Chocolate wars make you sick

Looking at the media coverage of Kraft's takeover  of Cadburys, you'd think that they were turning Westminster Abbey into a McDonalds drive-thru. The press, not for the first time, are right for all the wrong reasons. When  it comes to big business there is no place for sentimentality.

Cadburys is not a struggling family firm of artisan chocolatiers - it is a huge (not quite as huge as Kraft) multinational that got big by swallowing up other household names like Frys, Bassetts, and most recently, Green and Blacks. It is not especially British either  - it operates in sixty countries and employs eight times the number of staff abroad that it does in the UK. Nor is it a more 'caring' business than any other - the days of the philanthropic Quaker Cadbury brothers building a 'new model' town for their workers and donating to the hardship fund of striking engineers are long gone.

The real reason that the Cadburys sell off is depressing is not sentimental at all, it is a salutary reminder that under capitalism the only moral imperative is to maximize the value of a business for the shareholders. As Todd Sitzer, the Caburys' executive who negotiated the £11.9 billion  sale said; he was sorry that there might be job losses but his ultimate duty was solely to his shareholders. Whilst trousering some £12million for himself in the process.

The two groups who don't figure in this equation are of course the Cadburys workers and the customers.

Much has been made of Cadbury's Somerdale factory being saved from closure by the takeover. We'll see. Multinationals like Kraft do not generally take over other multinationals in order to save jobs. Given the £7billion debt incurred by the deal for the already debt-heavy Kraft, it is not surprising that they have declared that they are looking to 'make significant savings'.

As for the consumer, the drive to cut costs, as it has in every  other sector, will only dilute quality - a process already under way when Cadburys started adding vegetable fats to their chocolate. I suspect this particular race to the bottom will only accelerate now; the new owners  already manufacture a variety of some of the most disgusting foods know to man ...

Supermarkets and the cost of living

I spent last week working on a tender to get work from a supermarket.

Sadly enough I must admit that sometimes I get a bit of a kick about putting these things together – it’s a throwback to the days of writing essays – with the same essential ingredients of bluffing and bullshitting. With an added frisson, albeit a self deluding one, that if successful we are getting one over on ‘The Man’ – and of course paying the bills for a few more months.

The quasi-profession of ‘procurement’ has its own bullshit ethics of ‘fairness and transparency’. One consequence is that if any of the parties tendering have a question to ask then it is published, along with the answer, for all the other tenders to see. So after a week of bullshitting away on my tender I got to see the questions from ‘the competition’.

The answers let slip a few things that the supermarket hadn’t been quite so transparent about initially. Such as for every piece of work they gave us - we would have to pay them an ‘admin fee’ ; or that we had to employ a couple of staff to work in their head-office at specified wages way below what we would normally pay. Or that we would also have to pay the supermarket rent for the space taken up by the desks of our staff in their building. Or finally that they wouldn’t actually be paying any of the bills themselves – their suppliers would be picking up the costs and it was down to us to get the money out of them.

Imagine trying to negotiate such a deal in any other situation, say when buying a car or a house. Particularly if you weren't told about the 'hidden catches' up front - you would be sorely tempted to punch the cheeky fucker's lights out, or at the very least you'd walk away as quickly as you could. So I did the next best thing and immediately pulled out of the tender. The Bastard Supermarket seemed genuinely perplexed and offended.

I feel sorry for the poor sods who do win the contract - it will go one of two ways; if the company is a medium sized one – like ours - it will run the work at an increasing loss and so grind itself into the ground within a couple of years. Or if it’s a large one it will try to off-shore the work to a studio in India , Eastern Europe or wherever else labour is cheap that month. That's precisely what's going on in our industry when small businesses have to swim with the sharks. In any case, in a couple of years the Bastard Supermarket will have sucked everything it can out of the relationship and declared a new tender for fresh victims.

Blake’s 'dark satanic mills' may have been the universal symbol of old -style capitalism.If you want the equivalent for our own ‘post-industrial we’re all consumers now’ society – it’s the supermarket.

The apprentice

In my other life - the day job - I was invited to the government's apprenticeship roadshow. A seminar at Excel with a panel of Alan Sugar, Ed Balls and John Denham, an audience of captains of industry, assorted hangers on ... and myself.

I was one of the few not in a suit, definitely the only one who checked in a crash helmet at the cloak-room, and probably the only member of a Far Left Organisation there.

I don't have a major problem with the apprenticeship drive in itself - it was me who introduced the Modern Apprenticeship scheme at my work - hence the invitation I suppose. Despite its imperfections its not a bad scheme - almost as good as the union-run apprenticeships, and City & Guilds qualifications back in the supposed 'dark ages' of the print industry.

The crowd was a collection of familiar stereotypes - apparachiks from public sector quangos who are serial conference attenders, slimy big business types doing a PR job to show that offering training in shelf stacking is really making a contribution to society, and chippy small businessmen who complain the government should ' do something' to help them but in the same breath moan about being burdened with too much tax, red tape and political correctness.

Ed Balls and John Denham span the government-line with consummate polish whilst giving the impression that they have no idea about manufacturing industry at all. Alan Sugar (can't bring myself to call him 'Sir Alan' ) was greeted like a celebrity - the people's entrepreneur. In comparison to the oily politicians his bluntness was refreshing although he did lose a bit of credibility when in the Q&A session having berated business for not getting involved with the scheme, he also made it clear he has no idea how it actually operates.

In a similar vein at one of the interminable 'networking' breaks I got talking to some worthy from a housing trust - who had a go at me when I voiced my skepticism about how many apprenticeships and vocational courses actually led to proper skilled jobs - I asked him how many apprentices he had taken on in his organisation - the answer was none.

This is not surprising - the government is some 10,000 places behind its own targets for apprenticeships - and the poorest uptake is in the public sector.

You'd get less time for murder ...

Bit of a personal milestone for me today and one that's not very usual these days - 20 years with the same company. Fucking hell !!!

I never wanted a career, just a job - more or less. Armed with a degree from a prestigious university which was of no practical use at all as I didn't fancy a 'profession', academia, or an accelerated promotion scheme in big business - I got myself a trade. So I did a vocational course, got the then all-important union card and unintentionally maintained the family tradition of being 'in the print'. And here I am.

I've been lucky I guess - the firm (so far) has survived a couple of 'new technology' revolutions and I've had the chance to do three or four different jobs over the years. We're still a (large-ish) small business, and as tends to happen in such organisations, I slipped into senior management just by sticking around and getting involved.

This hasn't come from any great ambition on my part - basically I'm just a compulsive picture straightener who in any given situation can't help trying to make things 'right'. (Or at least I have enough cockiness to think that's what I'm doing).

Most of the time though I feel like a fraud who is over-paid for doing a job that brings nobody any practical benefit at all. Sometimes that depress me and I think I'm wasting myself. More often though I'm just looking over my shoulder waiting to be found out ...

The unacceptable face of 'value'

Purveyors of ultra-cheap fashion-tat to the masses - Primark - have sacked three suppliers in India after they were exposed as employing child labour.

Given that one of the companies has been working for Primark for over twelve years you’ve got to question how much of a surprise this really was.

Not long ago I wrote about being fucked-over at work by one of our big corporate clients. To the extent that we are now in the process of lying people off here. When I told the terribly polite people at the big corporate client that this is what we were doing, there was a look of horror on their faces: In their world when it’s time to 'let people go', they usually just pick up the phone to get someone from HR to do the distasteful task. But in small businesses we get to look someone in the eye and say ‘I’m really sorry but you’re fucked’.

The people at the big corporate client are perfectly nice and well-meaning, they may well be liberal too for all I know. But they are in denial. This enables them to dissociate themselves from the consequences of their actions. And that really pisses me off: I’m not too proud of some of the stuff I have to do these days – like making people redundant – but at least I’m honest about it to them and myself.

A lack of honesty and a cowardice in taking responsibility for your actions is the worst sort of Pontius Pilate-ism that makes possible all kinds of bigger horrors.

If you were in Germany in the 30s it might be not bothering to ask why all the Jewish shops and businesses were disappearing. Nowadays it manifests itself as not worrying where your T-Shirt for under a £1 comes from.

Administrative Professionals

Apparently today is International Administrative Professionals’ Day.

It used to be called Secretary’s Day but it’s been re-branded. It started in the 50’s and I think the idea was a kind of be nice to your secretary day. Fair enough I suppose, secretaries were a pretty hard done by group of workers.

But nowadays they have gone the same way as the hand-loom weavers. It’s difficult to conceive of a time when junior and middle managers were not capable of typing their own letters or answering their own phones.

Actually I’m pretty sure these skills were easy enough to acquire - but having someone else do these things for you was a status symbol. Laptop, email voicemail and open plan offices have thankfully made much of this corporate petty bollocks obsolete.

In fact I don’t know anybody who has a secretary. Of course there are some executives who live in the management stratosphere who have PA’s. (People like Sur-alun-sugar the nation’s favourite fat cat bastard). I guess PA’s can fill some kind of practical function in being gatekeepers for their bosses – managing access and running the appointment diary - they get to know all the corporate skeletons in the cupboards. But they’re not really secretaries at all, they're a kind of middle manager - and possibly a backdoor way by which women have been able to by-pass the corporate glass ceiling.

So who is an ‘Administrative Professional’ these days ? The only people who would use that title are probably jobs-worth petty bureaucrats who think that they aren’t working class because they get to wear a polyester tie, and have a BTEC in business studies.

Although actually Generation X-ers in clerical McJobs are the real equivalent of the down-trodden secretaries of the past. So rather than 'Sending a bunches of flowers to your secretary-day' it might be more appropriate to have 'Mourn the loss of proper jobs in manufacturing-day'.

Trade unions - initials & names

My trade union (Unite) has spoken out about bullying in the workplace – of clergymen by their parishioners. I’m a bit taken aback by this. As an ex-Catholic I can’t really think of clergymen as a part of the labour movement. And I was amazed to find that I am now in the same union as them.

I joined the print industry in the days of the closed shop and of jealousy and rivalry between the unions. In my naïve enthusiasm I initially joined the wrong union - SOGAT (Society Of Graphic Allied Trades). Trying to move to the correct one for my actual area of work, the NGA (National Graphical Association) was ludicrously difficult and achieved with only slightly less hassle than re-partition after a civil war.

But even when this was done I found that we didn’t really consider ourselves part of the NGA at all. We had merged only a few years before and still thought of ourselves as SLADE (the gloriously named Society of Lithographic Artists, Engravers & Process Workers). Not to be confused with the ex-ASLP (Amalgamated Society of Lithographic Printers) and definitely not with ex-NATSOPA (National Society of Operative Printers & Assistants).

All of which convinced me that craft unions were basically bollocks. Whilst everyone was arguing about differentials and giving archaic craft designations to new technologies, employers like Murdoch were busting the unions. And a new generation of people were coming in to the industry from design and IT backgrounds who the craft unions wouldn’t let in and who didn’t see the point of joining anyway.

For a too short time we had what had always made sense; a single (more or less) union for the printing / graphics industry - the GPMU (Graphic Paper & Media Union). But it was too late and financial pressures meant that we got swallowed up in a series of mergers with super-unions. Accordingly we traded initials and acronyms for vague and silly names – firstly Amicus and now Unite. Meanwhile fewer and fewer people see the relevance of being in a union – in fact the main benefits of memberships are cited as legal support, insurance and financial services.

I’m pretty sure I’d be hard pressed to find a fellow member of Unite any more who had a clue what my job was or what companies like mine do. That’s a pretty good acid test. Industry based unions made sense but I’m not sure that super-unions do – there seem to inevitably become lobbying groups rather than workplace-based.

And I wish the clergymen would just bugger off and form their own ARSE (Association of Religious & Spiritual Employees).