Superficial stuff: DO uses and endorses MSF*
Nov 27th, 2008 by Donagh
This morning in work the idle chatter which usually develops in the short moments before my co-workers and I turn to our daily tasks settled inevitably on the Fás expenses debacle and Mary Harney’s controversial ‘wash and blow’ dry. I entered into the spirit of the conversation to a certain degree – I alienate myself from work colleagues enough as it is – but couldn’t helping thinking as the discussion developed some heat around the trope of ‘public servants wasting tax payer’s money’ and about how we need ‘efficiency’ and ‘accountability’ in the public service, that well, the story was a bit superficial and distracted one’s attention from the larger issues.
As is regularly the case, such idle thoughts have thankfully been fleshed out very eloquently by Hugh Green, and to try and add more than his post on the matter would be the height of inefficiency as he articulates my barely formed thoughts and more.
It is clear that this matter is being tied in to a wider narrative being established of a ‘privileged and protected’ public service by contrast with the ‘private sector workers…facing into unemployment or a wage freeze’. But the sort of thing Mary Harney got up to is, at the very worst, a reflection of precisely the type of values that prevail at the top of that private sector so lauded for its efficiency. It is part and parcel of the corporate form: perks and privileges for those at the top.
But in terms of the massive exploitation of workers through the tyrannical hierarchies of corporate capitalism, where workers must compete relentlessly with co-workers in order to win a greater share of the rewards that trickle from above, where CEOs who earn many multiples the salary of the average employee can openly send out e-mails talking about increased profits but how tough challenges ahead mean wage freezes, this sort of thing really is, to quote the head of Fás, chickenfeed.
It’s superficial stuff, presented to distract from the fact that it is corporate capitalism and its relations of production that have left us where we are.
You should read the whole thing, of course.
*Might mean something if you’ve ever read the sleeve notes of the Big Black album Songs about Fucking.
I’ve had a high regard for Fás because some years ago I did a year-long community employment scheme when unemployed and during this attended short courses on computers and bookkeeping. Some time ago, again unable to find work, I also did a six-month computer course under Fás auspices, receiving a travel allowance and subsistence allowance that worked out at 25 per cent more than the usual dole payment. It helped me psychologically and technically and enabled me to research and write things. Believe me when I say that their training courses at designated centres are very professional. The community employment and other schemes helped a lot of low-income people and communities in small and big places where employment prospects were, and still are, zero. I know several individuals who might have cracked up if these schemes hadn’t existed .
I am saddened by recent revelations of exorbitant lifestyle spending by people at the top of the state organisation and their associates. We have a number of semi-state and NGO institutions which over decades have done lots of useful things to create enterprise and jobs and alleviate the problems of people struggling with disabilities of all kinds, financial, physical and educational
Institutions tend to expand their administrative and career infrastructure - it happens with third world aid agencies and other charities too - and a gap often widens between the lifestyles of middle and top management and the target groups that are supposed to benefit from the work that institutions were originally set up to do. Have you ever heard about The Poverty Industry?
Can’t be as magnanimous about the French equivalent (ANPE/AFPA) Gar - their main aim appears to be pushing your head further under the water or finding an excuse to deprive you of the money you’re entitled to since you paid up for it in the first place.
Have had little enough experience with FAS - apart from my missus teaching French very briefly for them in the 90s on a contract with a language school that turned out to be a bunch of fairly dodgy so and sos and never paid her. Not FAS’s fault, I suppose.
Donagh, has all that money spent by Mary at the hair salon allowed her to morph into Martine AUBRY (who just won the leadership of the French socialist party in very acrimonious circumstances) ?
As to MSF, have the Big Black album in a box somewhere but couldn’t be arsed digging it out - gowann, tellusworritiz…