John Collins talks to Chris Clark, managing director of BT Ireland, about the local telecoms market and his firm’s first year of pre-tax profits in the Republic in the week that his departure from Ireland was announced.
Simon Carswell, our Finance Correspondent, revealed this morning that Anglo Irish Bank spent €426,000 on branded golf balls and umbrellas over a three year period. The new management team have been able to locate just 1,000 of the 125,000 golf balls purchased by their predecessors. Simon reports that according to his sources “Anglo chief executive Mike Aynsley has begun searching for the missing balls”.
Although I never thought I’d write this maybe Anglo should take a leaf out of Lehman Brothers book. Or more correctly its liquidators, who last year established an eBay shop to sell off the failed investment bank’s branded goodies.
Anyone for an unused Anglo Irish Bank-branded iPod?
Of all the forces with the potential to flatter Ireland’s unemployment rate (not that the latest rate of 13.1 per cent could be described as flattering), arguably the most worrying is the shift towards part-time working. Migration flows and declining participation rates can be reversed. However, if the greater prevalence of part-time employment in the labour market reflects a greater casualisation of labour, the impact on our working lives could well outlast this recession.
Between 1998 and 2008, the percentage of people in employment who worked part-time hovered in the tight range of 16-18 per cent, Kieran Walsh of the Central Statistics Office (CSO) said on Wednesday. Going back further in time, the proportion of part-timers in the workforce has also more or less stuck to these levels. Now it has increased to 22 per cent: more than one in five people in employment work part-time. This, said Walsh, was an “interesting figure”, and one that signals a change in the make-up of employment.
The CSO’s data for 2009 employment trends, contained in the Quarterly National Household Survey (QNHS), gives the latest snapshot. While the number of people in full-time employment fell by 193,200 in the year to the fourth quarter of 2009, there was an increase of 26,400 in part-time employment over the period. The diverging trends suggest that employees are searching for any work that they can get, noted Goodbody Stockbrokers. “Any job will do,” its analysts remarked.
What’s that you say? Working part-time sounds like a waking dream come true? Indeed, many part-time workers, such as people easing their way into retirement or the parents of young children, do so by choice (although employers are not obliged to offer part-time positions to workers, a fact that helps limit promotional opportunities). Others, such as workers who have accepted short time in order to avoid redundancies may otherwise retain their employment conditions: part-time for everyone may be better than full-time for some and zero hours for those who are pushed out the door. But for the most part, this increased desperation can only work in favour of flexibility-demanding employers and against the long-term interests of employees.
Thanks to an EU directive on the matter – transposed into Irish law in 2001 – Irish employers are not officially permitted to treat part-time workers less favourably than a comparable full-time employee when it comes to the conditions of their employment (with some latitude on pensions). In practice, however, part-timers are often ghettoised into particular roles so that their jobs are not comparable to those of full-timers: less favourable treatment, including designation as a “casual” worker, ensues.
The CSO’s latest National Employment Survey – the most in-depth study of workplace conditions – found that full-time workers in October 2007 earned an average of €21.17 per hour, while their part-time equivalents earned an average hourly rate of €15.40.
The gap in pay can be partly explained by the concentration of part-time workers in lower-paid sectors. But it also reflects the fact that part-timers have less bargaining power than full-time employees. This is literally the case: the CSO asked QNHS respondents if they belonged to a trade union: 37 per cent of full-time employees did, but just 20 per cent of part-timers had the cushion of an organisation that will bargain on their behalf.
Time will tell if the part-time rate will stick at its current level, increase further, or fall back down to 16-18 per cent as the labour market recovers. My guess is that employers will prove unwilling to sacrifice the crisis-era levels of flexibility they have managed to win from workers. But another possibility is that the generation of enforced part-time workers could become so blissfully accustomed to their enviable work-life balance that they shun employers’ demands to return to full-time labour - and the cost of living is low enough for that to be affordable. I think I might be dreaming again.
John Collins talks to Clifford Coonan about China’s business reputation, Jim Power about the economic outlook, Chris Clark of BT about the telecoms market and reports on the Irish in Silicon Valley.
With crushing inevitablity, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment has waved goodbye to Mary Coughlan and said a big hello to erstwhile Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe. After his swapsies with the Tánaiste, O’Keeffe is now the man to turn to if you’re a struggling business in need of a subsidy or two. Out of work and looking for some kind of re-training gig? No, that’s still Coughlan, as her department is renamed the Department of Education and Skills (though Fás’s employment services is under the Department of Social Protection), while O’Keeffe’s castle now goes by the moniker Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation.
The new department names, apart from representing structural changes, exemplify the normality that is now attached to Government guff about “innovation” and “skills”, while concrete concepts such as “science” and, um, “employment” fall further out of fashion in political circles. But if only semantics were all we had to worry about, right?
My one encounter with Batt O’Keeffe – at the Kenmare economic conference last October – suggests he’ll feel right at home in his new job. Social welfare spending must be reduced and public sector pay re-examined, he told the audience of economists, business representatives and Lenihan fans. Greater work flexibility would definitely be required and cross-departmental waste eliminated, he added. Some people will call this stuff “common sense” and that it may be; I call it “Ibec press release”.
O’Keeffe was not present in the Kenmare auditorium to hear UCC economist Declan Jordan lambast the Government for its Science, Technology and Innovation strategy, arguing all too easily that it was awash with “fuzzy concepts” and had little economic basis. As nice as it all sounded, there was no strong correlation between higher spending on R&D and higher economic growth, Jordan claimed.
When it was his turn to talk, O’Keeffe declared that the Government would be sticking to its “smart economy” theme. This was “not just about white coats and PhDs”, he assured, inadvertently implying that white coats and PhDs were vain fancies. But as for what “innovation” will turn out to mean in terms of his department’s policies and – critically – its handling of its own budget constraints, who knows?
Simon Carswell talks to Caroline Madden and Karl Deeter about mortgage availability, Toby Birch on buying into gold and John Collins about the Irish in Silicon Valley
Mere days after the Fine Gael parliamentary party rejected quotas on the number of women candidates it selects, Europe’s biggest telecoms firm, Deutsche Telekom, has announced a quota system of its own: at least 30 per cent of its upper and middle management positions will be held by women by 2015.
Meanwhile, the UK’s equalities minister Harriet Harman is making noises that British companies should be compelled to disclose what they are doing to improve gender equality at management level and the Conservative leader David Cameron is flirting with the idea of quotas for candidates who are female and from ethnic minorities.
Spain and France have also brought in laws aiming to boost the number of women on company boards, while Italy and Netherlands are mulling similar measures. All are following in the footsteps of Norway, which has a legal requirement that 40 per cent of a listed company’s directors must be women.
So why the scepticism about affirmative action here? There’s been little official mention of gender balance at senior levels since 1991, when the State set a gleefully ignored target for 40 per cent of directors on State boards to be free of a Y-chromosome. Leading the charge against a very modest proposal for 20-25 per cent of the party’s local and European candidates to be women, Fine Gael TD Lucinda Creighton last week remarked that quotas were “a very easy solution to a very complex problem”, before listing the reasons why politics might be unattractive to women, including long hours and childcare.
This seems like a very strange argument, not least because very easy solutions to very complex problems – unfashionable though they may be in Ireland – are surely a good thing.
The anti-quotas brigade usually cites a charming desire for people to be appointed to a particular job “on merit”. However, quotas are only ever suggested in the first place because the individuals claiming first dibs on a range of powerful positions are deemed to have profited from decades of convenient prejudices with regard to their sex, race and/or social class. Although nobody ever wants to admit this about themselves, there are few people who ever got where they are solely “on merit”. Witness last week’s edition of the BBC’s Question Time, on which Labour MP Caroline Flint argued in favour of quotas but was anxious to assert that she had not herself been the beneficiary of one.
The second argument against gender quotas is that there simply aren’t enough suitably qualified (and bothered) women around to fill them. In Ireland, where only one major listed company (Irish Life & Permanent) has a woman (Gillian Bowler) chairing the board and female chief executives are still a novelty, quotas at boardroom level would undoubtedly lead to the same female faces popping up everywhere. But how is that so different to the current situation, where the same male faces collect part-time non-executive directorships (and six-figure payments) like scouting badges?
In 2002, when Norway’s government first declared war on the old boys’ network, businesses objected that they couldn’t find enough suitably qualified women. But the Norwegian government had done its research and replied that there were armies of high qualified women available for boardroom posts if only company executives looked beyond their own social circle. Gender quotas for Irish companies may force boardrooms to embark on a frantic headhunt for female directors. But rather than resulting in the appointment of underqualified women, this could actually bring in badly needed fresh talent, denting the decades of entrenched corporate cronyism that has built up in Irish business.
Those in favour of quotas recognise the paradox. To convince sufficient numbers of women that politics or big business is a viable option for them, there needs to be a critical mass of role models: women who have dared to delegate childcare responsibilities to their partners and maybe even embraced long hours’ culture. But achieving even a hint of gender balance where none exists is extremely difficult to do without some measure of affirmative action.
It’s hard not to conclude that many of those against quotas are simply rather happy with things the way they are. But quotas are not, as Creighton says, “window dressing to make us sound progressive”. As the examples of Norway and Deutsche Telekom show, they are a means by which progress can be achieved.
John Collins talks to Chris Horn and Harry Magee about the Innovation Taskforce report, Ian Mitchell from Deloitte on pension reforms and Ciaran Hancock about the trouble at Aer Lingus
Havok’s chief executive David O’Meara talks about the company’s new jobs, plans for the Game Developers Conference, doing international business and the problems in our education sector.
This week Colm Keena on IDA Ireland’s new strategy, Simon Carswell discusses results from the banking sector, Howard Beggs of Helix Health on a new software investment forum, and Havok chief executive David O’Meara on the firm’s new jobs.
Contrary to any bus-panel ads for movies you may have seen, it is not in fact a leap year, and so we have hurtled to the end of February and the second Current Account monthly round-up with all the impatience of a hangar-craving airline boss. Yes, this month’s news review is brought to you by the letter “H”.
If there was one story that rumbled on longer than the now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t Dáil departure of George Lee, it was the spat-by-press-release between Ryanair supremo Michael O’Leary and the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Mary Coughlan. Like a jilted lover sulking at (perceived) bad treatment, O’Leary made a loud show of refusing to speak directly to the Dublin Airport Authority. Could 300 jobs really be created at Hangar 6 if the Government acted as an intermediary in their dysfunctional relationship? Amid all the smoke, mirrors and Dail committees, it appeared little had been achieved save frenzied points-scoring.
February was a pivotal month for the banjaxed banking sector and not in a way that warmed anyone’s hearts. Five years after it bought a chain of 52 ESB shops in a bid to establish a high street presence, Bank of Scotland (Ireland) announced that it would be closing down both its Halifax retail business and its intermediary business, which over a decade ago had spurred so much margin-slashing competition in the Irish mortgage market. It was so long to Saturday opening hours and – more seriously – goodbye to 750 jobs.
Bank of Scotland (Ireland)’s legacy in Ireland is its spearheading of a new generation of home loan products. We should thank them for the tracker mortgages and cough politely at the slippery slope of interest-only loans as they depart. It’s a great deal more difficult to say what the legacy of Postbank has been, as its launch rather unfortunately coincided with the advent of the credit crunch. It followed in Halifax’s footsteps by announcing its closure, leaving 260 jobs at risk.
Sticking with the heady financial world, taxpayers were obliged to take a 15.7 per cent equity stake in Bank of Ireland, which in the new era of commercial austerity decided to end its sponsorship of Irish golfer Pádraig Harrington. Happily, Harrington’s website lists a further 11 sponsors, so he’s not going to have to fork out for his own collared T-shirts just yet.
Finally, there was a sad plot twist for the book trade when Hughes & Hughes went into receivership. The chain’s management blamed a testing trinity of intransigent landlords, Amazon and a collapse in passenger numbers at Dublin and Cork airports for its woes. The Simpsons used to feature an airport book store that went by the name Just-Crichton-and-King. Hughes & Hughes had aspired to be more than that. But its ambition was matched by bad timing: industry observers pointed out that expanding into a recession is never going to be a bestselling move.
