6 July (Part 2) - Long Service Awards revisited - TIC too
More information came in about this morning’s unfair dismissal blog after it
went on line so if you read it before the picture of its manager Richard Edwards
was added it might be worth reading it again. It has become apparent that
the News Shopper reporter, Sophie Maden, not only didn’t hear Miss Caroline Queen’s
cross-examination or the Judgment, she didn’t properly interview Miss Queen either. She
had promised to go to Caroline’s home on Sunday 5th July but it never happened.
I have a horrible feeling everything in the News Shopper came from Bexley
council; there is no other obvious place such a one dimensional story could have come from.
I received a very slightly critical response to my
3rd July comment on Long
Service Awards from ‘an old friend’ within Bexley council. Maybe it wasn’t that
critical and I may have read too much into it but the point being made was that
for some council staff the sums involved are large, more than a week’s pay. I
don’t think anyone would argue that council staff shouldn’t be taking the gifts
on offer, I wished only to point out that I haven’t found expensive gifts to be
the norm elsewhere, but maybe I am out of date, it’s quite a long time since I
was closely involved with anything remotely like Long Service Awards and the
mementoes I saw had little monetary value. What I wished to highlight is that Bexley
council is too free with tax payers cash when it comes to wining and dining themselves, whether that be
trips to posh hotels,
lavishing fancy food on the mayor or
celebrating cycle paths and that when anything is cut it is not councillors’ perks.
Another issue reported was that staff find it hard to reach 20 years service
because there is a high risk that their job will have been contracted out before
reaching that milestone. I’ve seen that happen to friends and relations who have
been in the Civil Service or nationalised industries that were privatized. Not
one of them had their conditions of service worsened and that must surely be the
hallmark of a decent employer. Maybe that excludes Bexley council.