The Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce and Industry has something in common with Gerry Adams.
Both are always banging on about the onus and responsibilities of others, yet ask them about their own and all you get is a constipated thousand-yard stare.
Last week’s quarterly report from the Chamber of Commerce was the usual special pleading whinge-a-thon, with over three quarters of firms surveyed claiming they cannot recruit staff due to lack of skills and the correct “attitude” - among applicants, that is. The idea that employers might have a skill and attitude problem is apparently too bizarre to mention.
It seems the onus is entirely on the rest of us to provide a ready-qualified and grateful workforce for an increasingly specialised economy. Should we process industry’s raw materials for them while we are at it?
Northern Ireland has close to full employment in terms of those actively seeking work. It has a persistently high level of economic inactivity - unemployed people not seeking work - but this has to be set against our relatively youthful population, with more students and parents of young children.
By and large, we are not sullen and idle.
If companies have a recruitment problem the onus is on them to offer better training, wages, terms and conditions. It would be interesting to know how much of our economic inactivity rate is due to employer hostility towards working parents and young women in general - a prejudice whose continuing extent and lawlessness has to be experienced to be believed.
The slow-motion collapse of Stormont over the past three years has increased the importance of Northern Ireland’s private sector owners and managers, along with the civil servants so often in thrall to them. Together they are in de facto control and better placed than ever to set the agenda. Note how the devolution of corporation tax rolls on, despite much of its rationale being overtaken by events.
The type of business subsidy regime presided over by Invest NI was meant to be phased out this decade under EU law but it continued regardless and has now presumably been saved by Brexit.
It is reasonable to ask what we are getting for our money and forbearance, especially as it distorts the market mechanism that is supposedly the private sector’s key advantage. Inefficient firms are meant to go to the wall.
Across the Atlantic, a once-in-a-century backlash has begun against the whole philosophy of management. The last backlash began in 1908, when Harvard launched its Masters in Business Administration (MBA) - the first pure management course, inspiring all others since.
This was seen at the time as a democratic, scientific revolution, opening management roles to anyone and ending the nepotistic, oligarchic era of the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, which had brought capitalism into crisis and disrepute.
Now the MBA culture is seen as the problem, fostering a myth of management as a transferable skill in itself and creating a new oligarchy of executives and directors, flitting from industry to industry spouting pseudo-scientific nonsense.
Because they have no deep experience of the companies and sectors they are running, they fall back on the same trite tactics of slashing investment and wages, bringing on another crisis of capitalism. This idea is set to be hugely influential over the coming years.
In Northern Ireland, we have few businesses large enough to suffer ‘pure management’. It mainly creeps in at the nexus of public and private sectors, via semi-privatised utilities or consultancy firms brought in by government, for example.
However, most of our private sector consists of small and medium-sized enterprises with management problems specific to this part of the world. ‘BMW syndrome’ is a well-known phenomenon of risk-aversion and limited ambition, characterised by being happy enough with a nice car and a big house in North Down.
Much worse is the tight-fisted sense of entitlement revealed by the Chamber of Commerce survey.
Perhaps it is a problem of the Troubles generation. People the age of a typical manager or business owner in Northern Ireland - mid 40s and older - grew up at a time when high unemployment seemed like a hopeless, endless condition. Employers were treated like saviours and molly-coddled like children.
That might explain why they remain mystified by the lack of enthusiasm for mediocre jobs. It no longer explains why the rest of us should humour their complaining.
newton@irishnews.com
