eventide
Coffee with Baldy Mongan the tame trade unionist.
"Heelers," he said earnestly. "There's still a way out of this. If you'd just eat a bit of humble pie you might not get fired. You realise you're about to lose your pension entitlement?"
I watched as the evening sunlight worked miracles in the puddles of Main Street.
"Is that all my good Lord Sir Baldy?" I cried warmly. "Why then the only difference between you and me, is that I shall lose my pension entitlement today and you shall lose your pension entitlement tomorrow..."
My voice darkened.
"...Because these idiots aren't going to have any money to pay pensions. They've paid a hundred million quid for a newspaper that's not worth fifty pence. They've driven out the only members of staff who had a clue. And they've dealt with a situation where competitors were setting up free sheet newspapers in the region, by establishing a free sheet of their own, instead of sitting back and waiting, and letting those competitors cope with their own atrocious start up costs, instead of doing that, these cosmically gormless clowns rushed to incur similar start up costs, effectively throwing away our advantage as an established title, and absolutely failing to affect the competitors at all, succeeding indeed only in levelling the playing field for them, destroying the sales of our 150 year old established title as the public inevitably decided: hey if a version of this rubbish is now available free at weekends, why the hell would we keep paying for a copy every week like we've done for the last century and a half."
"Heelers," he said earnestly. "There's still a way out of this. If you'd just eat a bit of humble pie you might not get fired. You realise you're about to lose your pension entitlement?"
I watched as the evening sunlight worked miracles in the puddles of Main Street.
"Is that all my good Lord Sir Baldy?" I cried warmly. "Why then the only difference between you and me, is that I shall lose my pension entitlement today and you shall lose your pension entitlement tomorrow..."
My voice darkened.
"...Because these idiots aren't going to have any money to pay pensions. They've paid a hundred million quid for a newspaper that's not worth fifty pence. They've driven out the only members of staff who had a clue. And they've dealt with a situation where competitors were setting up free sheet newspapers in the region, by establishing a free sheet of their own, instead of sitting back and waiting, and letting those competitors cope with their own atrocious start up costs, instead of doing that, these cosmically gormless clowns rushed to incur similar start up costs, effectively throwing away our advantage as an established title, and absolutely failing to affect the competitors at all, succeeding indeed only in levelling the playing field for them, destroying the sales of our 150 year old established title as the public inevitably decided: hey if a version of this rubbish is now available free at weekends, why the hell would we keep paying for a copy every week like we've done for the last century and a half."
posted by heelers | 4:00 AM
1 Comments:
Your pension plans may not operate the same way in Ireland as those in the U.S. However, you might be interested to know this: not long before I quit at our local newspaper, they announced that the pension plan had been frozen. No employee would accumulate any more years of credit toward a pension, no matter how long they continued worked.
They switched everyone over to an investment plan ("401-k"). The employee puts a percent of each paycheck into an investment plan, and the employer contributes a matching amount up to a certain limit.
I won't say that I quit just because I was only going to get three years of credit on a pension. However, the change in the pension plan certainly didn't convince me to continue working there.
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