Thursday 4 February 2010

NON-JOBS

It may come as a surprise to some of you but I do have a few “friends” who work for the Council in various positions throughout its long, laborious network and they quite often and openly tell me of their concerns about internal issues.
I am often told of staff being promoted beyond their capabilities, lazy colleagues or unnecessary usage of overtime for menial tasks. One common cause of complaint is “Non-jobs”, positions created when there is no real need for it, these involve managerial staff going from one meeting to another all day long and yet achieving nothing, “talking-shops” as you and I would call them.
These non-jobs are given impressive titles like “Social Cohesion”, “Racial Awareness” or “Strategy Reorganisation” impressive titles certainly but, in reality are a lot of talk about nothing and cost us, the tax payer, hundreds of thousands of pounds annually.
At a time when our Council are trying to save money perhaps they should be a bit more inward looking; if these mini-quangos are as useless as I am led to believe, and I do not doubt that they are, then it may well be time to start trimming the Council’s middle management workforce, if the Council was run more like a business, instead of a money-pit, then these people would have been out on their ear long ago. The attitude of “Well; its not our money we’re wasting” has to stop, get out the pruning shears and start trimming.

1 comment:

Steve Hunt said...

"If the Council were run like a business..."

For starters, the main reason most people take a job-for-life with a Council is that they can't hack it in the real world... If the Council WERE to be run like a business, I doubt many of them would last more than 3 months under a decent business-minded boss.

Also, if the Council were run like a business it would have weighed up the costs/benefits of bankrupting someone who was minding their own business, rather than getting themselves into a complete mess of lies and scandal which will ultimately cost the taxpayer many many hundreds of thousands of pounds, whichever way it is eventually resolved.

But there we are - we are all aware of the calibre of people that slink around the corridors of Bodlondeb, collecting allowance after allowance for attending non-meetings of non-departments...

...Just HOW many committees is our dear friend Cllr Hughes on these days? - I've lost count, and can't get an official answer (I guess even the Council don't know themselves?)