Tag: Redundant Public Servant

Is it a bad idea to grab at a job, whatever the salary?

In 1970s weepie Kramer vs Kramer,  unemployed ad-space  salesman, Dustin Hoffman, has to find a job on Christmas Eve so that he can keep his son.  His pitch at interview is that he will take a job at a rate far below his normal salary  because he needs the work, thus helping his future employer to bag the employee bargain of a lifetime.  This being Hollywood, Dustin gets the gig and the floppy-haired son gets to stay with Dad who can thus perfect his French toast-making skills.

I was reminded of this  for the first time in years as I read the increasingly unmissable Redundant Public Servant’s blog. Colleagues of our hero, who’ve been pushed out of work ahead of him, report that at interview, they’ve got the sense that anyone chasing a much lower paid job is an object of some suspicion.  That certainly rings  true to me.

My sense, bolstered from conversations with the odd recruitment consultant, is that applying for jobs that involve a significant drop in salary level or job title makes the applicant look desperate (which, admittedly they might be; but it’s never a good look). Even if they get the job, it devalues their CV in the long term.

More importantly, no matter how much employers know that it’s a buyer’s market out there with Dustin Hoffman-esque bargains to be had, they will  also fear that they are just a holding pen for the applicant – a finger in the financial dyke which will do until something better comes along.

One of the standard job hunters’ bibles, Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute, lists the fears  interviewers have at the back of their minds during an interview,  which might stop a candidate getting the job.  Number four on the list is the fear that you’ll only stay around for a few weeks, or at most a few months and then quit without advance warning.  It’s a hard one to counter if the job you’re applying for pays significantly less than the one you’ve had to leave.

Bolles’ suggested answer to the question Doesn’t this job represent a step down for you? by the way, is a chirpy and unarguable  No, it represents  a step up – from Welfare.  This does suggest another issue,  raised by Jenni Russell last week, about how to cushion the financial catastrophe which strikes the middle-class unemployed (for want of a better expression) when they lose their jobs and find a safety net of welfare benefits underneath them which doesn’t come close to meeting their needs.  Another blog post, perhaps…

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.