Politically correct

With a name like PC Air you might be tempted to think that this is a wind up...

The Thai airline has decided that it will employ ladyboys as flight attendants. They are, after all, quite common in Thailand and after advertising for staff, the airline was swamped with applicants by transvestites and transexuals.

The airline said that the qualifications for the ladyboy flight attendants were the same as for female flight attendants, with the additional provisos that they be like women in how they walk and talk, and have a feminine voice and the right attitude. The Thai Department of Civil Aviation says it has no problem with the policy and the airline says it may well hire some more from the 'third gender'.

I don't know about you, but I find this a little queer...

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Rotten boroughs : Norwich City Council

The UCATT construction union is pursuing employment tribunal cases for unfair dismissal, failure to transfer and failure to inform and consult on behalf of it's 125 members who worked on social housing maintenance contracts in Norwich.

Connaught went bust in September 2010. The company's £125m five-year deal with Norwich – which covered waste and recycling, street cleaning and council house repairs – was only announced in December but sparked controversy at the time. Morrison, the previous holder, won an injunction against the council awarding the contract after claiming Connaught had agreed to do the work at an "abnormally low" price. Morrison eventually settled out of court.

The Norwich contract employed 500 people but 200 jobs were set to be saved by the council and KPMG, the administrators, moving the waste collection and cleaning services from Connaught Partnerships to Connaught Environmental, which is not in administration. An interesting manoeuvre!

Last September, Councillor Steve Morphew, leader of Norwich council, said he would be "moving urgently to let emergency and temporary" social housing contracts. Morgan Sindall, which is paying £28m for all but 13 of Connaught's social housing contracts, will deliver emergency repairs in the meantime.

Now this transfer is complete, it is alledged that the company and council took advantage of the situation to dump staff and re-employ some of them on reduced terms. If this true, then it is scandalous and the union has a fair case.
 
It will be interesting to see what happens in court and what precedents will be set.

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Queen leads by example!

The royal family has always believed in setting an example when it comes to a national crisis - just look at the way they led from the front during the blitz!

So Buckingham Palace announced today that in the true spirit of "we're all in it together", the queen is to take up employment.

"One is only too aware aware of the problems facing the country and in particuar the ordinary working man," she said in a statement. "One wishes to show you all that no work should ever be considered beneath one."

Her majesty, pictured here in her new uniform, will be donating her wages to the government to help pay for her grandson's upcoming wedding.

In a reciprocal gesture, her employers have agreed to provide the wedding breakfast.

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Death of the T-Shirt Trade

I have mixed views about tourism. It has undoubtedly fucked up the world big time and yet I would be hypocrite if, as a seasoned traveller, I denied but I am not in any way to blame.

On my recent trip around the Pacific, I have seen first-hand the way that tourism can completely ruin some of the most beautiful and exotic locations. But the damage appears to me not just be due to the almost total economic dependence on tourism, but - especiallly in the post credit crunch era - it is due to what happens when the tourists stopped coming.

Eventually it was bound to happen anyway as over commercialism took away the very features that attracted the visitors in the first place. But when you combine that with worldwide austerity, the process is disastrously accelerated.

Bora Bora conjures up the immediate image of the perfect romantic location. Like most of Polynesia, it has become hugely dependent on tourists. When they stop coming, the economic decline is immediate - hotels close, unemployment rises rapidly, shops have no customers.

The double whammy is of course that there are no other local industries to take the place of tourism because all has all been set aside in pursuit of the quick and easy buck.

If these places are to survive then, ironically, they need to return to the very images of life in paradise that they are trying to peddle, otherwise they have no future.

And, if I'm honest, it is largely their own fault...

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The Living Wage

In a pathetic and feeble attempt to make headway in the Labour leadership race, nothing can be more calous, calculated and desperate than the recent attempt to jump on the bandwagon by Labour's own talking horse "Mr Ed" Miliband.

Blatently trying to drum up anti-Tory left-wing  votes, Mr Ed has decided to send out a letter pledging his support for the 'Living Wage' campaign.

So, when you are living on the breadline, here's just a few suggestions as to how you can make your wage packet into something that enables you to make ends meet :

• Don't go down the pub every night
• Give up smoking
• Make eating in the new eating out and learn to cook!
• Dump your mobile phone contract and get a PAYG phone for incoming calls
• Cancel your Sky telly subscription
• Stop buying iTunes for your iPod
• Buy non-designer label trainers
• Cut up all your credit cards
• Cancel that foreign holiday
• You don't have to have the latest gadget
• Don't run a car
• Get some skills training and a better job

Drinking, smoking, telly, mobiles, iPods, designer trainers, holidays in the sun and motors are NOT - despite what Mr Ed would have you believe - part of your inalienable human rights. What should come top of your priority list is putting food on the table, clothes on your back and keeping a roof over your head.

And if you carry on as you are doing, then some nice eastern european person will come and take your job off you because they seem to manage quite nicely on less than you get paid. Sadly, people in this country have no idea what real poverty actually is.

You already have a 'living wage' but many of you are just too self centred and greedy to manage it properly...

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The boomerang generation

Won't it be just great to have the kids back home again?

OK. You don't really need to answer that. After all, one of them might be listening in! And you wouldn't want them to feel unwanted now, would you? Never mind how you feel...

Pretty soon, lots of unemployed graduates will be leaving university and moving back into their old rooms. Back to the bosom of the family where they are loved and wanted. Well, loved anyway because what they have forgotten is that while they were away bettering themselves with higher education, Mum and Dad were enjoying some much earned freedom for the first time in years.

And now that's all gone. The parents can no longer run around the house in their underwear in case someone appears from their offsprings bedroom and demands breakfast...

But what really pisses me off is the attitudes of this boomerang generation. Attitudes like 'I don't need to clean my room because Mum will do it.' Like 'Mum will do my washing and ironing, Dad will pay the phone bill, my parents will put food on my plate' Attitudes like 'This is my home and I have a god given right to live here.'

Lots of the younger generation that I know seem to think that it is an unalienable human right that they can afford a house in their home town. We never had that expectation. We saved for years with our prospective spouses to scrimp together a deposit so we could get a mortgage on a crummy little one bed flat and even then we had to move further from town to be able to afford it. I was raised in south London, but I moved out to afford my first home. My wife was raised in Surrey, but her first home was in Reading.

A reality check is needed. You need to stand on your own two feet and assert your independence. You need a job you can do - you can get the one you want later, if ever. You can't afford a house on one income. It's not fair to live off your parents and contribute little or nothing.

Our generation lived with these realities. You selfish little buggers need to do the same...

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Graduate recruitment

So you got your nice shiney new degree and now you have to figure out what the hell to do with it?

Well, here is some practical advise from someone who has seen his kids go through it - and believe me, it ain't easy...

From my recent post, you will have hopefully realized that you have been conned. You were persuaded to stay on at school and go through university to keep you off the dole queue and make Labour's unemployment figures look better than they actually were.

But that is not to say you didn't do the right thing, although maybe it was not the right thing for you. Graduates tend to get jobs with other people or go on to professional qualifications. Entrepreneurs are frequently those who chose a different road. Different horses, different courses.

Here's the hard bit : your degree won't get you a job. What it will do is to establish that you have certain level of education and that you can apply yourself. It will open doors otherwise closed to you. It is not proof of intelligence. You can be thick as two short planks in the practicality stakes and still be a brilliant academic. If this is you, think about going into teaching.

And here's another heart warming statistic - In the 1980's 80% of the graduate output of this country became Chartered Accountants. What a waste of talent, but it does show that getting a job after universty wasn't any easier then either - and they didn't have JobServe!

Which brings me nicely on to my next point : If you are going into the big bad comercial world, then get yourself a computer. Use it to compose a well written and well presented cv. If you are sending it out in hard copy, print it on coloured paper - it will get you noticed.

More importantly, get onto job sites and apply for everything you can do, not just what you want to do. You need a job. You can get a career later. If you are not applying for 20 jobs a day, then you are not trying hard enough.

Don't spend all day on the computer scanning job sites. Get a routine. When you have done all you can for today, put it down until tomorrow.

And check your Facebook profile and information about yourself - your prospective boss will. If you look a prat on there, you won't get the interview.

And finally, don't give up. Winners never quit and quitters never win.

Good luck. You'll need it...

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The great graduate scam

This year, there will be more graduates than ever leaving university and trying to get a foot on the job ladder.

So I think that the time has come to lift the lid on one of the most disgraceful scams of the New Labour years.

When Blair came to power he proclaimed that the three highest priorities of his new government were "Education! Education! Education!" Nothing wrong with that, I hear you say. But you are wrong.

In 1997, unemployment was falling largely because of the measures put in place by the outgoing Conservative administration. Labour was happy to let this run as it made them look good - but it knew that wouldn't last and the numbers out of work would start to rise again. So it brought in the great scam...

Labour persuaded ever increasing numbers of young people to stay on in full time education and made it easier to get to university by vastly increasing the numbers of available spaces. Now I would not want to insult students by suggesting that A level examiniations have got easier, but what cannot be disputed is the increase in pass rates. So not only do more people sit these exams, but a higher proportion pass them.

The effect of this is that ever increasing numbers of people are kept off the dole queues by spending another two years at school and three more at university, totalling 6 years if you add in the increasngly popular gap year. Unfortunately, this is a temporary respite which must eventually unwind, but it worked long enought for Blair to win two further elections.

Now it is all coming home to roost. There are far more graduates than jobs and the dole queues will swell again - but now Labour is gone and they will no doubt be quick to blame the new administration.

Cynical, hypocritical and effective. All the characteristics of a really great scam...

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