Monday 23 May 2011

The Mafia, the law and positive discrimination


Was funny reading Nick Cohen's piece on how there's an Omerta i.e. code of silence, at work in financial services.

To summarise, the real reason yer average punter knows fuck all about how shit actually is in the financial services sector is that there are 1) legally binding, contractual obligations to keep schtum at every stage of the process, 2) its fucking obvious speaking out will permanently fuck your career i.e. no other employer would touch you with a barge pole if you speak out about your superiors and 3) you get more money keeping schtum than you ever would in an employment tribunal and with no risk/legal expense.

None of the above to me constitutes an "Omerta" give or take point 2), but then that applies all over the place, most obviously to Doctors. Rather, its economic self-interest that's the main thang at work here. Some practical results of this are that any inside account of how the financial service sector actually works tend to be the odd fictional account written by city boys that bailed out after they got their last big, bonus, plus the case details generated by the only time senior/high paid financial sector types go to law, which is when they think they can get a gender/sexual orientation discrimination case going what with the payout for those being uncapped (unlike what you get in a bog standard employment tribunal). Consequently, the public generally doesn't have a fucking clue give or these odd exceptions, which by definition are atypical and unrepresentative.

Practically, following on from the above, fuck the mafia parallels cos they're just for dramatic effect. Rather, employment law needs a changing as does the treatment of whistleblowers. Fuck knows about the latter, but as for the former, well that's dead simple - employment tribunals should be allowed to award multiples of salary including annual bonuses. There. Sorted. More people will go to law and more of the shit that actually happens will get exposed. Except there's no fucking way the current ConDem shites will do that.

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