jobs at such commercial / financial companies disappear at a blistering speed, while being temporary replaced by (freelance and project-driven) consulting jobs to enable the deployment of complex digitization and robotization services. Services that allow banks and insurance companies to do the same amount of work with only half the personnel or less.

Also in case of more hands-on jobs, like construction worker, distribution worker, agricultural worker or factory worker, there is a trend to get rid of people who are on the company's payroll with fixed contracts and replace them by freelancers or temporary labour, acquired from specialized service companies or temporary labour agencies.

Great examples are the building company virtually without construction workers and the large sales & distribution company without distribution workers on the payroll. The responsibility, the organization and the ‘hassle’ of having executive personnel are ‘delegated away’ to specialized services companies and what remains are a skeleton crew of high-profile, strategic personnel and a few invoices per month that must be paid.

At the same time, the traditional small and medium enterprises – usually a great driver of new jobs – are extremely reluctant to hire new personnel on fixed contracts. They are either worried about not being able to dismiss people at will in more difficult economic times or about the substantial risk of workers getting ill and requiring both a replacement worker and a long-term sickness payment (i.e. the so-called double whammy). Especially the latter is a risk that keeps owners of small companies with 5 to 10 people (f.i. retailers) awake at night.

In especially the Eighties and early Nineties of last century, it was normal that sick workers received a governmental sickness benefit (i.e. Algemene Ziektewet) after only a few days of illness. However, the Dutch government found out that some (especially SME) employers abused this law in times of weak business, by sending their temporarily superfluous personnel home on ‘sick leave’ until better times reappeared.

As a consequence this traditional sickness benefit was replaced by a series of laws in which the employer remained responsible for the sickness payments for a much, much longer period – up to a year or even longer – and also was made more responsible for the causes of such cases of sickness leave. This forced employers to more closely monitor the physical and mental health of their personnel and led to a host of new businesses, involved with the monitoring and guidance of workers, the so-called Arbo-companies (i.e. labour circumstances).

While this generally was a manageable challenge for larger companies of at least 50 employers – as general sickness statistics started to work to their advantage – it often caused grave problems and sometimes even an untimely end for (very) small companies and f.i. “mom-and-pop” retail stores. The result was that they tried to prevent personnel from ever working on fixed contracts and only hired personnel with temporary contracts for a number of years in a row.

When you look at things like this, employees with fixed contracts seem to have very little in their favour; for large as well as small companies. Flexibility is hot and robotization and digitization are even hotter.

However, you can also look at workers from a different point of view. Perhaps it’s time to appreciate your workers again and look at them as the mortar of every company; even if they come with their human peculiarities and an administrative hassle and even when their productivity looks inferior to robotized and digitized services. You can do so for a number of reasons.

Do you trust your computers and robots enough to let them run everything in your company? And do you entrust your suppliers of temporary labour and commercial services to always keep YOUR priorities at number one and work at your advantage alone?

Is it not much more convenient and comforting to have a group of loyal workers around you that are on your payroll and feel really part of your company's family? People that are willing to run the extra mile when the work requires that? And people that you can ask about things that went wrong or could be made better? Your robotized service surely can’t answer your questions and inquiries, when a customer is offended or goes to your competitors out of the blue.

And do you trust the thesis, that your customers like to be helped by a robotized telephone operator, to have a positive outcome?! And that it won’t scare away your elder customers towards your competition, which does operate a call centre with real employees of their own?

When there are two things that both the robotization and the outsourcing of core activities – like call centres and distribution departments – cause, it is that a. customers feel more detached from commercial / financial services companies (i.e. feel more treated like a number than a customer of flesh and blood) and b. those human call centre and distribution service workers will never feel attached to your company in the first place. They work for your company today and for your competitor’s company tomorrow and don't mind much whether customers run away to your competition. They simply do their job and that's that. 

And be sure that your customers notice, whether a call centre employee is really attached to a company on whose behalf he works or just a hired gun from a specialized service provider. So perhaps companies should give the outsourcing of real core activities a second thought after all.

Last, but not least, there is the issue of SME companies and their personnel.

The legislators (i.e. national government) and the executive organizations for labour laws and work-related social security (i.e. local governments, as well as governmental executive bodies, like the Sociale Verzekeringsbank and the UWV) should think about new sickness laws that are less radical and ‘life-threatening’ for small companies, in case of long-term sickness. 

On the other hand these laws should still not open the floodgates for abuse of sickness money in economic hard times for companies. Restoring the situation from the Eighties would be reckless, but the current situation at the labour market is also unsustainable. That is one of the challenges that the new Dutch cabinet will have ahead in 2017. 

But finally: take a look at the people who work for you and consider giving them a fixed contract. They might not be so bad after all and they will be grateful and loyal in exchange for that.

The food truck and the oriental guerilla: the growing influence of the food multinationals on our daily lives

One could call this a successful attempt to do guerrilla marketing.

Unilever, the large Anglo-Dutch food, hygiene  and personal care multinational is sued by the organizer of the ‘Rollende Keukens’ (i.e. rolling kitchens) food truck festival. The giant company is suppoenaed for illegally hijacking this explicitely non-sponsored and artisanal festival with industrial products from its Conimex oriental food line. These products were sold via a food truck, that was owned by a festival participant, but ‘stealthily’ operated by Unilever.

The following snippets were printed in daily newspaper Het Parool.

“Ten years ago we started with ‘Rollende Keukens’. The event is becoming bigger and bigger, but it is still established upon small entrepreneurship”, according to organizer Igor Sorko of Rollende Keukens.

With the steady growth of the festival, the number of application requests from the big brands is growing. “Every year we turn down dozens of such applications. In March, two months before the festival weekend, we were approached by Conimex. They offered a substantial amount for being allowed to distribute food samples on the festival terrain. Also that offer we turned down, as it violates our principles.”

Therefore Sorko was flabbergasted when he read on various blogs one week after the festival, that Conimex had been present on Rollende Keukens after all, with the ‘Hurry for Curry’ foodtruck.

“What happened? Unilever had asked a foodtruck entrepreneur, via a marketing bureau, to create a truck on their behalf, register himself for Rollende Keukens and thus participate in the festival with (candid) Conimex products”, Sorko explains. At that moment, the brand behind this foodtruck was not revealed.

However, in hindsight we found out that there had been a whole media campaign around this event, with a website, a Facebook page and purchased adverts etc. ‘Nobody knew it was us, but we were present on the Rollende Keukens with our truck’, they boasted. When we noticed that, we went crazy.”

While the uninformed reader could argue what the fuzz exactly is about, it is for me a tell-tale signal that the giant food companies and fastfood chains don’t take prisoners in their battle for total control of the consumer market. And as a matter of fact, I can understand Igor Sorko’s anger and flabbergastedness.

These are strange times: it is a world of globalization and open borders and increasing power for the large multinational food and personal health companies, like Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, Nestlé, Danone, Coca Cola Company and Monsanto, to name a few of the most important companies.

At the same time there is a strong craving among people for locally produced/grown food products of artisanal, handmade quality. Food that gives people a ‘heritage-ish’, ‘back to the barn’ feeling of long lost times. Food and snacks like homemade and handmade pizzas, sausages, hamburgers, handcut chips (aka French or Belgian fries), sandwiches made of artisanally baked bread and other finger food of artisanal, locally produced quality. Such food attracts a growing amount of people that are longing for the different flavours and the artisanal quality of the food of their youth. Hence, the foodtruck festival is a textbook example of this somewhat nostalgic, but very vibrant development.

When such a festival is ‘stealthily’ hijacked by one of the worlds largest industrial producers of food products – and as such the total opposite of what the festival endorses – in order to promote their own product lines, this violates the very foundation of this ‘back to basics’ development. And while the suppoena from ‘Rollende Keukens’ will probably become a mission impossible against the legal firepower of Unilever, it is a strong warning signal for the rest of the world that the food multinationals are playing for keeps.

In earlier times only the supermarkets and the well-known fast food chains – which were not so widespread over the country yet – were the domain of industrialized food production and there was still much room for traditional, quite artisanal snack bars, icecream parlours and cafeterias.

However, during the 21st century especially Unilever has intensified its presence in the whole distribution chain, with Unox soupstores, Bertolli lunchrooms, icecream parlours with Unilever scooped ice cream and last, but not least the ‘Broodje Unox’ (i.e. sausage roll) shops at the Dutch amusement parks, train stations and (musical/societal) festivals. Some of these experiments were a failure (for instance the Bertolli lunchrooms), but  especially Broodje Unox seems to be a big success.

Together with the tsunami of American fastfood chains that flooded The Netherlands, the number of places were people could eat real homemade, artisanal fastfood and snacks diminished substantially.

And that is not all: also the Dutch hotels and restaurants have become more and more in the grip of industrialized food producers and caterers, through the sales and usage of fully prepared, catered food as well as semi-finished products for soups, sauces, meat and vegetables. That is very convenient for cooking, but not always good for the taste and quality of restaurant and hotel food.

What most large food multinationals have in common, is that they both try to save an extra penny on expensive ingredients by replacing them with cheaper ones and make their food more preservable, so that they don’t have to throw away outdated stock.

Relatively expensive or unstable ingredients, like (double) cream, wheat flour, mushrooms, herbs and spices and real chicken/beef broth extracts are often replaced by cheaper or more stable ones, like salt (lots of it), sodium glutamate, citric acid, skimmed milk powder, modified starch and yeast extract, as well as artificial flavours and preservants.

This delivers a cheaper, more stable and preservable  end product, which nevertheless has a strong taste that is akin to the original product or even surpassing it. But it has nothing to do with real, artisanal cooking, using only real ingredients.

And can you – as a customer – tell which hotel or restaurant uses only real ingredients and which one uses industrially prepared food and semifinished products? Only the people with the strongest noses and the best trained taste buds can, but others are eating inferior products without knowing it.

Or do you really think that the “19” ingredients of McDonalds French fries are meant to give you a better eating experience than a handcut, hand-peeled and hand-baked potato of a superior potato species could?

This is for me the reason to support Igor “Don Quixote” Sorko in his battle against the windmills of the large food multinationals: a battle that he probably can’t and won’t win, but at the same time a battle worth fighting for. 

And perhaps, when you want to eat something really surprising ? Go for Sorko’s foodtrucks at the next ‘Rollende Keukens’ festival! But please don’t ‘Hurry for Curry’, as it might not be the real deal!