Dead Men Walking

It’s very strange in the office at the moment. It is hard to explain to anyone who has not been through it or been at a company where there have been forced redundancies and people still have to work their notice.

As I mentioned before, those of us on Fixed Term Agreements were not renewed, a decision not taken at local level or based on need,, purely on the fact that cuts had to be made in the DWP and FTA are the easiest to get rid of, we have no Union support, no recourse to tribunal, just let the contracts run out.

‘Oh look Cleggeron I cut 12,000 from my dept. I got my target, can I have a sweetie?’.

“Well done boy, have a seat in the House of Lords next time if you get voted out”

So there are seventeen (men and women, ignore the title) of us going between now and July, eight of us on May 27th including your humble cat. (Big piss up)

I would just tell them to fuck it, as would the rest but we’ve been saving holiday, so I get the last months money plus 22 days accrued holiday, which should keep me from going back to sign on for a few weeks. (Ah yes, the irony, the Job Centre I work at, is my local Job Centre, I’ve really been there 2 ½ years not 17 months. it is  as if I just got a pay rise in 2009 and moved to the other side of the desk*)

Once the announcement was made everyone just carried on as normal, thinking maybe it would be reversed or something (not me, I knew time was up), A couple of people have already gone. But now we are coming into the final countdown and it is obvious we are going.

The normal rank & file I must admit have been lovely, but lovely in the sense of someone finding out you have a terminal illness (Remember most of these people have never been out of work, even though they work in a Job Centre advising [sic] the unemployed, sorry Job Seekers)

It is all “How are you today?”, “How are you bearing up?” “What are we going to do without you?” “It’s wrong, they should get rid of the deadwood first.” [Have to bite tongue on this one, kettle] or the most annoying “Have you found anything yet?” 

To which the response is either a) “Do you think I would still be here if I had” or b) “You work in a Job Centre supposedly helping people look for work, doing job searches, what do you think is out there for us? Did you think we had some secret jobs stashed away purely for our benefit, you stupid bint”

No, it’s more the line managers and above and I stress this is not just here or all of them, I have seen it before elsewhere when people are working out their notice, both involuntarily and voluntarily (A manager at a Bank I worked for would not speak to people once they had handed in their notice, I asked once and he said they had betrayed him and the Bank)

Mine has not said more than ‘Good Morning’ to me in 2 weeks. They avoid direct engagement, even eye contact, they don’t ask us to do stuff anymore, we are omitted from consideration in team meetings. If someone mentions “But if I’m doing all this, what’s Pavlov’s Cat doing.?” There’s a silence as if someone just farted during The Lords Prayer, everyone looks at their shoes until the miscreant catches on with an “Oh right, [Looks at me] Sorry”

It as if we have become shades of our former selves, an embarrassment , we should have ‘passed over’ by now and left the living in Peace. We are in ‘The Void’ the space between here and there, shadows of people they once knew, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye and dismissed as a trick of the light or a memory of something once seen.

Still I am a professional and will continue to provide the best service I can, right up until my final day. As I have mentioned in previous posts, it has happened to me before and will no doubt happen again, nothing is certain in these times. So ‘Illegitimi non carborundum’**

As an aside, back in the day when I was providing support services, before IR35, I came across this poem that I thought summed up the life of a contractor.

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

Epitaph On An Army Of Mercenaries
A.E. Housman.

 

*If you are ‘signing on’ the DWP is technically your ‘employer’ and issues your P45 when you sign off, if you sign on over the tax year end 1st April, they’ll also send out a P60. (I had to chase the DWP for my P45 so I could send it to the DWP when I went from unemployed, sorry Job Seeker to working for them.)

**Don’t let the bastards grind you down