I especially like this quote:
If the people being sacked were really the most suitable for the jobs being created, then they would have walked into the new jobs without any fuss whatsoever.I can't help but agree wholeheartedly. Employment legislation is intended to protect good workers from bad employers. It might do that. I wouldn't know. What I do know is that it gives bad employees one hell of a good stick with which to beat good employers into submission.
After all, if you regard an employer as such an awful one, why do you want your job back? Either you are playing the system, or Gordon really has screwed our economy so badly that there isn't an alternative for you.
Thanks for linking, but I really must get back to work ;-)
ReplyDelete(you and me both!)
ReplyDeleteI have spent more time dealing with useless, pointless and devious employees than I ever have on moving business forward.
ReplyDeleteHR departments are worse than useless in that if they are aware of a problem they can devise ways to make it infinitely worse.
Without commenting on the rights and wrongs of the present industrial action, I don't think the suggestion that "the proper objective of a business [is] to make money and stay afloat" should go unchallenged.
ReplyDeleteSince money (though important) is not a basic good, it cannot be the proper objective of anything without qualification. Instead money serves basic goods like human dignity. Accordingly, in his Encyclical "Centesimus annus", Pope John Paul II said the following:
"The Church acknowledges the legitimate role of profit as an indication that a business is functioning well. When a firm makes a profit, this means that productive factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied. But profitability is not the only indicator of a firm's condition. It is possible for the financial accounts to be in order, and yet for the people — who make up the firm's most valuable asset — to be humiliated and their dignity offended. Besides being morally inadmissible, this will eventually have negative repercussions on the firm's economic efficiency. In fact, the purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavouring to satisfy their basic needs, and who form a particular group at the service of the whole of society. Profit is a regulator of the life of a business, but it is not the only one; other human and moral factors must also be considered which, in the long term, are at least equally important for the life of a business."
Albert, you are wrong. Totally wrong.
ReplyDeleteHere's why.