“BT has said it will cut about 15,000 jobs this year, mostly in the UK, and has reported an annual loss of £134m. The firm also said it had cut 15,000 jobs in the past year, which was 5,000 more than had been expected”.

The BT spokesman said they hoped to remove the positions through natural wastage and voluntary redundancies, rather than through compulsory redundancies. How caring that sounds. Though it transpires that although BT is not planning on compulsory redundancies, it instead has a compulsory redeployment programme, where highly skilled engineers are removed from the job they have spent years training (and even more years becoming accomplished) to do, and given the option of either voluntarily being redeployed to a call centre, or voluntarily being made compulsorily redundant.

But that wasn’t what I was going to talk about.

What’s not mentioned in the BBC News article, but was mentioned in the radio coverage of the story, was that the anticipation was that most of the jobs to be shed would be the temporary staff, working through agencies. He said it in the tone of voice indicating “so that’s alright, then”, going on to say that they wanted to reward their permanent staff for their loyalty in being permanent staff.

I wonder how many of the temporary staff who are apparently disloyal because they’re not permanent have been working there for over 12 months? Disloyal for foregoing sickness pay, pension contribution, paid bank holidays, and any number of other benefits which permanent staff receive and are denied to temporary staff – no matter how long either have worked for the company.

And apart from a few people working in highly lucrative I.T. consultancy roles, being a temporary member of staff is not the route to riches it is commonly thought to be – it’s took a change in the law to force employers to pay temporary staff as much as their permanent colleagues doing the same work – though the employers themselves still end up paying more for temps because of the agency’s cut.

Workplace unions are also notoriously bad at standing up for temporary staff – usually their attitude is protect the permanent workers at all cost, and see the temps as worse than scabs crossing a picket line.

So it’s quite convenient when such as BT announce redundancies, proudly proclaiming “we’ll restrict the sackings to the agency workers” – they manage to make themselves sound caring on the radio, the unions stay relatively quiet, & 15,000 more people next month will be wondering how they’ll pay their rent / mortgage / food bills.

But that’s OK – after all, they’re only temps.