People representing the private sector (very much including the current government) are always trying to convince us that the private sector is great and wealth-creating whilst the public sector is bloated and useless.
Here are a few examples of how some in the private sector are trying to con us:
1) Constant retail sales and offers which aren't worth the bright paper and expensive adverts they're broadcast on. Most of the time, so called reductions are based on the cost in one part of the country which may well have been set just so the retailer can later have a nationwide sale.
2) Excessive small print and superfast babbling of terms, conditions and figures relating to credit agreements on anything from cars to credit cards. They're trying to confuse you and bore you to tears until you just buy it anyway.
3) 'Umbrella' companies. Huge invisible behemoths hover over large companies, dipping their fat fingers into anything that will make them profit and they don't want you to know. They'd rather you were unaware that the failed care provider you heard about in the news is also running your unreliable local train service and the immigration centre (which has also been in the news for ill treatment of its inmates). They'd prefer you didn't realise that the huge company manufacturing those ubiquitous crisps also make the ones you think are a bit less big and mean and the 'healthy' drink branded as though it's made by a small, ethical company.
4) 'Separate' arms of one large company where one part supplies the other at a massive loss so they can cut the company's total tax bill by millions (or sometimes even billions).
5) Avoiding tax by claiming their head office is in Luxembourg or some tiny island somewhere, when in fact all that's there is a P.O. Box or one person with a phone and a locked door who knows nothing (or won't tell).
6) Pretending that all of their orders are placed through Ireland or somewhere else in the EU which charges less tax when the order was placed, stored, packed, shipped and delivered within the UK.
7) Trying to get out of giving staff contracts until they absolutely have to, just in case they want to make you redundant (this happened to me).
8) Cutting corners when it comes to cleanliness and public safety.
9) Using ingredients nobody has heard of to make production cheaper and shelf-life longer and then changing their names when people become wiser to what they actually are (do you ever see E numbers anymore? Do you think those ingredients are no longer used?).
10) Avoiding expensive UK recycling costs by shipping off waste to places such as India and West Africa (where they become places of work for poor children who end up breathing in toxic fumes and melting their skin as they rummage through, looking for something with any kind of value).
11) Avoiding expensive manufacturing costs in countries with health and safety and other regulations designed to protect poorly-paid manual workers by using third-world factories where pay and conditions are terrible.
12) Lying to us about the 'health benefits' of their product or scheme.
13) Lobbying governments to keep their products and services legal or free from regulation in the face of studies which show it is harmful or that malpractice is at play.
I could go on all day but I need to get on to the 'bloated' public sector: why might it be that councils and other public sector organisations have to be quite big? Could a large part of it be because of all of the above?! Laws and regulations constantly have to be refined and tweaked so that loopholes etc are closed. We also need big teams of people keeping checks on all of these bad practices.
Constant checking on private sector practices costs us a lot of money. Meanwhile, big companies' profits are hidden away from the treasury in all manner of schemes. Is that fair?
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