British Council staff have been sent a circular from management about restructuring their salaries in order to align their packages more closely with the private sector. It sounds like a good wheeze.
“…the key features of the new package will be a market-linked salary and bonus opportunity together with a defined contribution pension scheme…. Our overall costs would most likely increase but we feel that investing in our offer to staff is vital if the organisation is to achieve its long term ambitions.”
“we are at a very early stage of this work and have not yet started to discuss our proposal with Government. We want to first consult with colleagues internally and with TUS before we approach Treasury. We cannot be sure whether the response from Treasury will be favourable but we feel we have a strong case to make.”
While as we know the British Council are having “a lot of conversations” with their FCO bosses about the Triennial Review, they have - it says here - not raised the subject of their new salary structure. They have , they say, a strong case to make, but they are not making it just yet presumably because they have been distracted by a “very, very long” document which calls into question their accountability, their transparency and their ability to trade fairly. As soon as that little hiccough is out of the way they can get on with the business of paying themselves more and restructuring their privileges even more favourably. Yes, it will cost more, but who cares when the taxpayer is footing the bill?
So where does that leave “The Triennial Review”? If we thought it was significant (and I confess I had rather hoped it was) then we were evidently wrong. It evidently has little bearing on the British Council’s plans to pay itself better and use its subsidy and privileges to make life harder for genuine enterprise. As I have said before, by genuine enterprise I mean the kind that uses its own money, that carries its own overhead, that operates without gifted contracts and privileges of every kind, that makes it own pension arrangements and which has only its own resources to fall back on when the going gets tough. It does not refer to the featherbedded, subsidised, privileged parasites who play at commerce knowing that however incompetent they may be (oh yes they are) they will always be comfortably bailed out. And now will probably get a bonus on top.
Their FCO bosses and the Treasury should a) make it clear that the BC has no business to be floating this plan with their staff while the Triennial Review is pending and while fundamental issues of transparency, accountability and fair trade are being addressed, and b) tell them where to stick it.
"... and I will be writing to you soon about our exciting plans to make 30% of staff in junior grades (the people who do the actual work) redundant in order to pay for these salary improvements for the people who really matter - the useless bunch of time-servers in Grades E and above..."
Posted by: WhitSt | April 07, 2014 at 08:01 AM