[macafee2]

Originally Posted by MSS

I would not have put it quite like that myself, but your overall direction of thinking is correct.

If we look at what has been happening in the UK (and many other industrialised countries) since the 1980's, the earnings gap between the top layers of management and the working masses have widened year on year. The system that has evolved pays the top layer extremely high salaries and bonuses in order to deliver efficiencies. This in reality is another name for axing jobs as there is no often efficiency improvement involved. You simply cannot improve the efficiency of an industrial operation by 8%-10% year on year. What you can do is reduce costs by these amounts year on year by axing jobs. This is why overall the business or leadership capability of so many of our 'managers' is so poor. Often they do not have any such capability.

When jobs are axed, it invariably means that those who still retain jobs have greater pressures on them to do more for less. So if someone was to escalate on the basis of workloads they are in fact escalating on the basis of poor but highly rewarding policies or actions of those to whom you are escalating, especially if the escalation is to your second or higher line level.

The above scenario is now almost universal in front line services - in councils, hospitals, education and so on.

In private industry the same pressures exist because the financial markets demand increasing profits and therefore lower cost bases in order to sustain our services based economy i.e. the salaries of financial traders and bankers.

In Openreach, you were lucky in that you have a CEO in Clive Selley who has risen through the BT business from being an engineer. He understands every detail of the telecomms business. But, even he is not in a position to resist the commercial pressures from the markets.

So, I agree, that what we are now calling failures, after the event, will be repeated because the fundamentals of the equation will not have changed.

To finish off on a positive note, we are very good at holding equiries after the event!

and that is why we have whistle blowers

macafee2