Boss Radio

So, the banks are giving more money to the Tories than the unions are giving to the Labour party. No surprise there then. It might explain why the Conservatives insist that the recession is Labour's fault when we all know it was the banks though.

One thought does strike me. At least the unions ask me before giving my money away to a bunch of politicians.

I probably won't get to checkout the 'News of the World' on Sunday after all. The odds are it will have sold out by the time I get there. Look how fast things are happening.

NotW closed down, the editor formerly known as Rebekah Wade taken off the internal inquiry, Coulson arrested, and Cameron almost but not quite admitting he screwed up, which given the revelations that he was warned by more than one source that Coulson was bent, he most decidedly did.

The closing of the News of the World was both magnificent and unfortunate. Magnificently devious in that it has reduced The Dirty Digger's holding in the UK's media thereby giving him a better chance of qualifying to take over SkyTV and simultaneously giving him a chance to save money by replacing two newspapers, the NotW and the Sun, with one, the 7 day Sun. But unfortunate if you happened to work for the NotW, particularly if you were one of the employees brought in after the shirt hit the fan to clean the place up. Small wonder that a lot of employees are a bit miffed that Rebekah Brooks is the only one of the team that is still definitely in employment. Only three people think that Brooks shouldn't resign, the Murdochs and David Cameron, even Brooks thinks maybe she should be off, apparently she offered her resignation but it was refused. Mind you, she probably only offered because she knew it would be turned down...

An interesting thing is the time at which the web addresses sunonsunday.com and sunonsunday.co.uk were taken out. Either someone really smart has second-guessed Murdoch's strategy, or the digger already planned to shut the NotW down way before he announced it, and my money's on option 2.

I await developments with interest, unless Murdoch's strategy succeeds in which case I shall be every bit as miffed as his recently redundant workers.

Strikes are really annoying, especially if you're the one on strike. They're annoying because suddenly people, even people who don't know you, don't like you, and you're not getting paid for it.

Contrary to what the press may believe, no one wants to go on strike, they do it when they reach the point of no return. When they suddenly want to hurt the boss as much as he's hurting them.

It's an uneven world. You join a company and you sign an agreement which you're expected to stick to. The management on the other hand are not required to stick to it,their sole requirement is to let you know about the change in good time. If you have a union they'll go in and fight your corner for you, but the bottom line is that if they can't come to an agreement the company can simply impose. That's the point where you have to decide, is this worth losing money over?

Britain's unions are amongst the most tightly reigned in the world. France, Germany, the USA, they all have much more powerful Trades Unions than we do, what do they also have in common? They're above us on the rich list is what. The supposedly moderate Vince Cable is now threatening to take anti-union legislation even past that of the Thatcher years. It won't help, it'll just piss people off.

Now let's go back in time (Imaginary tinkling noise and Dr. Who effect...).

When I left school most kids didn't even get to take final exams, let alone go to college, they just left school at 15 and tried to find a job. As one of the lucky ones, by the time I was out and in the job market they'd all had a head start on me, but at least I did have some bits of paper which meant I could leap frog them. If I could find a job that one of them hadn't already been moved up into anyway.

Surveying the job market I became aware of vacancies right at the bottom, as a man from the ministry. It did have some advantages, promotion, back then at least, was by examination, and I was good at passing exams, my problem was remembering the stuff afterwards. The Civil Service had its downsides, like mainly starting salaries were almost exactly half those I could get in the world of business, but on the plus side there was the exam based promotion path, a good pension, and retirement a whole 10 years before my potential time of death, whilst those of my gender in industry only got 5 years.

I really liked that last bit.

It took about a year for the Civil Service and me to come to the conclusion that we couldn't work together, and I went out into the world to find a job that would let me be a rock'n'roll musician in my spare time. As it happened I walked straight into jut such a job and yes, I was on double the money.

Oh well, it almost made up for being chopped back to just 5 years of retirement, and dad said that the pension was actually not too bad.

Time passed, Thatcher happened, and suddenly HM Civil Service were earning comparatively good money, not because their wages had jumped, but because the rest of us were being held back.

So if the Civil Service do, as threatened, go on strike to protect their pensions and retirement dates, I'll support them. When they started they were on crappy wages, now they just want what they signed on for, and they have every right to it. It's not their fault that the rest of us got shafted.

It was the headline on the Daily Mail yesterday (Well, up to the word 'shock' anyway). Underneath was a story about the dire straits that families in debt will find themselves in.

Why? Anyone who took out a loan at the current rate and didn't think it might go up sometime would have to be a bit simple (And might have a good case for a 'Wrongful selling' claim too). The fact is that, as a net saver like most of the country, I have been subsidising borrowers ever since the banks took a nose dive.

I look forward to getting a little interest on my savings.

It'll be good to get a bit of money back from the banks instead of them using it all to make political donations.

...And to pay themselves bonuses.

I've just seen another of those programmes where small businesses claim that supermarkets are putting them out of business and the supermarkets say that the fact that people are shopping with them proves that it's the supermarkets they want.

I figure that to run a really successful supermarket chain you can't be a mathematical idiot, so I have to face the option that they are therefore deliberately playing with the figures. I've probably already moaned about this before but humour me, tell me where my figures are wrong.

If a small shopkeeper needs 100 customers a day and he has 120, then he's happy, and so are his customers, but if over 20 customers a day desert him for a supermarket then he's no longer in profit and has to shut down. When he shuts down the remaining customers have no choice but to go to the supermarket.

The fact that all 120 customers have now gone to the supermarket does not prove that it's what they wanted. It proves that they no longer have any choice.

Am I right, or am I left?