Driving home a bargain …

During Labor’s watch Ford announced that it would cease manufacturing in Australia in 2016. Labor blamed the world economy.

Last year, Miss Gillard, with a little help from South Australia and Victoria, divvied up $275 million to ensure that Holden didn’t do the same thing. She was proud to say …

And the good news is that the future of General Motors is now secure in this country for the next decade.

and she concluded her speech with thanks all round including …

the union representatives who are here, people who represent a highly skilled workforce who have wanted to work with us to secure the future

Holden have announced that they will be bailing, not in ten but five years. This is no longer the fault of the world economy. Labor would now have it that it is Mr Abbott alone who is to blame.

How long before Toyota pull the pin? Could it have something to do with those wonderful unions working with them to secure the future …

The Toyota enterprise agreement lists its “purpose” as “to achieve TMCA’s success as a Global Company” yet no single business contract could guarantee its failure more. This document, as much as Holden’s, reflects an extraordinary level of union control over daily workplace organisation.

When Toyota wants to hire someone, a union (employee) representative must sit in every single job interview as “an observer”…. A table in the agreement sets out exactly how many union representatives the company has to have in every section of the workplace and 10 paid union training days a year is given to union reps.

Toyota is allowed to hire casuals only from “time to time” and not at all without union agreement, although agreement must not be “unreasonably withheld”. Casuals can perform only the “agreed specified tasks” for the “agreed specified period” mandated by the union. “The maximum period for which a Casual Employee can work continuously on a full-time basis is one month” and any casual around for six months must be made a permanent employee.

Contract labour can be hired only after Toyota reaches “agreement with the relevant Union official and Employee (union) Representative”. Contractors around for 12 months must be made permanent employees.

This means Toyota can never really have a hiring freeze but are continually bound to a destructive cycle of taking people on before eventually having to make them redundant….

Over-staffing must be a big problem because the agreement mandates one team leader to look after “between 5-7 process workers”. Supervisors, whose base rates range from $75,000 to $103,000, are forbidden from helping with workloads…

If Toyota needs to dismiss someone, an outrageous procedure of at least three years and three months continuous disciplinary action is required before dismissal can occur. This defies belief. Grace Collier. The Australian.

Relevance restoration service …

Newly retired?

Do you suffer from relevance deprivation syndrome?

We have the answer.

Your inbox can be stuffed to overflowing every day. Our service will make you feel even better than you did whilst working.

Fully fifty percent of the emails will be marked urgent. You can be absolutely certain for the first time in your life that ALL of them will be of no significance whatsoever. Just imagine the pleasure it will give you to select the lot and hit delete.

Realism is our watch word. Even though most of the emails are randomly generated our expert staff vet everyone to make sure that none accidentally make sense. Additional emails are produced by our staff of specially selected primary school children so that the quality is no different from that which you were used to. Fully forty percent are presented in compressed format so that U CN NJOY LKE B4 LOL. U’LL ROTFL. And we guarantee that NONE are spell checked.

Emails will arrive day and night so you can leave your computer on and sleep fitfully to the sounds of reassuring relevance as the mail hits your inbox again and again.

Nominate your holidays and we will redouble our effort. For four weeks a year we can bombard you with carefully crafted inane questions and totally irrelevant information, in addition you will receive advertising material for any product you care to nominate as having no interest to you whatever. Take the deluxe package and you will receive daily phone calls early morning and during evening meal times. Faxes can be delivered to your breakfast table at participating hotels around the world.

This is even better than working. Your replies can be replete with foul language, racism, pornographic photos and links to adults only sites. Let yourself go.

======================

Congratulations, Gayle*, on your very distinguished career. You will be greatly missed. Do enjoy your retirement.

* name changed to protect her identity.

Speaking freely …

Freedom of speech has been in the news again this week as the Government gets ready to do something about the odious section 18c.

A couple of excellent quotes …

First, any commitment to free speech is a commitment to allowing people to say and write things you may not like, that you may detest, that you may disagree with and find offensive. If the words spoken are words we all agree with and find congenial, then there is no need for any commitment to free speech… Professor James Allan.

and

The Nazis did not flourish because they had too much free speech. They flourished because their critics had none. Andrew Bolt.

Nelson Mandela …

Nelson Mandela is dead.

Born July 18, 1918, died December 5, 2013.

For most of his life he was a Marxist with no objection to violence as a means to an end.

But when the time came he recognised the greater value of forgiveness and reconciliation.

And in doing so, made himself the greater man.

A denier, again …

On February 15th an asteroid weighing about 10,000 tonnes entered Earth’s atmosphere at about 67,000 km/hr. On impact with the air it exploded into thousands of pieces 23 km above Russia’s Ural Mountains.

 The city of Chelyabinsk and neighboring communities bore the brunt of the shock wave which shattered thousands of windows and flattened the roof of a zinc factory. Flying glass injured some 1,500 people.

What’s believed to be the largest piece punched a 7 metre hole in the ice covering Lake Chebarkul 78 km west of Chelyabinsk.

Andrei Breivichko founder of the Church of the Cheylabinsk Meteorite believes that this particular chunk brings a message from God containing legal and moral guidelines in the form of “scriptures” that would elevate humankind to a new level of consciousness. Only the faithful, of course, could interpret such a message.
Nonsense, of course … if God wanted to send us a message it’s obvious he’d write it in English.