This news, clearly part of a broadening government attack on workforces’ rights, is just the start, isn’t it?  Beginning to move the goalposts, so that in law unfair dismissal is no longer unfair, is only part of a wider process designed to shift the blame for economic injustice and inefficient process from the so-called wealth creators to the workers themselves.

In truth, if these wealth creators were really so very good at their jobs, they wouldn’t resort to the simplistic notions of firing workers to get out of economic holes they’d gone and dug for themselves. After all, the easiest thing when parachuting into a company with problems is to order a three-month review and fire ten percent of the people.  Far more difficult, far more value-adding, far more deserving of the high salaries these supposedly clever people are able to command, is to analyse all the processes which operate in the company and rework them little by little so everyone employed has a value-adding role.

It’s much easier, however, to shift the blame for inefficient economies onto surplus workers who are surplus through no fault of their own.  And since it’s much easier, government and business lobbyists both look for intellectual cloaks to justify their poor and shabby instincts.

We, as workers, deserve far better strategies.  They, as supposed wealth creators, have none.

For in reality, in any case, these wealth creators seem of late mainly to be putting their wealth into non-manufacturing and low-employment sectors – where the financial returns for their own private money piles are going to be much higher.  As an example, I remember reading a short while ago about how major car companies now make more money out of financial services and investments than they do out of making cars.  I wonder how much employment such decisions now generate.  I wonder how many workers, as a result, aren’t even contracted in the first place.

The worst of it all, of course, is that in an economy where consumer confidence is low – and demand is just about as shaky as it could get – we’re getting business leaders looking to make their shrinking markets less unprofitable by cheapening the cost of hiring and firing labour.  So where is the entrepreneurial ambition in that?  What’s more, where is the economic common sense?  You’re hardly going to get demand up on its feet if you make workforces, consumers and families in general feel even less confident about their futures.  And yet cheapening the cost of hiring and firing labour is exactly what that will achieve.

One final thought.  The Labour Party is investing much of its energy in the idea of predistribution.  One element of this concept, if I have rightly understood it, is that we should believe in and aim for high-quality and high-skill economies.  My experience of working in a large banking corporation would, however, indicate this is not the way forwards that at the very least big business is looking for.  In giant organisations, they always look to dumb down competencies, for several reasons:

1. Reduce the impact of staff turnover.
2. Reduce the cost of retraining.
3. Reduce the cost of salaries.
4. Reduce the danger of intellectual property loss.

These are all key elements in the decision to choose the dumbing-down of processes over the training-up of staff.  In reality, high-quality and high-skill economies can only operate in those societies where there are extremely high levels of trust and stability between workers and management.  This is definitely not the case in Coalition Britain.

And if Ed Miliband’s right-wingers continue to encourage him to sit on his hands, as they probably will do, it’s hardly going to improve under any future Labour government.