On Tuesday, January 30, 2007 1:58 PM [GMT+1=CET], Nigel Stanley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think that it's very hard to argue this out without a lot more > knowledge than it is possible for outsiders to have. Indeed. I've got a lot of experience of redundancy consultations, as a Trade Union negotiator for some years, and what comes out at the end is often very different from where the consultations started (see below). > But I do know that I am always suspicious of the easy line that only > 'front line' staff have proper jobs and everyone else is a useless > backroom bureaucrat. (part of the problem with the NHS is that it is > not managed well enough) Part of the problem, which I've come across in the public sector, but I'm quite prepared to believe it's there in the private sector as well, is that in any organisation about a certain critical size there grow whole tiers of administration whose task ends up (however it started) in inventing paper-work for others (including the front-line workers), and analyising the returns. I know that BW is not immune from this. I've seen the signs of it when I've been judging the regional heats of the lock & length competitions, when instead of my having to assess whether the staff on the ground are doing the right things about, for example, heritage and ecology, I'm supposed to check that they are following the pieces of paper that come to them and creating the correct pieces of paper in response. You might guess my attitude to this in practice. So perhaps if some of this tier of administration is pruned, the workers on the bank will have more time to get on with their jobs as they'll have fewer bits of Head Office Bumf to complete. > I'm even more suspicious when it's a nice round number like 150 - that > strikes me as deciding the number of jobs to go first and then > deciding who goes - not a process based on any real evaluation of the > jobs involved. I've had so much experience of redunancy consultations/negotiations that I now never believe anything I'm told about them by anybody who wasn;t actually round the table (and not always then, as some bits of negotiation are bert not discussed outside). I've never come across any organisation that started a redundancy procedure with an actual target figure of numbers of jobs. The target figure is nearly always a financial one, and an impoirtnat aspect of the negotiations between the employer and the unions is finding a strategy that will minimise the job losses that need to be made to achieve the required savings. And if the original plan was for job losses over a number of years, all or mostly by natural wastage, and then external or other budgetary constraints compel them to happen in the current year, then the number of jobs to be lost goes up quite considerably. That's because the saving made in the current year of each job lost is smaller than in a subsequent year for two reasons (a) if the job-loss happens part-way through the year, the sabing is only of the sslary for the rest of the year and (b) redundancy compensation adds a cost. So my guess would be that if the BW situation ended up with 180 job lossed in a single year, then they probablyt started looking at losing about 120 jobs over three of four years. Mike Stevens narrowboat Felis Catus III web-site www.mike-stevens.co.uk Defend the waterways. Visit the web site www.saveourwaterways.org.uk > > And don't get me started on the nonsense that all the private sector > is so much better managed than all the public sector - a good piece in > the FT today on this!
