Relativity

COMMENTARY: What a long wait it’s been for WorkChoices to finally come into force. This delay has cost Rabid Reseller plenty.

First off there’s the costs associated with re-hiring everyone we unfairly dismissed before we discovered how long it takes for a law to become a law. Then there was the cost of the higher wages for everyone we re-hired because they were affronted by our actions and had to be enticed back into the store.

And now, after the law became the law, there’s the cost of the lawyers to defend the class action brought by all our former staff.

Yes, former, as in once were workers. Of course we sacked them all again and offered them all their jobs back at a more appropriate salary base. Well everyone on the TV news is doing it so why shouldn’t we? Lawyers, that’s why. Apparently, the workers are allowed to have their own lawyers and don’t have to believe what our lawyers tell them.

No wonder there are all those countries where democracy hasn’t taken hold.

The WorkChoices legislation promised to reduce the costs of running a business, yet so far we’ve spent more money defending our right to sack everybody, than we would have spent if we’d given them all a substantial pay rise instead.

And we’re talking significantly substantial. Still our lawyers and their lawyers seem happy enough with the way things are going and we should have it all sorted before the Christmas rush. Meanwhile, it’s back to the goofball nephews and nieces posing as sales people. And I do mean posing – Madonna eat your heart out.

The problem with a family business is that you can’t tell the family what to do. Well, you can try, but customers always take sides with cute teenagers bawling their eyes out and blubbering on the mouse-mats, and there goes another sale down the drain.

We just have to work out a way to stop the nephew from beating up on cute teenagers while there are customers in the shop. And it would help if his sister stopped enticing them in off the street with promises of “fully sick” deals.

The flipside of a total lack of discipline is the luxury of being able to completely dismiss their whining about wages with a subtle reference to the tax they haven’t been paying. It hasn’t yet occurred to them that the tax office would beat up the owner of the shop for “cash-in-hand” arrangements, so until they twig there won’t be too much cash-in-hand for them.

They’d only spend it down the video arcade anyway, and we’ve got games here they can play for free. Well, when we say free, we’re talking in relative terms.

They’re relatives so our term for free always has implications not easily understood by other people. They’re free to waste their time playing games and we’re free to make them stay back until midnight doing stock takes.

We do that daily here, because their cute teenage friends keep taking the stock. You don’t think the nephew beats them up just for fun do you? Well, he does smile a lot, but his mother says that’s his nature. He gets the same grin while doing creative things involving organic solvents and the neighbour’s cat.

 Gotta go! Customers waiting!