As I read through the papers over lunch today, I was greeted by yet more bad news on the job front; lay-offs in Volex, potential job losses in Waterford Crystal, expected 1,000’s to face job axe in the next year. This has been building up for some time now and surely the world cannot be looking at this the way the media wants them to?
So far this tide of job losses has not been due to a global down turn, it’s simply because Ireland has become too expensive to work a business with profit. I would estimate (based on my very close following of closures and news reports) that 80% of job losses in the last 12 months have been relocated to foreign countries and not totally wiped out of existence. The people who are in control of analysing and controlling the country’s job market are still sitting pretty. How many government politicians have stepped down or have been sacked in the last 24 months? How many members of IBEC have been sacked?
I am familiar with both government and IBEC offices and employees and I can assure one and all that the price of the cars alone, that these people drive would cover many, many jobs for many years. Then we come to the salary issue, IBEC are today trying to push back the benchmarking of pay until a later date, I can’t help but wonder how many IBEC directors/managers have had their salaries frozen. Ireland as a country is moving towards a top heavy structure of extremely high paid individuals working for government or government bodies. As such the country/companies are running out of money to keep lower paid employees. This is a very logical argument if I may have the audacity to say so but did anyone ever think of sacking a really highly remunerated manager and keeping on 2/3 workers who actually do the donkey work?
I gave up a long time ago on suggesting logic to the sensibly impared and self-justifying job occupiers that are the country’s management types because you’ll never win an argument of fact with somebody who has more to lose than you. Management not only control your salary, they also control what the facts are and in what order they should appear. Pretty soon the entire country will be management and no workers will exist; instead there will be constant meetings between those who are paid in excess of Eur 90K, trying to decide how to create more jobs and give themselves a rise for thinking of the idea. Rant, rant, rant… The rat race is only run by those who believe that some day they too will be managers, instead of those who realise that by stopping somebody else from being a non-working manager is really how you get ahead in life.