Message from RCT Council to Junior Staff.

I just wonder whether or not Tony Wilkins and all the other top honchos who are such a drain on our council tax, are also being made to sign a new contract, or are they above all that because they are more important than the people who carry out the real work on behalf of their communities in RCT?

Are we then back to the double standards culture so prevalent in British society these days? One rule for the plebs and another for the top dogs. I'll bet they won't be subject to loss of compensation either, and neither will their fat pensions be affected into the bargain.

We're all in this together? Not the upper echelons that's for sure. That's only for the lower orders.

I gather that this new contract is for every member of staff in the council from cleaner to director.

The changes of milage allowance etc applies to everyone as my mates wife works in one of the RCT offices and she said everyone there including her manager who is a senior manager will get the same rate as everyone else which is the 40p rate

Dont know about the other changes though

There is now a culture of bullying and coercion amongst the upper echelons of local councils, and indeed, all of our public services. This culture has arisen in the wake of stringent cuts imposed by the unholy alliance of Tory and LibDems in Westminster in order to fund the bankers' and tax dodgers' bonuses and blatant fiddling.

Bullying by incompetents at the top has always gone on of course. It's a neat little ploy they make use of to cover up their total inability to do the job that their ambition has driven them to take on. And there lies the root of the problem: too much ambition and not enough ability.

In the meantime, the system they work under has ensured that they are paid far in excess of what they are worth, working on the old lie that if you want the best you have to pay for them. Now on the surface that appears to be logical, but it doesn't work like that, because you don't get the best.

As I've pointed out, what you get is the incompetent but over-ambitious. This e-mail that RCT council has sent around to its employees is thus another predictable bullying tactic to force employees into accepting what are probably worse working conditions, and wages, than they had before.

Unions of course have been tied up in knots by successinve Tory and Labour regimes in Westminster, which is what the Miners' Strike back in 1984\85 was all about. Nothing at all to do with rationalising the industry, but imposed by the political dogma of Margaret Thatcher as an act of vengence and spite for the miners' stance against governments during the 1970s.

The modern result is emasculated unions and management regimes able to ride roughshod over hard won rights of ordinary working people. This e-mail thus has all the hallmarks of a bullying regime secure in the knowledge that in an area of high unemployment and thus fear of loss of jobs, the incompetents at the top can impose whatever conditions they like, and keep themselves in their overpaid jobs.

We are now stepping back into Cocoman's wonderland of 19th century industrial relations; the type that Al Capone would have been proud of in 1920s Chicago. More or less the rule of blackmail and the baseball bat.

How long the British people will allow this state of affairs to continue remains to be seen, but we can see what happens in other repressive regimes around the world. Events in Tunisia and Egypt are examples of what the people will do in the event of conditions becoming unbearable.

Let's hope it doesn't happen here, but should further impositions like this occur throughout Britain, then the incompetents at the top will only have themselves to blame should working people take to the streets in protest.

People will only take so much until their backs are thrust against the wall, and then a sleeping giant will awake and rise up in reaction. The people of Egypt will tell you that.

After all, it's becoming ever more difficult for workers to use their ultimate weapon of self defence by going on strike. Employers are now using the courts to impose their will upon their employees, using Tory and Labour legislation that ties the unions' hands.

We should remember that only slaves have no right to strike. Are we as working people going to allow ourselves to become slaves? RCT Council, and all other employers forced to manage under this corrupt government's heel of economically bankrupt cuts, seems to think we already are.

It's up to us to show them that we are not slaves and will not accept the rule of the incompetent upon us.

And the bankers paying themselves bonuses of ££millions? Don't criticise workers fortunate enough to have unions to look after their interests. Those unions were fought for, long and hard, and if we're not careful this unholy Tory\LibDem alliance will outlaw them altogether and even make strike action illegal. Only slaves have no right to strike.

I watched a programme on miners and art on Monday night. It was reported on there that when a miner was killed underground he was docked half a shift for time lost in removing his body. That's what the unions fought against, and what we must never allow to happen again.

I thus support all strikes because it's our only weapon against a tyrannical bosses' culture that would make cocoman's rants seem positively liberal.

Train drivers on £40,000 a year? Why shouldn't many other people be on that kind of money, because contrary to what the ruling class would have you believe we're a rich country that could afford for everyone to have a decent living? The trouble is, there's an elite, powerful few who want it all, leaving just crumbs for the rest of us.

That just shows how we have not progressed much since our tribal days when a powerful chief and his cronies held the rest in fear and took the main share of the food and other resources. That makes us no better than a pack of wolves with its own savage order or rank.

That might suit the likes of cocoman, but it's a step back into the Stone Age to my mind.

It's not the fault of the train driver that he gets paid more than a nurse. Of course there are loads of worthy jobs that get paid shite wages, but criticising the train drivers for their £40,000 a year is to fall into the trap of thinking that everyone should be brought down to the lowest level, when in fact, the nurses and everyone else should be brought UP to the train drivers' level.

Make no bones about it, this country is awash with money; some parts reek of it, so there is more than enough to go around. Only problem is, there's an elite of greed mongers who want it all. Take a look at Sir Phillip Green, owner of Top Shop. Pays himself hundreds of millions of pounds in bonuses, and you know what? He pays not a penny in tax on it.

So, forget the train drivers, the tax dodgers are the type of anomaly that needs to be addressed in Britain. We've become a class, crime and corruption ridden country where the gap between rich and poor is obscene.

There is absolutely no excuse for anyone in Britain to be living in poverty, and if there are such people then it's down to a corrupt system that allows the likes of Phillip Green to rob us all blind.

Bob Dylan had a better line than that: "Money doesn't talk, it swears."

Or even more true to life, "Steal a little and they put you in jail; steal a lot and they make you a king."

Look at all the thieves and scoundrels who have been given knighthoods for their crimes in Britain and you'll see how true Dylan's words are: Sir Phillip Green; Sir Fred Goodwin, to name but two.

Of course, as we note from that letter sent out by RCT Council to its employees, the ones in positions of power are the ones most likely to be a bigger drain on our resources, being overpaid and incapable of carrying out the tasks set for them.

Too ambitious, you see; that's their problem. When you're too ambitious you end up in a job that you can't do, and then you have to target the minions in order to deflect attention away from your own incompetence.

In all my forty five years of work experience I have come across this type of person in senior management time after time, and they all fall into that same category; promoted beyond their abilities, and having learnt their management skills in the Al Capone school of industrial relations, which explains why morale in such organisations is at such a low ebb. You know, the cocoman ideal of getting the best out of your workers by dumping on them from a great height and keeping them in fear.

I yearn for the day when we can rid ourselves of unions. That's not an anti-union stance, but the complete opposite. When the day dawns that management treats workers with the respect they deserve, and works with them instead of continuously looking for ways to inflict more indignities upon them to cover up their own incompetences, then we'll have no more need of unions.

That day's a long way off if this letter from RCT's bungling bosses is anything to go by. Another shining example of the incompetent scapegoating their minions. A familiar thing in today's climate, where we seem to be going backwards towards the industrial relations landscape of the 19th Century.