Today is going to be a blog full of pain.
Today is a blog of screaming anguish.
Today is a blog of anger. Real gut-churning rage.
Today, H met an old friend from council days.
O is a man who has conducted himself always with dignity and extended friendship and kindness to everyone. He is a good man, an ordinary man.
He was made redundant today.
He wasn't given much for so many years of service. He wasn't given anything actually. He was told to leave after a meeting, all of his work is in places he knows, but nobody has asked him where his files are.
We know from this that his projects - seeming so important at the time - are to be abandoned. So he cannot even congratulate himself that he left with a loincloth of dignity, that he left with the thought that something he had given to others will help them. He cannot think that what he ever did there mattered to anyone.
His manager has gone too, having been promised a new job in the new stream-lined council - a more monied post - in the poor new council. The hit squad of bullies who were managers of people who had worked for that council are chortling today because they are accomplishing their most cherished dreams. They are getting rid of the folk who had grafted there for years. Getting rid of the 'old'. The 'old' who worked, who knew the value of a day's work for a day's wage, who cared about the people in the borough that they served.
No golden handshakes for O. No ugly clock to stand on his mantel. No fond farewells from colleagues. Nothing but emptiness for him. Shock in his kind eyes. Bewilderment. Hurt. A deep, deep pain that won't be soothed any time soon.
The ex-manager has been trying to rid the department of the 'underlings' and now he's done it. Thanks to the Coalition government.
Thanks to them, the bullies have got their way; they are happy tonight, secure in the knowledge that they have hurt a decent man, decent men and ordinary women. Families. Folk.
In the days of work, the manager-bully would never have a meeting with his underlings. He'd email them. Even though he sat five yards away. He'd use technology to distance himself from the people he was supposed to guide. Why was he a manager? Someone so useless at managing.
Why was he a manager?
Why has he been promised a job after the re-structuring?
Why are the senior staff with the big salaries staying? Why are they allowed to stay on? Haven't they done enough? Isn't it time to let them go with shock in their eyes? With no handshake, no provision for the future, no hope of another job when you're half way through your fifties because there are millions of young ones to do what needs doing and you're scrappage.
Is it all starting again? Those who are privileged ridding themselves of others who are not. Those who have much starting to kick to death - and they will cause death - those who have little.
Do we have to endure this kind of world?
Do we have to put up with it?
Do our children?
Today in Parliament, all those new people who were elected recently have been giving their maiden speeches. What they said is largely irrelevant. For what will they do to stem the pain? Will they speak for the ordinary people? The ones in shock from being scythed away from something they have known for so long, that gave them an importance of a small type? Will they change anything? In that most indifferent of chambers.
'"On reducing the deficit, Mr Dromey, a former deputy general secretary of the Unite Union, declared: "I will resist any notion of asking those who are least able to bear the burden to pay the price of the misdeeds of the bankers."
He also warned that cuts to university funding would deprive "young working-class kids" from his constituency "of the chance to become the first in their family to go to university". '
How strange it is that Harriet Harmon's husband has to be the one to say what we little people are thinking, to care what we ordinary folk are feeling, the dread we are experiencing, the bleak, black pain...
The quote is from http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/comment/newsid_8734000/8734105.stm
A website called democracy live. Ironic.
'I will resist any notion of asking those who are least able to bear the burden to pay the price of the misdeeds of the bankers.'
We have to band together - we have to commune - we have to protect not just our children, but each other - we have to stop punishing the innocents for the guilty - we have to open our sleeping eyes WIDE - we have to think of money as serving US not US serving money - we have to ask if men who are staggeringly rich SHOULD have the job of 'rescuing' this silly country - we have to think, and grow, and know, and change and wake up and never ever ever be fooled again.
Are we awake yet?
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Oh Danae that is tragic.
ReplyDeleteI had friends here yesterday and coincidentally we were talking about this very thing.
I said I thought the managers would stay and protect their clipboards and big salaries and the 'savings' would be made with front line staff being told to go.
I wondered if an audit was done in a year how many pointless managerial posts would have gone.
my guess 0.
Here you are telling the very kind of story I said would happen.
We do live in a rotten twisted society.