Down here in the antipodes we’re not feeling the pinch as much as you folk in the Northern Hemisphere and many, many employers are still struggling to fill skilled positions that have been vacant for a long time. For example the Olivier Job Index in Australia found a 9 percent drop in job advertisements across the board but only a l.4 percent drop in IT related jobs.

Hence employers are actively poaching workers from ailing companies … and yes money is the lure.

It’s my guess recession proof (or optimistic) companies in the UK will be doing the same. So while what you say makes plenty of sense, I’d recommend employers still keep a close look on key staff members’ salaries – despite everything.

If would be better to start with the customer, show what happens above the service line, and what happens below – how all the systems inter relate.

That’s what we need to know!

Interesting though – certainly takes up less space!

I don’t think office cleaning is demeaning BTW. It is rather important to me that the places I am in are clean and welcoming. I wish more firms thought the same. And if ‘warding’ the traffic is not meaningful, then why do we do it?

So how do we expand meaningful work. As a start, we can note that expanding the economy and expanding the money supply are two different things.

The banks expanded the money supply when they multiplied their assets 3 fold with derivatives (and a lot of us helped them). That we may have to ‘print money’ is down to this activity. The measure of how much we may have ‘to print’ is the distance between average house price/average wage from 3.5. The printing of money will simply be the market signal (exchange rate) going to where it should have been given the games we were playing.

The GDP expands when money goes round and round. The ONLY way to prevent runaway inflation now is to raise the average wage, and the only way to do that, is to arrange jobs so they give greater value.

Managers, or people who call themselves that, have to add value by showing they can rearrange work so the people in jobs become more valuable (not less). We don’t ask a cleaner to run faster and faster, we give him/her a vacuum cleaner. Etc. etc.

Have a winning week!

It would be nice if school children only did school, homework and play, as I did. But kids have much more expensive tastes nowadays.

“If we do not offer meaningful work we shouldn’t employ”? So no office cleaners? No factory hands? No traffic wardens? If you really mean that all jobs should be paid a “decent wage”, that equals fewer jobs. There is only so much money to go around (that is until, as seems likely, they print some more).

Those of us in HR should be looking at the contribution made by business to the individual.

16 year olds on duty at 10pm on a school night at 3 pounds an hour doesn’t cut it with me.

Exhausting 17 year olds over the weekend doesn’t either.

Each job needs to be designed in context of a career and a life.

I’ve talked to people on trains who are going in to London to meaingless jobs with antisocial hours and long commutes.

We are long past the point where Britain needs to argue about a decent wage. We This was the necessity of 5 decades ago. We are the 6th richest country in the world.

Now we need to talk about meaningful work. If we can’t afford to offer meaingful work, maybe we shouldn’t employ? Maybe we should sit down and look at our business model and ask why not?

It’s really not rocket science. The recession is a good time for people to go back to school to learn the skills we need to remain the 6th richest country in the world. Each person needs to be satisfied that they are part of that grand agenda.