Conor Pope on Tesco’s price cuts that weren’t price cuts, Stuart McLaughlin of Business to Arts on crowdsourcing funding and Andrew Hetherington of Repak on the challenges for the recycling sector. John Collins is your host.
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?
I have an ache in my back and I’m a bit sniffly. It’s just an average day, in other words, but with swine flu threatening to swirl around the nation any week now and the new NHS website in England swamped by feverish symptom-checkers and the “worried well” at a rate of 2,600 hits per second, it’s only sensible to consider the possibility that the H1N1 virus is busy incubating itself right now and really I should quarantine myself at home with a box of tissues and a box set.
Instead, I’m in the office, gambling with the health of my co-workers, which is what a lot of people who definitely have contracted swine flu will probably end up doing. The HSE this week warned businesses to prepare for a 15 per cent absenteeism rate as a result of swine flu and issued a 63-page pandemic planning document that my head hurts too much to read (again, nothing unusual there). But how many ill workers will make the misconceived effort to clock in – either due to ego-driven workaholicism, guilt at the resulting pressure on co-workers or fear for their jobs – when they really should be in bed?
I recently interviewed the new head of employers group Ibec, Danny McCoy, and he claimed that duvet days have more or less died along with the boom. Pale-faced martyrdom is this season’s sickie. However, my completely medically unqualified opinion is that if economic uncertainty really has led to an intensified culture of presenteeism, that could actually help spread the virus and ultimately make more people sick.
It’s also not the kind of phenomenon that small business group Isme captures when it interviews its own members and comes up with the astonishing, dubious and frankly disheartening statistic that employers reckon more than 80 per cent of sick days are feigned. The stress of knowing that their bosses think they’re malingering liars certainly isn’t going to speed up anyone’s recovery.
Meanwhile, having just conducted some impromptu journalistic research in the lift, it seems no one in the Irish Times has yet succumbed to the H1N1 virus – not that they’re admitting to, at least. But if a 15 per cent absenteeism rate were to hit the company, some 65 (okay, 64.5) out of the newspaper’s 430 staff would have to take time off work, whether it is because they are ill themselves or need to care for others who are ill. There’s not going to be a lot of news that day.
My colleague, the motors editor, assures me that you can’t apply national statistics like this to a workplace of our size, and that as we’re all “healthy, strapping” individuals, we’re probably more flu-fit than the national average. Nice. Socio-economic factors and, strangely, the fact that we’re also not the youngest of workplaces may also help: there is anecdotal evidence that people born before 1957 – aged 52 and over - have some immunity to the current incarnation of H1N1 because their immune systems have a memory of a similar 1950s strain of influenza.
Ah. Series Four of House will have to wait. I’m in the middle of writing this post when I’m asked to cover a shift for a sick colleague. In the language of the HSE’s swine flu continuity planning document, I am the “nominated deputy”. It’s the kind of role I imagine most workers will find themselves in at some point this autumn/winter 2009/2010. Although personally I like the sound of “pandemic tsar” a lot better.
This just arrived in our in-box and we thought at a time when some are accusing the business media of being overly focused on bad news we should share it with you straight away.
Personally I think the use of barbershop choirs to launch new organisations is an under-utilised publicity tactic. On a more serious note goodbiz.ie seems to be an Irish take on the Better Business Bureau concept in the US. Such a move can only be welcome in the current climate.
