“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.

The big internet story over the last few days has been how the Internet Watch Foundation has effectively restricted UK access to Wikipedia by putting it on its blacklist of alleged child pornography hosts, which most UK ISPs subscribe to, on account of it showing a 30-year-old album cover which has been available in shops worldwide – and continues to be available – without attracting any legal attention even if it has always been controversial.

As I was busy elsewhere whilst things have been unfolding I was too late to add my own comment, but Andrew Lewin has written about as balanced and informative a piece as possible – link above.

In the olden days, it was an online axiom that “the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”; when an entire country can now be blocked off from certain pages on certain sites, or certain sites as a whole, simply by diktat by a government department or non-governmental organisation, that axiom is clearly no longer true.

Whatever your views about the specific image in question, one paragraph of Andrew’s article bears specific attention:

“The Government probably thinks it can get away with it as long as it doesn’t look as though politicians’ fingerprints are anywhere too close, but the IWF will respond to government edicts about what’s right and proper with alacrity. We’ve already heard Hazel Blears attack political blogs as ‘a dangerous corrosion in our political culture’ so how long before the IWF decrees those to be against the law or corrupting our morals and do a blanket ban of any such blogs? Sounds like a perfectly proper, moral argument being presented to do just that, after all. Which could be any blog disagreeing with the party of the day … Now is it starting to sound just a little bit like China?”

And as Andrew concludes:

“So I ask you: think of the number one thing you would hate to lose online. And now realise, there’s a very good chance that it can and will be taken away because of the situation we’re sleepwalking into.

Want to wait till it happens? Or do something about it now?”

But of course, “it can’t happen here”.

“The Chinese authorities have broken their promise to improve the country’s human rights situation and betrayed the core values of the Olympics, said Amnesty International in a new report published today, marking the 10-day countdown to the Games.

Amnesty International UK Campaigns Director Tim Hancock said:

‘The Chinese authorities have broken the promises they made when they were granted the Olympics seven years ago. They told the world that the Olympics would help bring human rights to China, but the government continues to persecute and punish those who speak out for human rights ahead of the Games.

‘The Olympic values have been betrayed by the Chinese government. They must release all imprisoned peaceful activists, allow foreign and national journalists to report freely and make further progress towards the elimination of the death penalty – or risk permanently sullying the legacy of the Olympics.’

Amnesty International’s report ‘The Olympics Countdown: Broken Promises’ evaluates the performance of the Chinese authorities in four areas related to the core values of the Olympics: persecution of human rights activists, detention without trial, censorship and the death penalty”.

“Tomorrow’s potential troublemakers can be identified even before they are born, Tony Blair has suggested”.

Unlike most of my friends of the left-liberal persuation, I’m not automatically against the principle of ASBOs – there’s no denying that there are some people who make the lives of other people a misery through behaviour which isn’t actually illegal, and there should be a mechanism for dealing with them which has more legal weight than a stern talking to. If the mechanism is being abused in its implementation, that’s another issue.

But what this new ‘initiative’, branded as ‘Foetal ASBOs’ by the media, is planning on doing is looking at parents, and deciding in advance that their children are ‘bound to’ grow up as problem children – before they’ve even been born. Some people have branded the idea as verging on genetic determinism.

Back in the old days of usenet, it was always considered bad form to compare somebody, or an idea, to Hitler – basically it meant the discussion had run out of useful things to be said. In this instance, I think a comparison with the behaviour of the Nazi regime in 20th century Germany is not too wide of the mark.

Compare and, as the teacher used to say, contrast the following two situations.

Last Tuesday evening from Spar I bought a box of Stowell’s Tempranillo (a light red wine, for those not in the know). I got it to the boat, poured a glass, and it turned out to be quite disgusting – a bottle of it I might have forced myself to drink, but a whole 3 litre box costing £18, I draw the line at; I’m not that much of an alcoholic. As well as being disgusting, in the glass it was cloudier than New Brighton beach on a wet sunday morning, and left a sediment in the glass worse than the Severn Trent sewage reprocessing plant. I’ve poured better home-brew down the sink.

Last Sunday afternoon I bought from Sainsbury’s supermarket in Selly Oak a bottle of chocolate schnapps (amongst other things). When I got home I went to open the bottle (a screw-top affair), and half the bottle came off along with the lid. Soon in the booze department, luck has been lacking this week.

This morning I took the box of wine back to Spar (when explaining the problem to the person behind the counter, one of the responses was “what’s sediment?”), and discovered in the process that it had a Best Before End date of July 2005. When the manager came out from the back of the shop he asked if I had the receipt – my answer was, naturally, “no, sorry – after all, do you keep the receipt for every bottle of wine you buy?”, and I pointed out that it was over a year past the BBE date. The manager said that without the receipt there was nothing he could do, so a bit of a discussion followed in which I mentioned the magic words “Trading Standards”, and he eventually went into the back room to look through the whole of Tuesday evening’s receipts to find the sale for the box of wine, and after 20 minutes came back having found the evidence of the sale (during which time I’d discovered another box of the same wine still for sale, also out of date) and grudgingly agreed to a refund.

This evening I took the bottle of schnapps back to Sainsbury’s, was asked if I had the receipt, and again my answer was, naturally, “no, sorry – after all, do you keep the receipt for every bottle of wine you buy?”.

“Good point, fair enough” was the reply – and the person behind the counter instantly went to the till and pulled out a refund in cash to give to me, without any further discussion.

Now, the man from Sainsbury’s could quite easily have argued with me on the grounds that, after all, from his point of view I could have broken the bottle myself accidently and tried to pass it off as faulty. So why did the man from Spar, when there was clear proof and evidence that the actual product wasn’t fit for sale, that it was out of date, and that there were more goods still for sale also out of date, decide to make an issue of it? And eventually lose the deal, waste half an hour of mine, his, and his assistant’s time, and leave a customer with a bad impression of the shop.

I have to admit I’m not an Apple fan at all – I’ve always considered their products overpriced compared with their competitors, my experience of using Macs has been, despite the almost cult-like claims of their proud owners, that they crash just as much as Windows boxes, and they have just the same issues of useability and opaqueness of completing simple tasks that Windows offers. The only thing I would say your average Mac has over your average PC is that it looks sexier. Which is of course very important on your average untidy office desk.

‘But’, I hear you say, ‘what about corporate social responsibility? We all know how evil and anti-competitive The Borg is, whereas those nice people at Apple all eat organic food, donate lots to charity, and don’t wear leather or wool’.

Erm, yes. What’s not very widely known is that Apple co-founder and head Steve Jobs is also a major shareholder and board member of Disney, themselves not exactly Snow White when it comes to being cuddly bunnies in the corporate environment.

And now there’s this story today, revealing that some workers in the Chinese plant which manufactures the iPod regularly work longer than 60-hour weeks. Apple were quoted as finding that excessive, and taking steps to enforce a ‘normal’ 60-hour week.

Excuse me? A 60-hour week normal??? I’m glad I don’t work for Apple!

“LONG-serving workers at Birmingham chocolate giant Cadbury are being rejected – because the company claims they cannot spell. Dozens of so-called ‘temporary’ staff, who have been employed at the Bournville factory for up to 14 years, were forced to sit literacy and numeracy tests and told not to return to their jobs if they failed”.

Basically, this story was about how Cadbury’s recently sacked a whole raft of ‘temporary’ (some of whom had been working there ‘temporarily’ for 14 years) staff for not being sufficiently literate or numerate; they were all forced to sit literacy tests, and those who failed the tests told not to bother coming back to work.

The excuse given by Cadbury’s for this was ‘health and safety’ – apparently not being able to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and be able to calculate in one’s head the square root of 51 constitutes a health and safety risk in the modern confectionary industry. Whether this is the case or not, compare the behaviour of the modern Cadbury corporation with the beliefs and actions of its pioneers, George & Richard Cadbury. As well as the whole innovation of setting up the factory-in-a-garden and the building of Bournville Village in the first place, they were also prominent in the Adult School Movement, whereby workers were given paid time off twice a week to attend night school classes to improve their, erm, literacy and numeracy, and also allowed to study other subjects at the Day Continuation School (sited in what is now part of UCE BIAD, next to the Quaker meeting house).

I think this behaviour is worth a boycott of their products. It’s a shame really that doesn’t leave much left for a correct-thinking leftist liberal such as myself to eat in the chocolate department, what with also boycotting Nestl� and all for their socially irresponsible corporate behaviour. Looks like I’ll just be left with Green & Black’s.