Rightsizing

Go – Malta’s former telecommunications monopoly has announced that it is setting a target of 350 employees. That’s 350 people who have to lose their job because Go is…. “rightsizing”. Now there is nothing abnormal with a company in a competitive market adjusting its employment levels in order to remain competitive. When Go was privatised 3 years ago, one of the condititions imposed on it was that no employees could be dropped for three years. Well, the time has come and Go is availing itself of its right to do so. It has offered its employees a voluntary retirement scheme worth €60,000. This is the last offer of its kind CEO David Kay told employees.

What really struck me in David Kay’s letter to the employees is the use of the word “Rightsizing”. Now there’s a euphemism for credit crunch time. I was listening to a radio emission on France Info on my way to work this morning. One of the many union leaders was complaining about the government’s attitude to the not so well off. He said (and I paraphrase): “The government knows that people with €1000 a month can barely make ends meet, yet the government’s message to these people is that they should be grateful for having €1000 a month.” In other words, the mechanism of governmentspeak requires the citizen to be thankful for a desperate situation and makes it sound as if he should actually be thankful to the government for that situation.

GonziPN has not quite reached those levels yet. What it has shown to be capable of is turning around its failures into pseudo-achievements. The removal of a tax that should never have been is the typical case in point.

Anyway. “Rightsizing”… until recently it was “downsizing” – an objectively neutral term that could be agreed upon by both employer and employee. Now it is “rightsizing” – from the comfortable point of view of a CEO I guess it is the right term. An employee on the brink of unemployment (VRS or no VRS) would disagree. Don’t you just hate newspeak?