You have to laugh … Or you’d probably cry.
The city council’s ridiculous “strategic leadership team“, having spent the last 18 months feather-bedding themselves with pay rises of 20% plus; spending £120k on their own offices and “break-out spaces” and implementing a farcical management restructure “to save money” that’s resulted in at least 20 more senior managers – and a £1m bill – than they started with, have now discovered they need to save £2m this year.
And how do they intend to achieve that then? Well, according to Chief Exec Jan Ormondroyd, in her letter below, by “thinking very hard before authorising any discretionary spend for the rest of this financial year”!
What’s this then? Zen management? Are Jan and her team the strategic leadership Waybuloos now? Floating around in their break-out space in a trance-like state meditating and thinking hard to clear £2m of public debt?
Of course not. Jan explains more, “Each directorate has significant budgets assigned to costs such as: conference, subsistence and hospitality expenses, office stationery, equipment, furniture and fittings and other general supplies.”
So cut back on the paperclips and save £2m is it? Of course not. Jan then tells us the real plan to save £2m:
we also need to think hard before we recruit staff to fill vacancies. We need to consider all options before recruiting externally and in order to consider the corporate priorities I am establishing a Corporate Recruitment Management Panel. This will require all managers to submit any vacancy requests to this panel, which will sit on a weekly basis. The panel will commence on November 9th and a more detailed note explaining the process will be sent out shortly.
What this means is that if you’re a frontline member of staff or an ordinary office monkey on crap money and a colleague leaves or dies or goes sick they ain’t gonna replace them. Instead you’ll have to do their work for them on top of what you already do – for exactly the same money plus the generous 1% pay rise they gave you this year. That’ll improve services won’t it?
And this is all on the say-so of a gang of wealthy “strategists” struggling along on recently enhanced six-figure salaries. What a warm-hearted, generous bunch they are!
If you work at Bristol City Council and you’re not in a union, join one quick. If you work there and are in a union then isn’t time to start kicking off? Remember it could be you …
Yesterday the sick, the disabled, the old and the mentally ill. Today the wage slaves. Isn’t it about time that Ormondroyd had her overpaid, oversized, reactionary backside firmly kicked in to place?
BCC Recession by bristol_citizen on Scribd
Or, in other words, we’ll be cracking the whip to make the peasants work harder, smoking out some toadies to take on extra duties, and bullying people into taking cuts in their paid hours.
Anyone at the council like to hire me as a jargon-busting translation consultant? I’m cheap, by BCC’s standards.
There are at least 2 scary things about Gormlessdroyd.
At least 90% of what she’s suggesting should be happening routinely and constantly. Does she mean they don’t usually think hard about very much?
Second, in this climate how can she possibly consider gambling public money on the possibility that we might be awarded World Cup football games. This is wanton irresponsibility.
She is a disgrace to her office and a liability to the good people of Bristol.
a lot of companies in the private sector are doing this to be fair, like my company, when we were outsourced to a bunch of slave traders they predicted in oct 08 that 200 people a year would leave of their own accord which hasn’t happened and now we are at risk of redundancy for someone fudging the figures to get a 500 mill contract from a major Bristol Employer. When those people go the ones left will be expected to do the other person’s job with no pay increases!!
Who the hell is Ormontroyd and who made her Chief Executive.
I thought the leader of the council was Barbara Windsor!!, so if she is not the leader what are we paying her for then?
Any chance of us getting some new blood on the council instead of the present shower of shite.