Slashing Prices At The Check-outs, Slashing Cashiers for a Price.

Sweary

My cousin Balls (not her real name, honest to God) recently applied for a job in a local supermarket. The job description had laid out thirty to thirty-five hours a week, which was less than what she’d hoped for, but needs must and all that. Anything was better than being on the Dole; the Dole is rather like Willie O’Dea in that respect.

She was offered the position, and so went along at the required time to give the new gaff a whirl. The job was hardly demanding, and she might even have enjoyed the staring-into-space time that it involved, had management not suddenly decided that thirty hours would be far too much strain for anyone and so cut the hours involved back to to seventeen.

“But this is a minimum wage deal!” Balls cried. “I might as well be on the Dole, or Willie O’Dea even!”

“We apologise,” said the mournful managers. “But due to the current economic climate, we are forced to cut hours.”

On investigation, though, that rang about as true as Mary Coughlan’s pledging of funds for Gay Pride. The local supermarket, as cobbled by the recession as Lisa Murphy’s implants, was still actively recruiting, even whilst cutting full-time staff members’ hours faster than Brian Cowen’s neck cuts through swathes of tagliatelle coated in bechamel. Part-time staff members are the way to go, clearly. They may soak up training with the enthusiasm of an own-brand serviette, they may have as much loyalty as a D4 socialite who’s just found her coke-buddy girlfriend face down in the bath, but God fucking damn it they’re cheap! And plentiful! And cheap!

This isn’t a phenomenon confined to one supermarket run by a couple of lonely mercenary geniuses, by the way. This is rife, a disease feigning competitiveness and innovation, and one blamed on the great big Recession entrepreneurs like to keep in their handbags and drag out when opportunity affords. Cutting hours is like the local business’s equivalent of creating redundancies, which they’d never be able to explain away at the next GAA ball. Plus it appeals to our Irish sense of martyrdom – sure any job is better than no job, even if involves having to scrape by through eating nothing but lip gloss samplings from the chemist’s next door.

I don’t understand how businesses can get away with hiring more staff whilst cutting pay and/or hours for their permanent workers. I don’t understand why businesses don’t have to provide proof that they truly can think of no way forward which would allow them to remain competitive other than laying off line staff left, right and centre.

No doubt the Small Business Association can put me right on the first two, though. The smartarse tossclumps.