redendancy

WOW, this morning I was really doing one when I heard the news.  But this one has a bit of a back story.  Centrica or what we used to call British Gas a couple of years ago was moaning that their profits were only a few percent and therefore through challenges needed to raise their prices by about 6 or 8 percent. All well and good you think.  Many months later their latest set of results came out and out popped an increased profit figure of about 6 or 8 percent, basically they put a price rise in place to fund greater profits.  A fantastic idea if you can get away with it and of course they did as the government loves business or they are totally afraid of them, not sure which.

Now we head to this morning when the latest results from Centrica show that their profits have taken a bit of a dip and their instant reaction is to kill off approximately 4000 jobs.  So basically that is 4000 families that will be worried and stressed as to whether they can keep a roof over their head.  4,000 families that will be unhappy and when that happens stress causes family rows which then affect children and other members of the family.

What annoys me is the company is still making a profit for god sake, profits go up and down but they are not losing money, they are not facing bankruptcy, they will come through this and again profits will go up and then go down again.  Why do we have to have this expectation of never ending profit rises.  We cannot see profits rise every year, even damn good companies will occasionally see less profit than the previous period.  It doesn’t me a bad thing.

Finally I will add that a company that I left just over a year ago is now also ditching 25 percent of its staff, not because they are losing money but because they want to make more.  Ore families that are worried about the future because one or two guys at the top want more money and I know for a fact that the CEO of the company when I was there got a twenty million dollar bonus because he made x million dollars in profit and he did that by making people redundant and then making the ones who were left work much harder and in many cases, my own included, not able to do their job in the 40 hours we were paid so had to take work home to complete in fear we would be the next to be axed. In the end we were.

Why are companies allowed to wreak so much havoc on families of employees just in the name of increased profits and in the name of getting millions in bonuses.  I don’t want to come over as some sort of ogre or control freak but do we really need people to have billions of pounds.  Is there some sort of cap that should be placed on the amount one person can own.

However in argument to that, when you see people like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and others who are using their wealth for good things then one doesn’t mind but it is the ones who are accumulating wealth purely for self pleasure.  Oh and don’t get me started on the wealthy leaders in the developing countries who have gold taps and bathrooms whilst the rest of the country is literally starving.