“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.

“Needless jargon in the workplace is baffling employees and widening the divide between management and staff, a survey suggests. Investors in People said that the proliferation of phrases such as ‘blue-sky thinking’ and ‘brain dump’ was damaging to British industry”.

Is this actually true? It would be interesting to see the actual survey questions, and how loaded they were; I do very much doubt there has actually been a ‘proliferation’ of needless so-called management-speak anyway, and when it is used gratuitously I predict that, just as anywhere I’ve ever worked, the user is quickly laughed out of the office for being a total prat.

But the main reason I rate this as a non-story is because it is hardly a new story – the epitome of a management-speak gobshite was Gus Hedges in Drop the Dead Donkey dating way back to 1990 – that’s 16 years ago – and the phenomenon itself surely goes back further to the rise of yuppie in the mid-1980s. So why bring it up again as if it’s something new?

I have to admit I’m a little ambivalent as to whether or not I want to join in with the city outrage on the matter; on the one hand, indeed the factory is a Birmingham icon and too many Birmingham icons have been trashed in the last five years, 125 people will lose their jobs, and as a correct-thinking leftist liberal I of course should oppose all that is bad in Corporate Greed(tm).

On the other hand, the 125 people do have until next May to find new jobs (how many other people get the luxury of a full 12 month notice period of redundancy? When I was made redundant from Oakwood Village we were warned of the posssibility on the Friday, and then told to clear our desks on the following Monday), and as skilled workers will probably have little trouble finding replacement employment. And, the economics are clear – the factory as it is only operates a part-time week anyway, and since Heinz is, after all, a commercial entity with a need to make profits for the benefit of shareholders rather than an agency of the benefits service, it is a little difficult to blame them for wanting to combine production with a similar factory in the Netherlands which also only operates a part-time week – if one of the two factories has to go, what does make the Birmingham jobs more important than the Dutch jobs?

The story today is that HP Sauce’s long-time rival in the brown chip dressing department, Branston, is to launch a legal action to try to prevent HP from using the Houses of Parliament (after which the sauce is named) motif on the bottles once production moves, on the grounds that if the product is no longer British it will no longer have the right to use British imagery on the packaging.

The irony of this, of course, is that when the Aston factory closes, production of Lee & Perrins Worcester Sauce will return to its original factory in, erm, Worcestershire.

‘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.