Tag: public sector cuts

The emotional impact of redundancy

There’s a sudden flowering of  blogs from public sector workers facing redundancy, setting out with splendid gallows humour how the sector is facing up to cuts.   I’m an avid reader of the Redundant Public Servant’s blog, and was struck by a  post  by Mrs RPS about the bitterness she feels  about her husband’s impending redundancy.

I saw my then boyfriend,  now husband,  deal with a lengthy spell of  unemployment a few years ago and understand completely what Mrs RPS is talking about.  The thing that really hurt was the  sense of powerlessness I felt watching the person I loved most in the world deal with something so devastating without being able to do anything practical to help.

Mrs RPS, though, also reminded me of when my Dad was made redundant, after 44 years with one company, a couple of years before he was due to retire. How unfair, I ranted. How disloyal, after all you’ve done for them.  Typically, my Dad  didn’t join in with the ranting, but calmly pointed out that loyalty didn’t come into it – on either side. The contract between him and the company  was that he would do a month’s worth of work and they would pay him for it, and if they both agreed to carry on they’d both do the same the following month. In his mind  there was no issue of loyalty involved – no-one would have accused him of being disloyal to them had he found a better job and moved on.  It was a purely business relationship and, from the company’s perspective, making him redundant was the  logical thing to do. Taking the emotion out of it allowed him to cope pretty serenely (although I  imagine that having a  decent pension on the way probably helped!)

The problem is, of course, if you profoundly disagree with the business decision that leads to your job being lost.  An awful lot of public servants feel – as Mrs RPS does – that these are wrong-headed decisions, with jobs being “wiped out at the whim of a government and ministers whose motivation I deeply suspect. For a doctrine I believe is essentially flawed.”  I completely agree with her.  No wonder you can feel anger and hurt  bubbling through her post.

It does seem that the process isn’t being made any easier to deal with by the way it’s being handled.  My eye was caught by a blog detailing how one local government department was given a redundancy notice, without warning, by mass email.    An agency I worked with, which was cut when the quangos were culled, reports that no help or advice has been forthcoming about how to go about winding up a business, no re-training opportunities have been highlighted, no  careers counselling offered.  That’s where I think you can start to complain about disloyalty.  Cutting  a job, a team, even a whole department is, as my Dad would point out,  a dispassionate business decision. Cutting people adrift with no support is wrong.

Clinging to the wreckage?

Lying awake at 4am fretting about how long it’s taking to confirm a new piece of work, I was trying to remember my own rule 5 – the one that starts “it always takes longer to get work sorted out than you think it possibly can.”  Looking up the actual quote this morning I was astonished at how breezily confident of getting new work  I sounded  a mere 7 months  ago.

The need to re-focus the business was clear as soon as the scale of spending cuts in the public sector (where I’ve done most of my work for the past two years) emerged.  It’s a time-consuming undertaking though, and not everyone took the hint.

Being prepared for cuts?

Pre- election I was  talking to a 20-something AD at an agency with lots of public sector contracts and asked if she  worried about what might happen when spending was cut.  She looked at me with all the confidence of someone who’s never experienced a recession and said,  as though speaking to the very hard of understanding: “If there’s a new government there will be changes in policy.   Change always needs to be communicated.  We’ll carry on working with the Department,  just on different things.”  The agency is now making a significant number of staff redundant.  I genuinely hope she’s not one of them, she was very good at her job – but lots of people were caught in that trap and were just not prepared for what was coming.

Money saving tips

I’ve been doing some work recently on how the voluntary sector can cope with the impact of spending cuts – maybe that’s what’s making me pessimistic!  A lot of the advice translates to any SME, so here are some resources that might be helpful

Singing the public sector blues

It’s unlikely that 38Degrees will be organising flashmobs to protest about the cutting of marketing and consultancy budgets in the public sector.  There won’t be a harrowing Boys From the Blackstuff sequel showing the  impact of unemployment on the PR consultant communities of north London.   Newsnight’s package last night about the potential impact of cuts to services in Sheffield has already been called “lefty bollocks” by one esteemed Tory blogger, so I’m not holding my breath waiting for an outraged  backlash from the commentariat either.  But, other than the Guardian (inevitably), no-one much seems to have noticed that cutting the government comms budget is going to have a hefty impact on the private sector too.  Lots of small consultancies  mixed public sector with private sector work.  It helped them to stay in business so that they could employ their own staff and sub-contract printers, designers, writers  and event management companies.  It paid for ad space in print and on TV, direct mail, web development , exhibition stands and a multitude of other things.  The money got spread around and (whisper it) a lot of the campaigns it paid for did a lot of good.

It’s not that I didn’t expect cuts to comms – an obvious target if ever there was one, and much more sobering cuts were also made yesterday.   I’m just concerned about what happens when you take £270m worth of business out of an industry containing a large number of  SMEs that’s just coming out of a recession.