Latest posting One of the themes of this year’s conference has been trust – how to regain it, in some cases, and how to build it in others. As CIPD president Gill Rider said in her opening address to the conference on Tuesday, there is a crisis of trust in leadership which is almost as huge as the more tangible economic challenges organisations face. Whether it is politicians, bankers or even the media, many people at the top of organisations have slipped in the public estimation and it could take some time and effort before they are once again held in high regard.

But allied to this, HR has more specific challenge – how to get and keep the trust of their staff. Wednesday morning saw a fascinating insight from Jane Beine of John Lewis, whose partnership model represents a much-admired example of a trusted employer brand. (Indeed, they will be a case study in forthcoming CIPD research). The retailer had to make 3,300 posts redundant in its three-year restructuring programme, yet employee surveys showed that faith in leaders actually went up during this period – a sign that staff trusted the communication they received from leaders, especially when it came to looking after workers through redeployment.

Marks and Spencer HR director Tanith Dodge was another speaker who touched on the subject yesterday. For her, admitting mistakes rather than brushing them under the carpet was a central plank of being trusted – by employees and customers alike. She referred to the media furore in 2009 over the company’s pricing of bras, which saw women charged more for larger sizes. The openness of the company’s response to that criticism – which included an advert admitting that the company “boobed” – went down well with staff.

“You’ve got to really demonstrate that you live the values, that leaders walk, talk and embed them,” said Dodge. If the leadership is open “that’s how you build employee trust,” she said.

Finally, Marshall Ayoade of Vodafone Global Enterprise touched on another variety of trust in his session on flexible working. He said that much of the resistance to flexibility came from managers who needed to see their staff to be sure they were actually working – a culture of ‘presenteeism’ that he wanted to dispel.

Where everybody trusts each other in the workplace, things run more smoothly – bosses don’t have to spend so much time micro-managing their staff, leaders have faith in their reports to deliver and we don’t waste energy checking up on each other. And that’s the sort of workplace we’d all like to work in.Comments [1] Recent postings
At the CIPD’s annual conference this month I attended a session by Angela Williams, HR director of British Gas (she was also kind enough to repeat some of the highlights from it for us on this video interview).

One of the most interesting things she had to say was about how the “employee proposition” at British Gas has had to change in recent years in response to the “customer proposition”. Put simply, this means that as the customers expect more from the service (more flexible hours for call-outs, a quicker response, better communication, etc) there are also implications for the terms on which employees do their jobs – their shift patterns, working hours and flexibility. At British Gas the heightened customer expectation was enshrined in a ‘customer promise’ to mend your boiler on the same day if you call in the morning.

Williams said that one of the biggest recent achievements of the company (and of HR in particular) was bringing about these changes – which included renegotiating terms and conditions that had stayed the same for 30 years – in a harmonious way. She said it had required “major partnership activity” with unions.

It’s quite an achievement. When you review the history of other former nationalised companies, like Network Rail or British Airways, or even the soon-to-be-privatised Royal Mail, you can see that the slightest change to working conditions has often been enough to lead to conflict. In some of these industries the “customer proposition” has changed a lot (people are demanding more from the service) but the employee proposition – whether in respect of working hours, pay and pensions or job security – has been amazingly slow to shift.

So why has there been more of a success story at British Gas? It’s not that the unions have given the organisation an easy ride; indeed, GMB briefly threatened to strike in March before rejoining talks. It’s probably not solely due to its HR department doing a brilliant job (although I’m sure that they are). Instead, I’m inclined to think that it’s because your average gas fitter has more empathy with the customers than a train driver or postman. The gas man comes to your house, sees the predicament that you are in and helps you put it right. He speaks to the customers individually; he might even get a cup of tea. If he puts in extra effort, he can see that it is helping someone – and he certainly doesn’t want to go on strike and leave those old ladies with broken boilers shivering in the cold.

It’s hard for anyone to change the routines and terms on which they do their job, especially if the change means they have to work longer or harder. But if you are close to customers – close enough to see the whites of their eyes – perhaps it gets a little bit easier to understand why those changes must be made.

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It’s a common warning sounded by big business (especially financial firms) to the government in the UK – if you are overly tough with your tax regime, we’ll pack up and go somewhere else.

Such lobbying usually works, partly because it’s relatively easy to imagine such companies moving – you’d have to get your key staff to relocate and it would probably be a bit of a headache, but if most of your money is made while sitting at computers, it’s not a huge leap to think that you could set up shop in Geneva. But recent events in Australia have shown that similar threats can be effective even for a more unlikely group - mining companies.

You would have thought that if your business consists of digging things out of a hole in the ground, then you are about as geographically immobile as it’s possible to be – but that doesn’t mean that you have to let national governments push you around. Not when you have achieved a certain size at any rate. Let’s take Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.

Rio is listed on the London Stock Exchange and as such is part of the FTSE-100, but has barely any employees in Britain. By contrast, it has 16,000 workers in Australia and mines commodities as diverse as diamonds, coal, salt, uranium, iron ore and copper. However, it’s a truly international company, with a presence on six continents, and made profits of £5.2 billion in 2009. But there was growing disquiet in some quarters about the profits being made from Australia’s natural resources, particularly as much of it seemed to be going abroad; so in May, Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd laid out plans for a 40 per cent windfall tax on the sector, which he said would help plug the country’s deficit.

What happened next reveals the power that big employers like Rio can wield when they feel wronged. The company threatened to scale back a £150 million investment in its mines in Western Australia, where it is a large employer, and to look at opportunities in other countries instead. Its main rivals, BHP Billiton and Xstrata, made similar noises.

One of the most biting criticisms came from Rio’s executive director Sam Walsh, who went on TV and said that the way Rudd had behaved was “not a satisfactory way to run a country”. With an election imminent, and with all those Western Australian votes at stake, the opposition Liberal Party jumped on the bandwagon and opposed the tax. The ensuing row may have been the last straw for Rudd’s Labour party at a time when his popularity was waning anyway, and they ended up toppling him as leader. Deputy Julia Gillard was installed as the new prime minister and, lo and behold, one of her first actions was to renegotiate the tax, which will now be set at 22.5 per cent, apply to fewer commodities and will kick in at a higher point.

This week, Rio Tinto signalled its approval of the change by confirming its £150 million Western Australia project would now go ahead – giving Gillard a PR boost for the jobs that will be created.

I think this story contains a lesson for those who favour aggressive taxes against big business of all kinds – don’t assume that such things are possible, because business leaders are often just as powerful (in some respects even more so) than politicians. If a firm employs thousands of people and is responsible for a hefty slice of a country’s tax revenues, then politicians have got to keep it happy one way or another. It’s pretty much impossible in a democracy for a few angry politicians to get rid of a chief executive; however, as this episode shows, a few angry chief executives can certainly go some way towards bringing down a prime minister.

Comments [0] In today’s post-crisis climate there is a growing appetite for holding corporate leaders to account – whether it be by government, regulators, or non-executive directors – and shareholders are one group that it is speculated could gain more power as a result. For example, last month’s updated Corporate Governance Code recommended that directors should face election by shareholders every year, rather than every three.

You often hear talk of “shareholder revolts” at large UK firms, but they rarely add up to very much; UK investors tend to register displeasure by selling their shares rather than engaging in US-style shareholder activism. But what’s going on at Prudential at the moment is a rare and fascinating example of shareholders flexing their muscles.

For those who haven’t been following the story, chief executive Tidjane Thiam and chairman Harvey McGrath are under fire for the botched takeover of AIA, the Asian arm of insurance giant AIG. This massive purchase (worth the small matter of £23.4 billion) was to be funded by a rights issue – a device in which shareholders are asked for more money to finance management’s plans. But many investors proved unwilling to stump up the cash – asking awkward questions about the fees paid to the bankers and the risks involved – while the FSA also expressed concerns. Thiam was forced to try to renegotiate the deal and when AIG wouldn’t play ball the deal collapsed, with an estimated cost of £450 million. Thiam or McGrath, or both, may end up paying for the episode with their jobs.

The key shareholder in the revolt was fund manager Robin Geffen of Neptune Investment Management – memorably described as “Scrappy Doo on steroids” – who controls £34 million of Prudential shares. After his initial protests to the board fell on deaf ears, he has led a campaign which has included vocal criticism in the press, a barrage of questions at the firm’s AGM and a website for smaller shareholders to register their disapproval.

Not all shareholders will share Geffen’s perspective on matters – indeed, if they did, the saga would have been much less drawn out – but I think the fact that prominent investors are willing to make their voice heard over the running of a company is a welcome development. Prudential has over 70,000 individual shareholders, but the only ones that really have any influence or voice are the 282 institutional investors who own 86 per cent of the shares. If these big investors – who hold many smaller investor’s pensions and savings in their funds - are unwilling to challenge directors’ actions then nobody ever will.

If the result of such activism is that more directors, leaders and investors are compelled to think about the long-term health and sustainability of a company, rather than being motivated by short-term profit and speculation, then it can only be a good thing.
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To say that it has been a dreadful month for BP is an understatement. From the moment the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on 20 April, the scale of the disaster has been mounting by the day. Eleven workers lost their lives in the explosion; 5,000 barrels of oil a day have been leaking into the Gulf of Mexico; and the growing oil slick has caused such damage to the environment and the local economy that it’s estimated the company will be hit with an eventual bill of around £6 billion.

While BP has been trying everything to plug the leak, from constructing a giant metal cap to jamming the gap with golf balls, chief executive Tony Hayward has apparently become America’s public enemy number one. But after being on the wrong end of a tongue-lashing from President Obama and receiving hate mail from the US public, Hayward has been pulling out all the stops to put things right. He has relocated to the company’s US headquarters in Houston and vowed not to return to the UK until the situation is resolved. He has mobilised a massive clean-up operation involving thousands of people, which BP will pay for in its entirety, and has admitted in interviews that he can barely sleep thinking about the oil still escaping from the ocean floor.

The incident raises troubling questions about the extent to which businesses, and their leaders, can be held responsible for the damage caused by their activity. It’s important to note that no official blame has been apportioned for the tragedy - the rig’s operator, Transocean, and building contractor Halliburton, have also been under scrutiny and all three parties have blamed each other when they gave evidence to US Congress. Of course, there is a feeling that BP has the moral responsibility to carry the can, not least because it has deeper pockets than the other firms – its profits in 2009 were £8.75 billion.

If BP are found to be at fault, there are those who would call for Hayward to lose his job – and given that lives were lost, there’s even the possibility that criminal charges could be brought. But how much can any one individual – even a chief executive – really be held accountable for a disaster of this magnitude? The mistake might have been down to a single defective piece of equipment, a single blunder or oversight by an otherwise attentive person or team. It might even have been the result of a tragic combination of circumstances, and nobody’s fault at all.

It’s worth remembering the case of Joseph Hazelwood, the captain of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker which ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989, dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil and killing 250,000 seabirds. Exxon were initially fined $5 billion for the environmental catastrophe, (reduced to $500 million after 20 years of legal arguments) but if anyone was personally responsible for that disaster, it was Hazelwood. He was fined $50,000 and given 1,000 hours of community service, yet continued to protest his innocence and embarked on a lengthy appeals process. It was ten years before he paid his fine and did his community service, working in the Alaska’s national parks picking up litter, but it was not until the 20th anniversary of the disaster that he truly accepted his fault and made a formal apology to the Alaskan people. "I was the captain of a ship that ran aground and caused a horrendous amount of damage. I've got to be responsible for that," he wrote in a personal account of the disaster. "I would like to offer an apology, a very heartfelt apology, to the people of Alaska.”

However much it costs to clean up the latest oil spill, let us hope that it does not take 20 years for the individuals involved to show similar contrition.

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Whether or not the UK gets a new leader on 6 May, next month will definitely see a change of leadership at one venerable British institution: Marks & Spencer. Sir Stuart Rose, who has broken current corporate convention by holding both chairman and chief executive roles at the retailer since 2008, will stand aside as chief executive on 4 May to be replaced by Dutchman Marc Bolland, former chief executive of Morrisons. Under Rose’s five-year stewardship as CEO, M&S has not achieved notable growth – its profits this year are expected to be in the region of £620 million, very similar to those of five years ago – but it has at least survived the recession in good health, thanks to a regime of belt-tightening that has cut £300 million from its annual costs.

Rose, who will stay on as chairman until 2011, has shown few signs of wanting to abandon the limelight in recent weeks. He was perhaps the best-known signatory in a petition of business leaders opposing Labour’s planned 1 per cent national insurance rise, and has been particularly vocal in his criticism of the government. So what effect will Labour’s tax changes really have on businesses such as Marks & Spencer? Are Rose and the other business leaders right to be aggrieved on this issue, or are they – as some have insinuated - a bunch of closet Tories who are letting their personal politics shine through?

The National Insurance Contributions (NICs) rise has been described as a “tax on jobs” and this criticism is true in that the more staff a company has, the more it will have to pay. M&S, which has about 77,000 employees, is expecting the rise in employer NICs to cost it £5.4 million a year. Sounds a lot – but this has to be put into context. At 0.9 per cent of annual profit, or £70 per employee per year, it’s questionable whether it will change the behaviour of a giant such as M&S. All its rivals in the retail sector will be similarly affected, so it won’t be put at a competitive disadvantage. Neither will its employees suffer unduly: employee contributions won’t go up for those earning less than £20,000 under Labour’s plans and M&S employees – including both full and part-time staff – take home an average of just £12,500 a year.

Now consider the effect recent tax changes will have on the bosses of Britain’s big companies, such as the new income tax rate of 50 per cent for those earning more than £150,000. Rose, for example, will get a salary of £875,000 as chairman of M&S (as executive chairman it was £1.2 million), and so he’ll now be paying (according to my basic calculations) around £410,000 of that straight to the government – a whopping £72,500 extra in income tax a year. The NI rise will cost him personally another five-figure sum each year. Any bonus would also attract the new 50 per cent rate, while if he wants to top up his pension in future he’ll also get clobbered once the tax relief for high earners is cut from 40 per cent to 20 per cent.

It’s easy to imagine how he might be resentful of Gordon Brown’s regime – his business, which wasn’t at fault for the economic crisis and is providing employment to thousands, is being punished by a national insurance grab at the same time as he himself is being hit by much higher personal taxes. Not all FTSE companies will feel the pain of the NICs rise as much as Marks & Spencer – it has been pointed out that one of the signatories to the letter, Mick Davis, chief executive of mining company Xstrata, employs only 250 people in the UK – but all FTSE chief executives will have noted the attack on their personal fortunes.

Whether or not the NICs rise will really prevent jobs being created is certainly a moot point. But could the imposition of taxes on the rich – a reversal of Labour’s policy in the previous decade – go some way towards explaining the sudden rush of business leaders who are now lining up to put the boot in to Brown?

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Imagine being the chief executive of a company that loses £6.7 billion. The following year, things get a little better, but you still lose £6.3 billion. Here’s a question – how much would you expect as a bonus? The answer for most of us would be a round number – a big fat zero to be exact– but if your name is Eric Daniels of Lloyds Banking Group, then the answer is a more pleasing £2.3 million.

To his credit, Daniels waived his right to the bonus. But some Lloyds shareholders (and since the bank is 41 per cent taxpayer-owned, that category includes all of us), have been quite rightly asking how this reward is calculated. What variety of success is the incentive recognising, if it’s not to do with making a profit or raising the share price?

This question becomes all the more pertinent when you realise that the figure of £2.3 million – 225 per cent of Daniels’ basic salary of £1.03 million – is actually the maximum allowable he could have been awarded by the Lloyds remuneration committee. They are saying his performance over the year was right at the top of the range.

To understand how this could be, let’s take a look at way the bank’s executive remuneration is structured, as explained in the Lloyds’ annual report and accounts for 2009 (the 2010 version is not published yet). This says that 50 per cent of the bonus is set according to “group financial targets, relating to profit before tax and economic profit”, while 50 per cent is determined by a “balanced scorecard, covering customers, people, risk, and franchise building”.

Lloyds’ profit before tax in 2009 - £1.04 billion – was actually not disastrous. While it was only about a quarter of what Lloyds TSB was achieving on its own before the crash, at least it’s a profit. What plunged things into the red was the scale of bad debts (especially property loans) left over from the HBOS part of the business, which have ballooned from £14.9 billion to £24 billion in the past 12 months. Since this was a legacy factor outside Daniels’ control, the remuneration committee have obviously taken the view that he has met his financial targets as they relate to this single year. The fact that Lloyds has successfully raised huge sums from shareholders – and reduced its public stake from 43 to 41 per cent – will also have helped in this regard.

The other half – the balanced scorecard based on non-financial factors – is a bit harder to quantify, but the biggest task in hand is the integration of the new group, which is now the largest ever UK bank. Lloyds has shed 15,000 jobs since it was officially created at the start of 2009, so the drive for “synergy savings” is clearly proceeding apace. Lloyds has denied that there is a specific target for the number of jobs cut, but “integration” and “cuts” are two sides of the same coin. It’s intriguing to think that their executives might be being rewarded for reducing the workforce, at a time when the largest shareholder (the government) is keen to maximise employment. There’s also a contrast with the US – where Obama has vowed to break up banks that are too big to fail – that one of the effects of the banking crisis on the corporate landscape was to create this super-bank, which will dwarf much of its competition when the economy recovers.

Once this painful period is over, it has dumped all its toxic assets and “integrated” its staff, there’s every possibility that Lloyds will once more be a roaring success. How much of this will be down to the good work of the chief executive, and how much to the safety net provided by the taxpayer, will continue to be the subject of much debate.

Daniels’ announcement that he was waiving his bonus only came after his counterparts at Barclays and RBS made similar gestures. This has led some to speculate that he made the move reluctantly, and that both he and the company believe he is doing a grand job. It’s also worth noting that when all elements in his reward package are considered (salary, bonus and long-term share plan incentive) Daniels earns significantly less than his counterparts at Barclays, RBS and HSBC. Perhaps he offers good value for money after all.
Comments [1] Welcome to my new blog , in which I take a look at the business and the HR facts and figures behind the FTSE -100 companies making the news.

Soon after 22 February’s ballot for industrial action closes, we’ll learn the outcome of the latest chapter in the saga that is the BA dispute. Cabin crews affiliated to Unite are voting on whether they should walk out in protest at job cuts and changes to working practices. Considering that the previous ballot – albeit one that was spoiled because some ineligible people voted – recorded 92 per cent in favour of a strike on an 80 per cent turnout, it would be surprising if the result were anything other than a repeated mandate for action. BA’s plans to keep services going during the disruption, including bringing back departed staff and training ground crews as substitutes, only show how worried the company is at the prospect.

The public is unsure about where its sympathies should lie – many customers are simply wondering whether they’ll still be able to get to Tenerife for their Easter getaway, of course – but any objective analysis must focus on the state of the company’s finances. The chief executive, Willie Walsh, has said that BA is in a “fight for survival” and sacrifices must be made, but the union has pointed to the latest results – a relatively trifling £50 million loss for the quarter – as a sign that the situation is not as bad as all that. So who is right?

Whichever way you look at it, BA is in dire straits. The latest quarterly loss might have been less than what most analysts were predicting, but the firm has still shed £342 million in the first nine months of the 2009-10 financial year after posting a £401 million total loss in 2008-09. The airline has a cash balance of about £2 billion so, while it’s not about to go under, it can’t afford too many years like this one. And that’s before you consider the biggest millstone around the company’s neck: its pension scheme. This is showing a deficit of £3.7 billion – well over the company’s market value of £2.38 billion. (The old joke is that BA is a pension company that also runs a few jets.) The deficit is so large that a proposed merger with Iberia, which might still make sense, is on ice because the Spanish company is insisting that BA sorts it out first. The management team is committed to paying an extra £131 million a year towards filling the hole and, even if radical action is taken, this is going to be a drain on resources for many years yet.

Reducing costs seems the only option, but where to make the cuts? Cutting staff from 15 to 14 on each long-haul flight (one of the most controversial issues in the dispute) is predicted to save BA about £140 million annually and would lead to 1,000 redundancies among BA’s 12,000 cabin crew members. It’s not a palatable option for the workforce, but neither is the alternative of across-the-board pay cuts. Softer options such as voluntary leave, periods of unpaid work etc have been tried without conspicuous success. When left with a choice of equally painful options, a union’s default position can be to resist everything. Given that a strike would itself cost the airline an estimated £25 million a day, BA’s overall position is going to be made even worse by such resistance.

While the biggest factors behind the current problems – high fuel costs, intense competition and fewer business travellers – are industry-wide, BA is being hit hardest because of its historically high staff costs. The airline’s troubles are sad but inevitable. Whatever the outcome, I’m not sure that the union can win. Either the company succeeds in forcing through cuts and culture changes or a prolonged industrial battle becomes another dead weight to bring the airline down.
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Welcome to my new blog , in which I will take a look at the business and HR facts and figures behind the FTSE -100 companies making the news.


Cadbury is in the process of being taken over by US cheese maker and all-round food giant Kraft. For anyone who has missed the details (or has switched off during the interminable negotiations and games of bluff that have taken place in the last few months), the Cadbury board has finally accepted a bid for the firm valued at around £11.5 billion. This means that shareholders have until 2 February to decide whether or not to accept the deal.

Notwithstanding the complaints of Warren Buffett, one of Cadbury’s largest shareholders – owning 9 per cent of Cadbury shares – the deal is almost certain to go ahead. Around 40 per cent of Cadbury’s shares are owned by US investors who aren’t likely to be swayed much by the “great British brand” argument, while another 20 per cent are owned by hedge funds that are only there at all because they hope to profit from the takeover. In fact, few shareholders of any kind will turn down the chance of a short-term profit – as the Cadbury board well knows, which is why it has finally seen the writing on the wall and accepted the offer (but not before a desperate search for another buyer to save Cadbury from Kraft’s clutches).

The big HR story in all this is the fate of Cadbury’s 4,500 UK-based staff, especially those at the firm’s historic site of Bournville in Birmingham. The union Unite certainly fears the worst, and some of these fears might be justified: Kraft has financed the takeover with borrowings of around £7 billion, a debt that will fall on the new firm and is bound to affect its financial priorities. There are some parallels with the Glazer family’s takeover of Manchester United FC – except that while the Glazers could make some of their money back by selling Cristiano Ronaldo, Kraft is more likely to seek a return on its investment by making “synergies” that include cutting front-line jobs.

But perhaps some of the pessimism has been overdone. Far from being a quaint British institution that is about to be swept away by a new tide of American efficiency, Cadbury is itself very international in outlook - it employs 46,000 people in 60 countries – and also very profitable (its last full year results showed a turnover of £5.4 billion and an operating profit of £638 million). Despite the philanthropic roots of Cadbury’s 19th century founders, the company has not up until now been run as a charity. If it was desperately uneconomic to continue making chocolate bars on these shores, then sentiment alone would not have been enough to preserve jobs this long. Instead, Cadbury is actually a British success story, and Kraft, while it clearly believes itcan enhance its profitability further, would be foolish to move in and destroy the foundations of that success. And before too many political points are made about foreign predators swooping on UK firms, it should be remembered that Cadbury has made its fair share of acquisitions over the years, including some American ones such as the Adams chewing gum firm it bought for $4.2 billion (£2.6 billion) in 2003. If a business is worth its salt, it is worth keeping - whatever the nationality of the owners.

An interesting footnote to the saga is that Cadbury’s chairman Roger Carr has called on the government to review its list of firms that enjoy state protection from overseas bids. Currently, only Royal Mail, BAE Systems and Rolls Royce enjoy this status. It would be stretching it to argue that chocolate-making is an issue of national security, but there are rumours that UK energy firms such as National Grid and Centrica are on the shopping list of Russian giant Gazprom. That would certainly raise some political hackles. Watch this space.
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I’ve just finished reading an excellent book on economics: The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith. Putting aside the fact that I only withdrew it from the library because his other well-known book, The Great Crash, was unavailable (it’s quite in vogue at the moment), I thought he had some interesting points that could be relevant to the current economic situation.

His main line of argument is that nowadays most of the goods we produce in the West are non-essential. Because the vast majority of our basic needs (such as food and clothes) are in ample supply, the economy has only been able to continue to grow by producing more and more superfluous products – products that, were it not for the efforts of the advertising industry, there would be no demand for.

Despite this, economists continue to view production as all-important to the economy – think of all the stats about GDP and the worrying caused by the economy shrinking. However, here’s the most important point: as most of what is produced is non-essential, why do we care if production goes down? In fact, Galbraith argues, what people in an affluent society really care about is employment and unemployment: they don’t mind what is produced, as long as they can be paid for producing it and enjoy a good standard of living.

But if we accept that employment and job security are our goals rather than production and efficiency, it challenges a lot of widely-held assumptions, many very pertinent today. Why promote efficiency in our public services if it is going to have a huge human cost? Why permit massive mergers or acquisitions in the name of efficiency if it’s going to put thousands out of work?

There is a lot of muddled thinking about this among our political leaders. On the one hand the government professes to be concerned about unemployment but, on the other, it looks to privatise the Royal Mail in the name of efficiency. It spends billions propping up the banks but when it comes to the civil service and local government it insists on reductions in headcount. The media don’t help either with articles banging on about “non-jobs” in councils; if those people weren’t doing their non-jobs, they’d be in the dole queue and the taxpayer would be paying for them anyway.

The carmakers that have implemented three-day weeks and reduced hoursare perhaps showing the way forward: they are showing that in tough times, and perhaps in all times, keeping people employed is a goal in itself and not everything should be sacrificed for efficiency and the bottom line.
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