Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Skill Shortages

Thanks Virginia for your note yesterday about the skill problems that are affecting us - of course it's all the Government's fault.

I will acknowledge that we have been a little slack with our processes - perhaps we should have been thinking about workforce planning a little earlier than last week but I always thought that Tony would get in and that the Coalition would then do what they always do - and let employers dictate employment terms to the workforce. Big disappointment that.

Plus I was hoping that he would re-introduce WorkChoices (of course he would have called it something else) and that would have allowed us to screw our workers while screaming for a change to those bloody restrictive imported worker rules that the Labor Government have introduced.

And I note that they are now clamping down on the numbers coming here to attend University - jeez where are the fast food and convenience store industries going to find slave cheap labour now?

And don't talk to me about training. The last time we spent money on training people was at the junket conference in Bali in 1988 - and the Tax Office only allowed us to claim 20% of that! Never again Virginia.

And that is the real problem - how can we run an Aussie Icon business when we have to pay Australian's real wages? Lets get real here - there is just no possibility of us making any more super profits if we have to pay anything like $18 an hour? Surely the Government understands that?

So your first task will be to ensure the Government gets back to a real employment system of letting us import all those Asian and Islander workers. They are the workers we want because we can pay them peanuts and claw back much of that with bogus services - like housing and transport. And who cares if they don't speak English - at least then they won't be able to complain. Couldn't we just use Google Translator?

And keep talking up those "Skill Shortages" because if we can get the media to focus on that then perhaps they will overlook the fact that we haven't been doing any workforce planning or educating our workers or paying them very much.

And then I can get back to the real issues that concern us all like trying to work out which new 4wd to buy and how to acquire the 10th new investment property using negative gearing - to house our new "workers".

No comments: