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Business ethics: 2. The language of the unfeeling
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"Don Watson would have loved it"
Okay, just one more and I’ll leave it alone for a while. I was doing a bit of research into a large Australian corporation – now a multinational – when I came across this little beauty hidden in its 2009 Annual Report:
Labour expenses decreased…primarily through successful implementation of headcount reduction strategies…
Don Watson would love it.
Why do they use language like this? Is it because the head HR person doesn’t want to go home and say to the missus/hubby: “Expect a big Christmas bonus this year, I just fired 5000 people.”
Should I be charitable and say the said hirer and firer actually has a conscience and can’t call a redundancy a dismissal? Or does the company’s talking head feel that if she goes on Tv and says “We sacked 5000 workers today but our stocks went up 3 percentage points” there might be a ripple of unrest out there in worker-land?
Maybe company directors hand out prizes for the most inventive euphemisms over the after-meeting port and cigars – Penfolds ‘Grange’ ’51 or vintage Armagnac, say?
Oh by the way, that Australian corporation was once entirely owned by the people – or the government if you prefer it that way. One day a new-thinking politician said: “The government has no business owning a telephone company.” The lobbyists all cheered, for he was right. Governments should only run unprofitable things so that the knights of industry can tell us how inefficient they are.
But to keep the people happy and not to be seen to be bowing to the lobbyist, the government half-privatized the company. Pretty soon all the solar-powered public telephones in remote communities began to disappear and the network of solar-powered relay towers that spanned a thousand miles of the most sparsely populated continent on earth (outside Antarctica) were abandoned. “Cell phones,” they told the people, “are the way of the future.” If you can't get cell-phone coverage, shell out a thou or so and buy a satellite phone. Get digital, we’re phasing out analog, then G3, never mind that it costs you money, the stockmarket likes it. And the less public it became, the worse it got.
Broadly speaking, in those15 years strategic headcount reductions saw a loss of more than 40,000 jobs as the company was restructured. It also saw remunerations for executives increase. In 1995 only one executive received over $A1 million – by 2009 10 executives earned an average of $3.5m ranging from $9m to $1.3.
Oh the profits were up all right – hugely so – but the company is now rated the worst telco in Australia. So inefficient is their internet service that the federal government is pushing forward plans for a fiber-optic network to bring modern communications back to most of Australia and is talking of breaking the company up.
But I suppose we can be thankful that socialism was delivered another blow.
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