Jobs go at boat firm

Makes you wonder why South Boats have made internal promotions giving out higher salaries and company bonuses, then days later they lay off staff leaving no staff for the promoted managers to managers. Giving them notice that reducdancies would be made on Christmas eve! Too many chiefs and not enough indians will kill the company!

As long as they think positive and don't blame Thatcherism for everything....

Indeed Mike, that is how I worked for 13 years and it does work to some degree. The only problem with that is that the tax man wants to penalise the little man if a contract runs to , say. three years. It makes not a jot of difference that at the end of the three years that contractor has no employee rights but they are not allowed to mitigate that risk by running their tax affairs (sorry swore then ;) ) in a manner that compensates for the lack of rights and allows them to pay for training out of pre-tax profit. All the taxation of an employee with none of the rights. My problem is that companies (and the tax man) are wanting it all their own way now and the market is , currently, supporting this. The model you suggest would be a good one if we were geared up to it but I also suspect that much cheaper labour rates outside the EEC would still make an impact.

Peter the answer would be to make ererybody self employed and employ them on contract for the duration of 'the work in hand'. I have been so employed and a daughter has been so employed for a good number of years.

We move more and more to the "Hire and Fire" model as shareholders demand returns leaving directors up against the wall . It is an incredibly short term outlook as skills in many industries can take decades to acquire. No industry is immune either. I'm facing almost certain redundancy within a utulity company. Companies might wake up when they look for skills to expand and make profit only to find the people have moved on to another skill set completey. IT is suffering this more and more. Sad for the staff . Never mind , there are plenty of cheap staff in India and China only too glad to use their recently acquired certificates to good effect. The world is going global and greedy.

Anybody who has been in the boat building industry knows that it's a 'hire 'n' fire' situation as the orders come along, but this is a sad case and I hope that those removed from employment soon find something new or that South Boats recover.

Any views or opinions presented in the comments above are solely those of the author and do not represent those of the Isle of Wight County Press.