More leverage, being 2 tips, a story and some observations

Tip 1: You’re summoned to a meeting with HR. Not good. She’s already sitting behind a desk with a note pad and an intimidatingly fat folder when you arrive. During the meeting, the HR person taps the folder, at one point implying it concerns you and the reason for this meeting.

Or it might not. A bog standard HR tactic is to take a  folder into meetings like this to deliberately intimidate people. You're within your rights to ask to see it and if she refuses, inform her you'll be making a subject access request  -as per the data protection act - after the meeting to have a look at all these files she supposedly has on you. Now whose intimidated?

Tip 2: The meeting with HR is almost over or at least she’s said all she’s got to say. You, on the other hand, if you’ve just found out your being made redundant, might have a lot more to say, but are understandably distracted.

However, you're not so distracted you don’t hear the HR person pick up her pad and tap it on the desk, punctuating the meeting with a full stop you instinctively recognise and acknowledge. You look up, then at her as she starts easing out of her chair. Now the meeting is over or at least it is until you realise she is actively exploiting your civility so she can avoid having to contend with what you’re actually thinking or feeling.

A story*: What people leave on printers is great sometimes. The best I’ve heard about minuted the organised shafting of an executive who, for the purposes of this post,  we’ll call Mr Deputy Divisional-CEO. Mr Deputy had been recruited with the stated intention that after a few time he would take over from Mr Actual divisional CEO. Time passed, everyone agreed Mr Deputy was a very good deputy indeed, however, they also agreed he wasn’t quite divisional CEO material.

And so the shafting began; executives across the bank were contacted by HR who explained the situation and what they were going to do. Once all the executives agreed this was the right thing for the business, HR invited Mr Deputy to a meeting and told him his services were no longer required. Mr Deputy was taken aback at this, so much so he asked if he could speak to Executives A, B and C, especially B. HR said of course, but also advised (these were minutes remember) that executives A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H were all fully aware of and in agreement with the purpose of the meeting. To save face Mr Deputy made clear he would definitely be speaking to B, oh yes (unfortunately, the minutes of that meeting weren’t left on the printer).

Observation 1: From what I understand mass office redundancies are a horriible process. Individuals are queued at their desks, summoned into mass booked rooms to be informed of their fate, escorted back to their desk to collect their belongings, stripped of their security passes, then escorted out the building.

Observation 2: The above chat illustrates how decision-makers are institutionally insulated from the consequences of their actions, so much so this “insulation” has been professionalised, resourced and ritualised to the extent where I’m guessing there are flow charts somewhere detailing every step of the way.

So not having a sense of the consequences of your actions is a defining characteristic of both children and executives. This is very obviously a bad thing; if we don’t have the opportunity to learn what the consequences of our actions are, then what’s to stop us repeating what could well be mistakes in future?

Which brings us to the actual subject of this post, the Unite union’s “leverage” tactic, which can involve protesting outside the houses of executives. To the Tories this is a “thuggish” and intimidating tactic, except  its not. Its about people not playing by the decision-makers' rules and confronting them with the consequences of their actions. And if a decision affects a lot of people, then fine, let a lot of people do the confronting. Heck, HR is usually the first to claim work is about more than just pay, so why shouldn’t executives have to actually deal with the human costs their decisions impose?

Besides, from what I’ve personally witnessed (and read and documented above), executives are actively and strategically willing to exploit our politeness, our civility, essentially our passivity to achieve their own ends with as little fuss as possible. They’re also - are you listening ArthurScargill? -  vicious enough to cannibalise their own in the process. To my mind “leverage” is an honest, civil and legal (for now) means of challenging this rude exploitation.

No wonder the Tories are squealing about it, squealing like stuck, shite covered pigs

P.S. Nov 3rd - Andrew Neil's politics show had a wonderfully facile discussion of "leverage". Mr Neil huffed and puffed about it prompting, Diane Abbott to claim Unite hadn't protested outside an executive's house. Except, they very obviously had.

How dare Unite behave with such termerity! How dare people try and defend their not especially well paid jobs by protesting outside the however many hundred thousand pound house of the executive on a six figure salary, with a good pension, the kids at private school, a shiny German car in the garage for him and another for the wife. How dare they! Actually, they did him a favour, now his kids know what he did at work today without having to ask.

* this story is very obviously sheer fantasy. No civil person could ever contemplate being such a c&nt.

Bandits vs aliens

For me the working papers churned out by the Karel Williams crew based at the Manchester University Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, setting aside the pointless sociologese chat, constitute the most significant critical analysis of modern Britain available today. I mean for one thing they figure large amongst the teeny minority of lefties, liberals and sociologists who actually have a reaonable grasp of finance.

More importantly they use that to generate a whole slew of insights into practical political and economic matters. So its easy to say I enjoyed their latest paper on elites in modern Britain. One wee thing I reckon is they could have done with articulating how these elites position themselves with regards to the state and for political purposes come up with some justifiable, but deliberately pejorative titles for said elites (hence the title of this post).

They talk about finance, I reckon we should talk about aliens. Helpfully, they chart how over time manufacturing’s importance, in terms of Britain’s biggest companies, has reduced. I think this matters a lot because of what it means about how elites relate to specific locations.

Here, a hypothetical example to illustrate what I mean; in the past a big Coventry based car maker was bothered about the quantity and quality of local supply chain companies to be sure, but also had a vested interest in the associated infrastructure, like the schools, roads, sanitation and so on, basically all the things it needed to ensure a continuous, 9 to 5 supply of adequately skilled labour.

By contrast a London based financial elite don’t give a shit. As we’re continually told they recruit labour from a global market, so if London schools are crap, who cares, they’ll just ship in some Frenchmen (and of course there’s the rarely mentioned importance of British private schools and elite universities when it comes to churning out the raw materials investment banks need to get by).

So for the financial elite, state welfare, state education and so on is an irrelevance not least because the wages are so high their staff simply buys in private provision of whatever it is they need. Also, unlike the Coventry carmaker, investment banking is primarily about banks trading with other banks i.e. they don’t give a damn about actual consumers. Like, median wages rise or fall? Who cares, it don’t mean shit in terms of derivative contract sales.

In these kind of ways investment banking is at a remove from i.e. is alien to and has alienated itself from the rest of Britain. Basically, as long as London continues to attract enough migrant labour willing to serve investment bankers coffee for hee haw an hour, then they’re OK and the rest of the UK can go raffle.

That’s the aliens, what about the bandits? Well, that’s the outsourced from the puiblic sector companies that is. Now, you could call them parasites I guess, however, the criminality associated with them makes bandits more appropriate as a name I reckon given stuff like G4S and its tagging shenanigans and her who advised the government on getting people back into work and all the shenanigans her business got/gets up to.

Now this lot do care about the state because it i.e. us, is what pays for their holiday homes, tasteless executive villas, range rovers and what not. And their big thang is as follows – cheap, cheap, cheap-ity cheap labour. There, that’s it, that’s all they want (or what they and politicians call “private sector efficiencies”). Like is your prison staffed by trained and competent staff? Feck, that, lets get in some casual labour on the cheap and cut costs (oops, suicide and violence rates go up). What about your granny, is she in a home being looked after by well trained and competent staff? Again feck that, lets get in a Polish teenager and some local who has difficulty counting to ten even with her fingers cos they're cheap and means the company can undercut the public sector alternative and still make a fat profit. And oh dear, did we just fail that last inspection? Who cares because the politicians have such a vested interest in it all they’ll gloss it over.  

And yeah the aliens and bandits do go together. The aliens like the notion of outsourcing because it might create some new opportunities for financial engineering (as in we’re tip toeing to a place where private companies eventually run the school system), while the associated spending cuts lessen the pressure to actually tax them fairly. Similarly, the bandits like the sales pitches the aliens give them about how this or that bit of fancy financing could make them millionaires and also their hurrumphs of support for more outsourcing.

So yeah, rather than an elites or executives, or financiers or what not I reckon we should talk about bandits and aliens.

Historicism

Whoever said the lesson of history is that there are no lessons was an arse. Mark Twain on the other hand is supposed to have said “The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes”, which rocks.

To give one example, there’s that Scottish bank run disastrously into the ground by its West of Scotland executives who, speculating on asset values, lent too much to too few people while taking no where near enough security to protect their company’s interests. Obviously, I’m talking about the 1878 failure of the City of Glasgow Bank. Obviously. Since then banking has become a much, much more sophisticated activity and no banker would ever be fuckwitted enough to adopt a similar “business model", give or take the ones that have.

To be fair, the work chat I mind from a couple of years back was that business cycles last 6 years; 4 to learn the lessons of the last disaster and another 2 to forget them. This implies that in banking, greed, arrogance and stupidity are both timeless and recurring. Given that, let’s compare and contrast what happened to the bods who knacked the City of Glasgow Bank with today’s high flying “wealth creators”.

As if to emphasise the difference between then and now, the late historian Sydney Checkland described the City of Glasgow Bank’s board when it failed as “mediocrities and men of straw”. All of them, plus the Bank’s manager, were soon had up before the High Court in Edinburgh, found guilty of various offences and given jail sentences ranging from 8 to 18 months. Thankfully, today’s “wealth creators” are treated with much more respect; when they go a tad awry, the worst they can expect is a fine equal to only a fraction of their personal wealth or the loss of a knighthood, but prison? Heaven forbid.

Another difference between then and now was that the City of Glasgow failure taught the late Victorian bourgeoisie the limitations of unlimited liability; because it was an unlimited concern the Bank's 1,819 shareholders were liable for all of its obligations and after these were met, only 254 of them remained solvent. Funnily enough, the City of Glasgow Bank failure was followed by a new Companies Act in 1879 and with it the widespread adoption of limited liability; unlimited liability, or what a Vince Cable might call shareholder activism, having previously been regarded as a built-in check on management, was suddenly recast as a barrier to investment and as such something to be got rid of pronto for the good of the economy.

Fast forwarding to today, rather than any change sensibilities, I'd argue the structural changes made to the financial obligations of asset owners/shareholders (i.e. the rich) underpin the change in how “wealth creators” now get treated. Then, shareholders got fucked. Now? It’s the taxpayer. Then, the people who ran banks that fucked up and fucked the finances of the rich got the jail. Now? Less so. See the difference?

As for the rhyme, it sounds like Berkshire Hunt(s).