A FINANCE culture and a drive to downsize have become the dominant features of Irish companies, Mr David Begg, general secretary of the Communication Workers Union said yesterday. It was essential to end the obsession with cost cutting if industry was to restructure itself successfully, he told delegates at the Institute of Personnel and Development conference.
Mr Begg said modern companies, whether publicly or privately owned, were predominantly influenced by finance. "Finance sees zero hours contracts as the ultimate nirvana of total cost flexibility," he said. "The problem is that employees do not have zero hour mortgages, cars or children."
Mr Begg said there were two kinds of human resources management - hard and soft. "Hard human resources management sees people merely as a cost and costs must be cut by sacking people so that profits always rise, even in a downturn period," he said.
He said "soft" human resources management had the same end objective, but the mechanisms used generous severance terms and "second career outplacement" - were superficially human.
He said people worked for more than money. "What you are in society depends on what you do. Respect in society and in the family goes with the job."
He asked whether it was any wonder that people were beginning to react to policies which deprived them of work. He warned that any "common value system" between workers and management in corporations was being dismantled.
"The new competition ethos is downsize or die, so people must be shed to upsize profits," he said.
Mr Begg said globalisation of commerce was creating companies with loyalty to neither country nor community. These corporations were becoming disconnected from the communities in which they located and from the families of their workforce, he said.
Mr Begg said the challenge was to change the relationships between corporations and society and within companies to integrate "the values we all hold dear into the norms of society".
He said the "stakeholder concept" was the key to this transformation of corporations, and the means by which the personnel function could become important again.
