On Sat, 03 Nov 2012 09:53:47 +0000, alan
wrote:


In the company I work for trainee/appretices are usually quite good,
however, there is a fairly stringent vetting progress, first by Human
Resources*

*They changed their name from the Personnel Department some years ago


A personnel department was often a reasonably altruistic
operation in a businesses in the days when a company would take young
people in,train them and hope to keep them for a reasonable part of
their working life so they in turn could pass on the skills to the
next generation and whose years of experience could be drawn on even
by management who were younger and still learning the finer points of
a business or product.

A resource is something to be exploited and that's what Human
Resources do. The workforce is regarded as just another form of raw
material. A lot of what has gone wrong with British industry stems
from the era when personnel departments became HR with rapid turnover
of staff and firms now hemorrhaging funds to costly consultants and
recruitment agencies in attempts to acquire the most suitable staff.
Trouble is the firm really needed someone with a knowledge of widget
making to make and develop a new widget and the HR dept hasn't a clue
about widgets so recruits somebody with a degree on Mongolian
agriculture in the 13th century instead. They blag around for a while
****ing everybody off till they go elswhere and the circle starts
again.
Meanwhile the only place the firm can actually get a widget done is in
China so the owners go sod this, might as well move the manufacturing
there.

G.Harman