Lets say youre an engineer, and you work at a company where most of the management trained as accountants. Your manager, however, originally trained as an engineer, and like a lot of popular managers hes not above flattering his staff - he tells you repeatedly that there are too many accountants and not enough engineers in this company, and how the products would be a lot better if they were designed by engineers instead of by marketing. This particular manager has always been quite ambitious - early in his career he was sent to the firms call centre in Mumbai, where he sacked half the workforce and made the rest work twice as hard, and he later spent time at their Hong Kong and Singapore offices, marketing opium and successfully seeing off a takeover bid from a Japanese competitor. One day, he decides that he wants to quit and set up a startup engineering consultancy, which will sell its services to your current employer as well as to its competitors. He has, apparently been pissed off for some time that the profits from an oil terminal designed by the engineering department arent allocated directly to its departmental budget instead of being divvied up across the firm as a whole, and he has threatened to sue your employer for ownership of it if he goes. He wants you and the rest of the engineering team to come with him, and gives you his usual spiel about how were all engineers together and what a great place it will be to work. But he needs at least half of you to agree to it, because otherwise his business plan wont work. You do actually have a union at your work, albeit a fairly useless one, and the engineering branch has an only partly deserved reputation for being more militant than the other departments. On the other hand, the logistics departments workforce is nine times larger, and youve only been able to win some strikes in the past when theyve joined in. Some of them - and some of your workmates - are braindead sychophants who believe in some weird religion that says that engineers and logistics should always be in the same company run by accountants, while others just dread the idea of working at a firm with a smaller unionised workforce. Others still send you jokey memes on Facebook asking you to take them with you if you leave, although thats not really the sort of business that your manager had in mind. Your shop steward, however, is fed up and has become fixated on the idea that your manager at least wont be as much of a bastard to negotiate with as his superiors are. In fact, they spend quite a lot of time in each others company, perhaps more than is entirely becoming in a militant shop steward. Your manager has, apparently, asked your employers for permission to use the companys bank account while he sets himself up, although theyre not exactly that keen on the idea, and he hasnt got a good enough credit rating on his own to tell you for certain if the local high street bank will let him open an account with them instead. On the other hand, he reckons it wont matter if he wins that court case over the oil terminal that he hasnt even started yet. More to the point, he isnt even particularly clear about what your starting salary will be, and whenever you ask him about whether TUPE provisions will apply or what your pension arrangements will be, he just umms and ahhs before muttering something cryptic about paying you in stock options, and how theyll be worth a fortune once the business goes to flotation. Should you take the risk of jumping ship and joining his new startup? In a free country, you should certainly be allowed to, and it may even happen that the deal pays off and that you achieve the petit bourgeois nirvana that is said to be the lot of Google and Microsoft employees. But why should I regard your decision to do so as having been a matter of principle, and on what basis should you expect the workforce in logistics to back up your managers case when your shop steward tries to sell it to your workmates in engineering?
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 01:20:28 +0000
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