Jamie Oliver tells the truth!!!

Tancred

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

http://news.sky.com/story/1133928/jamie-oliver-says-british-workers-whinge

Bo**ocks!

Oliver is just a rich pr**k with an attitude problem. Typical loud-mouthed cockney git who reads The Sun and votes Tory, except that now his wife has forced him to read The Times instead.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

chewmylegoff wrote: »

The thing is, it's easy to see why you would want to work your rear off in this sort of situation as you have a clear career path and you are well rewarded for your endeavour. It has been the same for me. As soon as I started work a clear pathway was set out in front of me, as long as I jumped through the hoops and did the time I knew I would receive promotions, payrises, bonuses etc and that makes it worth doing the work..

I have no idea what type of work you do, but certainly for management structures in many/most customer facing organisations getting promoted gets harder the further up you go.

For example (and using nice round numbers to illustrate), for each 100 workers there might be 10 supervisors, 2 junior managers, and 1 senior manager. For every 10 senior managers, 1 regional manager, for every 10 regional managers, one national director, etc.

So there are no guarantees that the rewards will be there, unless at every step of your career you outperform all of your peers.

And the ones that rise to the top are the best of the best, and have had to repeatedly prove that at each step of their career.

So in that example for every ten thousand workers there can be only one national director, and if that director has worked his way up through the company he's had to be better than and/or work harder than thousands of other people to get there.

I suppose it's different for some professions of course... some organisations/careers have much flatter structures.

But there are a lot of careers where it's pretty much dog-eat-dog and you simply have to put in the hard work for years with only a 1/10 chance of making the next rung. What you're counting on is that most people will not.

So yes, I'll agree I'm well rewarded now, but there have never been any guarantees that would be the case.

John_Pierpoint

PasturesNew wrote: »

I've never understood why bosses are so proud to have workers working 100 hour weeks. Why not have double the staff and work them for 50? You'd get more out of them.

Migrants have a different position: our minimum wage is a fortune to them, so it's easy for them to come over when young and work their nuts off, then go home after a few years and buy a house outright..... and live in HMOs with fellow countrymen of the same ilk.

Brits are trying to establish a life and all the costs that go with that. There's no party and free house after 3-4 years' hard work, just a realisation that there's another 40 years of the drudgery.

Foreigners, working their nuts off are already away from home and not putting down roots - they live with their mates, they're young, it's fun.

Brits have all sorts of family to fit in, plans to make etc, they're not away from home on a big Grand Tour style adventure.

Surely the point is that we are in a global capitalist economy now?

Someone needs to tell our teenagers, from the age of 13, that there is no free lunch, no entitlement to anything, and at least 6,000,000,000 other people in the world getting by on a lot less than our minimum wage.
So stop reading celebrity c@rp, or dreaming of being a gangster rapper, and earn what you feel you need to spend. If you cannot afford it you are not going to have it.

GOYA, there are still character forming activities available in the country and around the world for 18 year olds.

John

I don't think I have ever worked a 100 hour week, though I did once mix up 20 tonnes of concrete footings between 10:00 and 02:00 hrs. on my own account [by which time I was suffering muscle cramps - so much for an 08:00 local authority inspection and a one day mixer loan].

Once upon a time I worked a 26 hour on the job day - not my responsibility but I was the only member of the team capable of sorting out the mess, before the deadline, theoretically at 10:00 in the morning [in reality at 11:30 for noon].

Amara

It annoys me to hear all the time the same news: Eastern Europeans work long hours for minimum wages, because they don't have the same living costs English people do and after a while they can buy a house in their country outright. Yes, they DO have living costs! It's a myth " most immigrants live ten people in one house" . Every immigrant I know live their own place , rented or owned, they pay rent, mortgage , council tax , other bills. I visited Poland last month, checked property prices in a medium size city (200k ) . Cheapest house I found costed 750k PLN, roughly £150k. Hardly money you can save up living on minimum wage. Flats prices: £60k up. You can buy a property in UK for that money.

custardy

Amara wrote: »

It annoys me to hear all the time the same news: Eastern Europeans work long hours for minimum wages, because they don't have the same living costs English people do and after a while they can buy a house in their country outright. Yes, they DO have living costs! It's a myth " most immigrants live ten people in one house" . Every immigrant I know live their own place , rented or owned, they pay rent, mortgage , council tax , other bills. I visited Poland last month, checked property prices in a medium size city (200k ) . Cheapest house I found costed 750k PLN, roughly £150k. Hardly money you can save up living on minimum wage. Flats prices: £60k up. You can buy a property in UK for that money.

happens plenty here in Edinburgh
My last rented house was in a complex of small 'professional' lets
tiny flats. yet when the Poles et al came in they were living with many of them in one flat.
this is no anti pole post,I work with them and they are good guys
however I dont see them as better or worse than their UK co workers

thedalmeny

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

I have no idea what type of work you do, but certainly for management structures in many/most customer facing organisations getting promoted gets harder the further up you go.

For example (and using nice round numbers to illustrate), for each 100 workers there might be 10 supervisors, 2 junior managers, and 1 senior manager. For every 10 senior managers, 1 regional manager, for every 10 regional managers, one national director, etc.

So there are no guarantees that the rewards will be there, unless at every step of your career you outperform all of your peers.

And the ones that rise to the top are the best of the best, and have had to repeatedly prove that at each step of their career.

So in that example for every ten thousand workers there can be only one national director, and if that director has worked his way up through the company he's had to be better than and/or work harder than thousands of other people to get there.

I suppose it's different for some professions of course... some organisations/careers have much flatter structures.

But there are a lot of careers where it's pretty much dog-eat-dog and you simply have to put in the hard work for years with only a 1/10 chance of making the next rung. What you're counting on is that most people will not.

So yes, I'll agree I'm well rewarded now, but there have never been any guarantees that would be the case.

I think your problem is you believe success is directly linked to how hard you work in relation to the volume of hours, which is a pretty poor approach all around.

I work as a manager in quite a large company (10 billion in revenue per annum), if i was to allow any of the teams i've run to work 100 hours per week on a regular basis i'd get a swift bollocking.

I've had team members like yourself who were doing the same, i've instructed them to go home and slow down a little. As they're no good to me or the programme when they're burnt out.

If i didn't.... Not only would i at a very basic level been seen as unreasonable, i'd be creating an extraordinary amount of risk. My estimates be unrealistic as my FTE would not be representative, if anything was to go wrong i'd have no bandwidth within the team to resolve it.

It's poor management & planning anyway you cut it.

There are times everyone needs to pull together and put in 1-2 weeks at around 100 hours, these however are few and far between.

Battleaxe44

I will just throw this one for consideration if ever it was mooted to introduce this to England.

I was surprised when I first came over here that England did not have this for employees.

http://www.workplaceinfo.com.au/payroll/leave/long-service-leave-comparison-states-and-territories#nsw

Out,_Vile_Jelly

Some further observations:

1 Oliver, like all "celebrity chefs" seems to spend more time gobbing off to get headlines for his latest book rather than actually cooking.

2 It's rather pointless to compare working attitudes of immigrants and locals as their short and long term situations are so different. When I was 20 I spent the summer working for minimum wage as a cleaner at a US motel, living in a trailer park, where I could enjoy myself knowing I wouldn't be doing it forever. The following year I was an EFL teacher in Poland, where after one month of training I was earning more than an experienced local teacher, merely by the fortune of having been born a native speaker of English.

3 It's really very silly to say things like "I don't understand this 9-5 culture". A great part of the UK economy is based around a swathe of people working in offices during the week, with leisure time to spend money at cinemas, theatres, concerts etc in the evenings and on traditional weekend activities like Saturday DIY and Sunday pub lunches. How can an economy thrive if everyone is hunched over their work email 20 hours a day?

4 From personal experience, those who are married to their jobs and obsessed by their career are dull, stunted individuals. I work at a university, and those who put in long hours in the lab, come in at weekends, stew over paperwork, mutter about the hours of colleagues do not progress. Academics who have rounded personalities through a sensible work-life balance make better supervisors, get great student feedback, are notably more competent people managers and problem solvers.

Loughton_Monkey

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

I have no idea what type of work you do, but certainly for management structures in many/most customer facing organisations getting promoted gets harder the further up you go.

For example (and using nice round numbers to illustrate), for each 100 workers there might be 10 supervisors, 2 junior managers, and 1 senior manager. For every 10 senior managers, 1 regional manager, for every 10 regional managers, one national director, etc.

So there are no guarantees that the rewards will be there, unless at every step of your career you outperform all of your peers.

And the ones that rise to the top are the best of the best, and have had to repeatedly prove that at each step of their career.

.......

I never looked at it like that in my day. [Generally working for 'Blue Chips']. At the lower end, promotions for 'good' people generally came every 2 yrs or so by shifting to another unit, branch, division.....

In my 4th job at 9 years service, it did become the sort of 'buggins turn' that you outline, but then any sensible person jumps ship and goes to a competitor don't they?

It's a bit defeatist to dwell on the diminishing no. of jobs as you go up, since once you take into account 'the market', there are (plucking figures from air) 3,000 jobs - possibly 25 vacant at any one time - that you could get if only you know of them/look for them.

Even better, these days, it's far more global so literally "the world is your lobster".

Still gets harder the further you go up (agreed) - especially if you simply look upwards in your own specific organisation that may be retrenching - but there's still 100's or 1,000's of opportunities out there, and you only need 1 of them..... And if you can get one, plus negotiate a redundancy from where you are.... all the better!

... large gin & tonics all round...

richbeth

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

And the ones that rise to the top are the best of the best, and have had to repeatedly prove that at each step of their career.

sorry I think this should read

And the ones that rise to the top are those preferred by their line managers out of those who give a monkeys about "career", are willing to put up with the office politics involved, are in the right place at the right time and don't wish to run their own business or go freelance.