Behind Eimear’s desk was a large framed poster of the sort loved by international financial companies and small marketing firms. Three hands, one black, one white and one yellow, intertwined beneath a slogan that said “Together we are One”.
Someone in HR figured that a few motivational pictures were all the staff needed to get them to go that extra mile. Bugger pay increases, a feeling that you were all part of one big happy team was all that mattered. To Eimear it looked like the sort of picture you’d find in a Credit Union. Every time she saw it she was reminded of the time she told her mother she’d been promoted to Manager. Next time she was home she found out that her mother had told all the neighbours that Eimear was now a Bank Manager.
Eimear had been promoted to Manager as compensation for not getting a pay increase. She didn’t tell her mother that bit. It got her a better desk and an invitation to the weekly management meeting. This turned out to be more of a punishment than a reward however. Regular meetings are fine the first couple of times, but they soon turn into the office version of water boarding. A feeling of drowning in a sea of nothingness is common to both.
Each manager gets a few minutes to update the team on issues the boss is already aware of and nobody else cares about. As a general rule, if you have to wait a week to hear something at a meeting, it can’t have been that important in the first place. After each manager has used up their allotted time talking about transaction numbers and the planned team night out at the bowling alley, the boss gets his turn. Generally he’ll just regurgitate what he’s been told at the senior manager’s meeting but with a few alternations to soften the blow of negative news. So where he might have been told that sweeping redundancies are planned, he’ll tell his team that the company is looking at some strategic restructuring initiatives to maximise synergies.
At Eimear’s first meeting the boss didn’t feel like softening the blow. Desperate measures were called for. If the department didn’t trim its expenses by 10%, then New York would do it for them. Eimear was a dab hand at spreadsheets, so the boss had asked her to put together some numbers beforehand.
“Salaries make up 50% of our budget, rent and services 40% and stationary 10%.”
That last number fell off his lips with an excited murmur. It was clear to him what needed to be done. “Lets cut stationary”, he exclaimed. “Those bastards think they can get a new pen every time they open their desk and what is it with the amount of highlighters we go through? Are we running colouring competitions? And why are we buying calculators for people? Don’t they all have Excel on their computers?
The managers looked at each other and shrugged. Once the boss got a crazy idea in his head, he was like a dog with a bone and no amount of logic would change his mind. Eimear was innocent to the ways of the office however and she had the full analysis of costs in front of her.
“The vast majority of the stationary budget is paper. And we can’t stop that because we’re legally obliged to maintain hard copies of all data and print reports for clients. When you take out paper, we hardly spend anything on stationary.”
The boss smiled. Eimear and her colleagues were simple number crunchers. He had been invited into the secret group of senior strategy thinkers that were trained to think outside the box. The previous November the boss had spent a week at an off-site planning meeting in Barbados. The purpose of the meeting was to plan expense cut backs in the coming year and no doubt the calming influence of the 5 star resort they stayed in helped. One of the messages the boss came back with was that the monetary value of expense savings were less important than the message they give.
“Once the staff realise that we have tightened our belts on this issue, it will be easy to whip them into shape. Fear is a great motivator”.
The managers trooped out dejectedly. They had a quick meeting outside the boss’s office and agreed to keep quiet about the stationary freeze in front of their staff. Being a coward is a lot easier when you do it as a group.
Over the coming weeks the staff learned all too well about the freeze. Pens ran out first. People started stealing from their kid brother’s pencil case, so that outsized Bart Simpson pens became common. Highlighters were next to go and the office became monotone as a result. People started clambering under desks to retrieve pens that had been dropped months before and had gathered dust and fluff.
The archiving team was hardest hit. The nice filing envelopes they used were culled. Luckily this was before Ireland’s ban on plastic bags, so a strict re-cycling program was put in place. In years to come, archeologists will find the bank’s archiving site and wonder why Tesco plastic bags were used to store documents for 6 months in 1999.
Frank had been avoiding Eimear since the disappointment of his pay review but he saw this as a chance to impress with little effort. He had a mate who worked in the London office and he emailed him about their dilemma. A week later a box was delivered by courier. When they unwrapped it, a large red cross was drawn on top and somebody had written “Emergency Stationary supplies for our beleaguered colleagues in Dublin”. Frank and Eimear were suddenly overcome with a feeling of shame. The bloody English were patronising us again. Then the opened the box and their mood changed instantly.
“File dividers! I haven’t seen those in months.”
Soon a scrum formed as the team scrambled around the box like starving children at a feeding station. They scurried back to their desks which armfuls of posted notes and refill pads and for a morning at least, Eimear didn’t have to listen to complaints. She took the box to the re-cycle bin and noticed the courier ticket on top. It gave the charge which she knew would be routed back to her department. It was greater than that month’s normal stationary budget.
Eimear smiled. As her boss said, it’s not about the amount of money saved. It’s about the message.
Thursday 25 September 2008
Friday 19 September 2008
Working for the Yankee Dollar - Part 1
Frank finished College in 1998, having been part of the first batch to benefit from free University Fees. He didn’t know it then but he would be a pioneer in the rise of Ireland’s lower middle class. The people who would later paddle in the shallowness of the Celtic Tiger and measure their worth and the value of others in property and fast cars.
Frank didn’t put a lot of thought into picking his first job. The big American banks had toured his College the previous March and dangled dollar bills in front of the hungover students. Newly emboldened with his degree and surfing the wave of the emerging Irish economy, Frank simply chose the biggest bank and before his feet hit the ground he was sitting behind a desk in Dublin’s gleaming Financial Services Centre, wearing an ill-fitting suit and trying not to be too obvious when eyeing up his new female colleagues.
Those first few months were easy. Frank was smart and realised that he could have his work done by 10.30am but he could skilfully stretch it out till 6pm to demonstrate to his supervisor Eimear that he was a committed soul willing to put in half an hour of unpaid overtime each day. He remembered one word from his initiation course that seemed to by-pass his fellow new hires. They were more interested in the free coffee and muffins. But Frank heard the word “meritocracy” and he was determined to make them live up to it.
The HR woman explained that the bank was proudly American. “We reward individual effort, if you do a good job, it doesn’t matter what the rest of your team, the department or the overall company does. You will be rewarded. We don’t recognise Unions here because we don’t need them. Hard work brings its own rewards”.
These words brought a cold shiver down Frank’s spine. It was the first of many times he would feel that shiver in the years to come. His favourite subject at school was History but his ambitious mother had pushed him in the direction of Commerce so that he would get himself a “good” job. Nevertheless, Frank hankered for the summer he spent back-packing around the World War II sites of Eastern Europe. As he sat listening to the hectoring tones of the woman from HR, he was reminded of the hot day he stood outside Auschwitz and listened to the tour guide translate the sign on the front gate. “Hard work makes you free”. The link between concentration camps and the bureaucrats in Human Resources had been fused in Frank’s mind and the events of the coming years would do little to dispel it.
Frank went into his first staff appraisal in a confident mood. He’d put in six months of deception but had met every target Eimear set him and had skilfully spotted opportunities to do extra tasks if they involved little effort but were highly visible. One of these was to put in half an hour each Friday talking to Eimear in the pub. Frank would have preferred to be talking to the lads about Football, but 30 minutes of chat about bastard boyfriends and the problems of being a female manager in a macho culture was a small price to pay.
But as soon as he walked into the room he could tell from Eimear’s face that the news wasn’t good. “I won’t beat around the bush” she said. “Your performance has been excellent. But we’ve a problem with this year’s pay increases. It’s Argentina you see”.
“What’s Argentina got to do with me”, Frank said. “I’ve never even been there”.
Eimear squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. The management courses she fought so hard to go on didn’t prepare her for times like this. Those courses taught her how to deal with difficult staff. But Frank wasn’t being difficult, he was correct. The company had sold him a lie when it talked about meritocracy and senior management were too chicken to deliver the news themselves. So all around the world on that fateful appraisal day, they left it to junior managers like Eimear to deliver the company message.
“You see Argentina is just the tip of the ice-berg Frank, they’re talking about a global crisis. It seems that we were like, more exposed or something to Argentina than anyone else.”
Frank was enjoying it up to this point. Something in Eimear’s discomfort made him feel powerful and in control. But then he thought of the skiing holiday he’d planned in February and how he was hoping to pay for it with his year end bonus. The prospects of receiving that were melting like the spring snow.
“But I thought we were a global bank, sufficiently diversified to ride a crisis in an individual country? Didn’t we just announce massive profits and say that transactions were at an all time high.”
Eimear paused. The briefing note she got from HR didn’t anticipate staff spotting the fatal flaw in the company’s message. “But they burned down our branch in Buenos Aires” she mumbled, her voice fading with each sentence. “And little old ladies are protesting about us outside the US embassy, saying they’ve lost all their savings”.
Frank leaned across the desk and stared directly at Eimear. “Let me get this straight. I work in Dublin and I’ve worked bloody hard. My team have worked hard and we’re busier than ever. The department is twice the size that it was when I started. And you’re telling me that I’m not getting a pay increase because some old dear in South America has lost her pension”?
“It’s a global financial crisis Frank. If it’s not now it will be in six months. The company has to provide for that. But if you stick around I’m sure we can do something for you next year”.
Frank sat back and sighed. Little did he know that this was just the first excuse of many. The company would continue to make massive profits but conveniently find a crisis every time his pay review came around. He shuffled out and headed to the pub. In future his Friday nights would be spent talking football with the boys.
Frank didn’t put a lot of thought into picking his first job. The big American banks had toured his College the previous March and dangled dollar bills in front of the hungover students. Newly emboldened with his degree and surfing the wave of the emerging Irish economy, Frank simply chose the biggest bank and before his feet hit the ground he was sitting behind a desk in Dublin’s gleaming Financial Services Centre, wearing an ill-fitting suit and trying not to be too obvious when eyeing up his new female colleagues.
Those first few months were easy. Frank was smart and realised that he could have his work done by 10.30am but he could skilfully stretch it out till 6pm to demonstrate to his supervisor Eimear that he was a committed soul willing to put in half an hour of unpaid overtime each day. He remembered one word from his initiation course that seemed to by-pass his fellow new hires. They were more interested in the free coffee and muffins. But Frank heard the word “meritocracy” and he was determined to make them live up to it.
The HR woman explained that the bank was proudly American. “We reward individual effort, if you do a good job, it doesn’t matter what the rest of your team, the department or the overall company does. You will be rewarded. We don’t recognise Unions here because we don’t need them. Hard work brings its own rewards”.
These words brought a cold shiver down Frank’s spine. It was the first of many times he would feel that shiver in the years to come. His favourite subject at school was History but his ambitious mother had pushed him in the direction of Commerce so that he would get himself a “good” job. Nevertheless, Frank hankered for the summer he spent back-packing around the World War II sites of Eastern Europe. As he sat listening to the hectoring tones of the woman from HR, he was reminded of the hot day he stood outside Auschwitz and listened to the tour guide translate the sign on the front gate. “Hard work makes you free”. The link between concentration camps and the bureaucrats in Human Resources had been fused in Frank’s mind and the events of the coming years would do little to dispel it.
Frank went into his first staff appraisal in a confident mood. He’d put in six months of deception but had met every target Eimear set him and had skilfully spotted opportunities to do extra tasks if they involved little effort but were highly visible. One of these was to put in half an hour each Friday talking to Eimear in the pub. Frank would have preferred to be talking to the lads about Football, but 30 minutes of chat about bastard boyfriends and the problems of being a female manager in a macho culture was a small price to pay.
But as soon as he walked into the room he could tell from Eimear’s face that the news wasn’t good. “I won’t beat around the bush” she said. “Your performance has been excellent. But we’ve a problem with this year’s pay increases. It’s Argentina you see”.
“What’s Argentina got to do with me”, Frank said. “I’ve never even been there”.
Eimear squirmed uncomfortably in her seat. The management courses she fought so hard to go on didn’t prepare her for times like this. Those courses taught her how to deal with difficult staff. But Frank wasn’t being difficult, he was correct. The company had sold him a lie when it talked about meritocracy and senior management were too chicken to deliver the news themselves. So all around the world on that fateful appraisal day, they left it to junior managers like Eimear to deliver the company message.
“You see Argentina is just the tip of the ice-berg Frank, they’re talking about a global crisis. It seems that we were like, more exposed or something to Argentina than anyone else.”
Frank was enjoying it up to this point. Something in Eimear’s discomfort made him feel powerful and in control. But then he thought of the skiing holiday he’d planned in February and how he was hoping to pay for it with his year end bonus. The prospects of receiving that were melting like the spring snow.
“But I thought we were a global bank, sufficiently diversified to ride a crisis in an individual country? Didn’t we just announce massive profits and say that transactions were at an all time high.”
Eimear paused. The briefing note she got from HR didn’t anticipate staff spotting the fatal flaw in the company’s message. “But they burned down our branch in Buenos Aires” she mumbled, her voice fading with each sentence. “And little old ladies are protesting about us outside the US embassy, saying they’ve lost all their savings”.
Frank leaned across the desk and stared directly at Eimear. “Let me get this straight. I work in Dublin and I’ve worked bloody hard. My team have worked hard and we’re busier than ever. The department is twice the size that it was when I started. And you’re telling me that I’m not getting a pay increase because some old dear in South America has lost her pension”?
“It’s a global financial crisis Frank. If it’s not now it will be in six months. The company has to provide for that. But if you stick around I’m sure we can do something for you next year”.
Frank sat back and sighed. Little did he know that this was just the first excuse of many. The company would continue to make massive profits but conveniently find a crisis every time his pay review came around. He shuffled out and headed to the pub. In future his Friday nights would be spent talking football with the boys.
Wednesday 10 September 2008
Isaac and Ishmael
Steve is an ocker Aussie. Likes his footy and his four and twenty meat pies. Speaks with an accent that would make Kath and Kim wince with embarrassment and has even called one of his kids Kiely. Steve is also Jewish and I only realised this when I asked him what he thought of bacon butties as a hangover cure. He’s not a fan needless to say but he was more than willing to fill in the gaps in my simplistic mindset.
Jews have been in Australia as long as Europeans have been here. The early arrivals fulfilled the stereo-types of all those first fleeters. While the Irish on those prison ships were there for various crimes involving animals (stealing them usually as opposed to acts for which New Zealand is now famous) and the English were there for pick-pocketing and other Dickensian crimes, the occasional Jew was being punished for forgery. This made them highly sought after in the new colonies when legal documentation was in its infancy. It also made them popular among the other prisoners because they could knock together a “Ticket of Release” form in a jiffy.
Later Jewish migration followed the periodic upheavals in European history, right up to the fall of the Soviet Empire. Australia opened its doors in particular after World War II, which means that it must be the only country in the world with sizable populations of both Holocaust survivors and Nazi war criminals.
Being Irish of course, I have very little experience of meeting Jewish people. We like to pride ourselves on being the only country in Europe that didn’t persecute Jews, but the truth is we achieved this by not allowing any into the country in the first place. Until recently our only experience of Jewish people was on the pages of Ulysses. And more Irish people have been to a Bar Mitzvah than have read James Joyce’ classic about Leopold Bloom.
Nevertheless, I’ve always been fascinated by the Jewish faith. This has been inspired by my devotion to Woody Allen movies. Through Woody, I like to feel that I share in the existential neurosis of being Jewish. Steve laughed when I told him this. He said judging all Jewish people by the standards of Woody Allen would be like judging all Irish people on the activities of Father Ted.
He told me about the different communities that live here. From the secular to the Hasidic, from the Russians to the Israelis and from the ones like him who considered themselves as Australian to those who insist in speaking Yiddish and dressing like they have just walked off a 17th Century movie set. Like many secular Jews, Steve is suspicious of his Orthodox cousins. He distrusts their piety in the way that I, as a Catholic, distrust Opus Dei and Jesuits. But in the same way that the Devil makes the best music, Steve believes that the Orthodox guys are the top cooks. He suggested that I visit a bakery near where I live that does the best Matzo breakfast in Australia. The bakery is in Elsternwick which is the next suburb over. I’m in St Kilda and it doesn’t really have an ethnic majority although the recent influx of Irish backpackers is trying to change that. It could best be described as Bohemian with its eclectic mix of Italian and eastern European restaurants. It might even have people who are actually from Bohemia.
Elsternwick on the other hand is a Jewish suburb right down to the kosher section in Supermarkets and the Shul on every major intersection. It sits just on the other side of the Nepean Highway from St Kilda but it seems like continents away. Steve’s bakery is on Glenhuntly Road and the food didn’t let me down. One of the great things about living in Melbourne is the amount of fantastic places to have breakfast. I like nothing better than sitting in the window of a café on a Saturday morning and watching the world go by.
On Glenhuntly Road on a weekend morning you can sit on one side of the café window and pretend that it’s Tel Aviv or Lower Manhattan outside. The Orthodox Jews scurry along as though constantly late for an appointment. Whatever the weather is in this City of ever changing climate, they always seem to be dressed the same. Black frock coat, as seen on bouncers and undertakers, black suit with an ornamental Gartel around the waist and a wide brimmed hat keeping the rain and sun off their sumptuous beards and carefully plaited hair. And as the old Woody Allen joke goes, that’s just the women!
Their secular cousins can be found clogging the road in their gas guzzling SUVs as they scuttle between delicatessen and bakery. It’s a scene repeated in many Cities across the East coast of America and it’s indicative of the cosmopolitan nature of this City.
I brought the news of my happy breakfast back to Steve but somehow our conversation veered onto weightier matters. I made the mistake of bringing up Middle Eastern politics and that was like a red rag to a bull. For the next two hours we relived every atrocity in Israel and Lebanon in the last fifty years. Needless to say we got nowhere. Steve reckoned that if Jews didn’t exist, the Arabs would have invented them just to practice anti-Semitism.
I mentioned that Brunswick in North Melbourne is the centre of the City’s Arab population. I’d spent a wonderful Saturday morning there some months ago. We had dined on Arab cakes that day and what struck me after visiting Elsternwick was how similar they were to Jewish ones. Steve smiled and told me the story of Isaac and Ishmael. They were sons of Abraham and Isaac grew up Jewish while his brother Ishmael followed the Islamic faith. And so the troubles in the Middle East began. One thing they had in common however was that they both loved their mother’s buns.
Jews have been in Australia as long as Europeans have been here. The early arrivals fulfilled the stereo-types of all those first fleeters. While the Irish on those prison ships were there for various crimes involving animals (stealing them usually as opposed to acts for which New Zealand is now famous) and the English were there for pick-pocketing and other Dickensian crimes, the occasional Jew was being punished for forgery. This made them highly sought after in the new colonies when legal documentation was in its infancy. It also made them popular among the other prisoners because they could knock together a “Ticket of Release” form in a jiffy.
Later Jewish migration followed the periodic upheavals in European history, right up to the fall of the Soviet Empire. Australia opened its doors in particular after World War II, which means that it must be the only country in the world with sizable populations of both Holocaust survivors and Nazi war criminals.
Being Irish of course, I have very little experience of meeting Jewish people. We like to pride ourselves on being the only country in Europe that didn’t persecute Jews, but the truth is we achieved this by not allowing any into the country in the first place. Until recently our only experience of Jewish people was on the pages of Ulysses. And more Irish people have been to a Bar Mitzvah than have read James Joyce’ classic about Leopold Bloom.
Nevertheless, I’ve always been fascinated by the Jewish faith. This has been inspired by my devotion to Woody Allen movies. Through Woody, I like to feel that I share in the existential neurosis of being Jewish. Steve laughed when I told him this. He said judging all Jewish people by the standards of Woody Allen would be like judging all Irish people on the activities of Father Ted.
He told me about the different communities that live here. From the secular to the Hasidic, from the Russians to the Israelis and from the ones like him who considered themselves as Australian to those who insist in speaking Yiddish and dressing like they have just walked off a 17th Century movie set. Like many secular Jews, Steve is suspicious of his Orthodox cousins. He distrusts their piety in the way that I, as a Catholic, distrust Opus Dei and Jesuits. But in the same way that the Devil makes the best music, Steve believes that the Orthodox guys are the top cooks. He suggested that I visit a bakery near where I live that does the best Matzo breakfast in Australia. The bakery is in Elsternwick which is the next suburb over. I’m in St Kilda and it doesn’t really have an ethnic majority although the recent influx of Irish backpackers is trying to change that. It could best be described as Bohemian with its eclectic mix of Italian and eastern European restaurants. It might even have people who are actually from Bohemia.
Elsternwick on the other hand is a Jewish suburb right down to the kosher section in Supermarkets and the Shul on every major intersection. It sits just on the other side of the Nepean Highway from St Kilda but it seems like continents away. Steve’s bakery is on Glenhuntly Road and the food didn’t let me down. One of the great things about living in Melbourne is the amount of fantastic places to have breakfast. I like nothing better than sitting in the window of a café on a Saturday morning and watching the world go by.
On Glenhuntly Road on a weekend morning you can sit on one side of the café window and pretend that it’s Tel Aviv or Lower Manhattan outside. The Orthodox Jews scurry along as though constantly late for an appointment. Whatever the weather is in this City of ever changing climate, they always seem to be dressed the same. Black frock coat, as seen on bouncers and undertakers, black suit with an ornamental Gartel around the waist and a wide brimmed hat keeping the rain and sun off their sumptuous beards and carefully plaited hair. And as the old Woody Allen joke goes, that’s just the women!
Their secular cousins can be found clogging the road in their gas guzzling SUVs as they scuttle between delicatessen and bakery. It’s a scene repeated in many Cities across the East coast of America and it’s indicative of the cosmopolitan nature of this City.
I brought the news of my happy breakfast back to Steve but somehow our conversation veered onto weightier matters. I made the mistake of bringing up Middle Eastern politics and that was like a red rag to a bull. For the next two hours we relived every atrocity in Israel and Lebanon in the last fifty years. Needless to say we got nowhere. Steve reckoned that if Jews didn’t exist, the Arabs would have invented them just to practice anti-Semitism.
I mentioned that Brunswick in North Melbourne is the centre of the City’s Arab population. I’d spent a wonderful Saturday morning there some months ago. We had dined on Arab cakes that day and what struck me after visiting Elsternwick was how similar they were to Jewish ones. Steve smiled and told me the story of Isaac and Ishmael. They were sons of Abraham and Isaac grew up Jewish while his brother Ishmael followed the Islamic faith. And so the troubles in the Middle East began. One thing they had in common however was that they both loved their mother’s buns.
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