Blimey, what an asshole.
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You know what they say: if you can’t work with one person, then maybe they’re just an arsehole; if you can’t work with anybody, maybe you’re the arsehole.
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So it’s not because of the fleas. I learned something today.
the alternative, if the school district really didn’t want the administrative overhead of running a busing company, is to establish a contract which guarantees a certain minimum wage, maximum working hours, and the like.
of course they probably wouldn’t find a company to agree to those terms – but, that’s the right way a public private partnership should work: not just a race to the bottom of the pay scale.
It’s one thing when an employee says that. It’s quite another when the owner of the company does so.
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Ohhhhh. I thought “scratchers” meant pajamas. You know since a common activity while wearing them might involve scratching yourself in certain areas made more easily accessible.
Well, to you and me that would seem to be the obvious solution. For some odd reason, the majority of voters don’t seem to agree.
From the council’s point of view, their funding keeps getting cut and they know/think that their local electorate won’t stand for council tax going up to anything like the rate needed to actually fund everything the electorate expects the council to provide so their only options are to either cut services or reduce costs in some other way (and by this point in time - both).
The political message since Tony Blair took the Labour party into government lo these many years ago, right through to today’s Conservative government has been that public bodies should use private industry to provide services pretty much wherever possible.
So the Council has that in the background shaping their thinking. They also know that if the council provides the service directly, they get it in the neck for everything that goes wrong.
If they outsource, they can tell the electorate that anything wrong with the service is the private company’s fault and as here “step in” to save the day.
In addition, they not only save a fortune (just on staff costs alone for example) but they also get to tell the electorate that the cost of the service is not just some featherbedded figure that’s been pulled out of the air by some council officer but is the best price possible achieved under an open tender process.
That is genuinely important to a lot of voters.
To be fair, a lot of councils do try and require those sort of terms. The UK of course has a minimum wage in any event these days and a lot of councils will try and require a local ‘living wage’ be paid, working hours again are theoretically covered by UK/EU law but again many councils will try and specify better standards in their contracts.
The response to which as you said is either “We can do that of course, here’s what it will cost (quotes twice the Council’s available budget)” or “No, thanks we’re not interested” or (my personal inducer of frothing rage) “Sure, we can do that, it’ll cost half what you’re spending now, when shall we start” until the council commits itself to that operator and then "Oh, there’s no way, we can provide all this for the price, we’re not going to provide this, this or this and the price will actually be slightly more than you were paying in-house.
Note, this doesn’t even need to require a signed contract or even the confirmation that that operator has been selected since the procurement process (for admittedly mostly good reasons) takes a very long time and the previous contract (there always is one - see above for the pressure to outsource over the last 20 years) will expire soon leaving the council with the choice of caving in to the disgusting Trump-like negotiation tactics or carrying on with the existing operator under emergency arrangements which will of course a) cost a fortune and b) be politically embarrassing.
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Limited company…
So unless a liquidator decides there was fraudulent or wrongful trading (and that’s hard to show) and thinks its worth pursuing (also unlikely) and can find sufficient creditors willing to put more money into the potential chance to pursue the director for his own assets (vanishingly unlikely - why throw good money after bad?), not likely to hit his own pocket.
I won’t be too surprised if Mr Hardy ends up filing for bankruptcy himself soon enough though given his apparent meltdown.
Equally, I won’t be surprised if he turns up sunning himself in luxury on the Costa del Sol or wherever retired small businessmen like to go these days. Malta?
Just to add to the ‘spectacular fail’ part, according to the Daily Mail (so entire salt mine of salt needed and I’m not linking) one of the staff he fired via the email was his own daughter.
You gotta abscond them before they abscond you.
IIRC, it’s also the attitude that Hitler took during the last days. To defelct blame for Germany’s total defeat, he decided that the German people were not the Master Race after all but a bunch of spineless weaklings who didn’t deserve so great a leader as he.
these school bus contracts are the terrible. I signed my kids up for their school bus 5 years ago and the buses they supplied were death traps. They were very old, often broke down and once my son came home and wreaked of diesel fumes. When I asked him why he said that fumes were leaking inside the bus, but the driver refused to do anything about it.
I reported this to the school, who conducted an investigation and found out that the company were using the cheapest drivers possible, without any criminal checks and telling them to have no interaction with the kids beyond checking their passes. They were just leaving the children totally unsupervised on these dangerous buses, with people that potentially shouldn’t be anywhere near children.
Needless to say, I took my kids off the buses and the school changed to a different contractor, but how this happened in the first place is beyond me!
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