... bet you didn't expect to read this...

i've been taking salsa dancing lessons. don't get excited, thinking i'm going to burn up the dance floor at your next formal event - i'm looking at it more in terms of a growing experience. apparently the instructor believes that i have a good sense of rhythm and if i can relax more, my instincts for the mechanics of the movements will stand me in good stead learning the dance moves.

hmmm...

in other news, i see that bonds and king gee are moving 1800-odd jobs offshore. that, to me, in these hard economic times seems, on the one hand, to be shrewd business sense. on the other hand, it does seem to be the kind of business practice that will harm australia as a whole, certainly in the short term and probably in the long term.

call me crazy but putting almost two thousand people out of work must be tantamount to commercial terrorism, don't you think? if a drunk person were to drive their car into someone's house and in doing so caused a fire that burned the house down, wouldn't they be held accountable? so how can a business in cold, sober deliberation, effectively set a match to almost 2000 people's lives? not to mention families, their debt loads, other businesses that rely on their money earned being spent with them?

i've said it before and i'll say it again - this is what happens when accountability is shifted from the stakeholder to the shareholder.

here's an idea. turn businesses into co-operatives with a cap on the number of people involved. have the co-operatives organise into unions or whatever but keep the business decisions made by people actually involved in the businesses on a coal-face level.

how about this? make it the responsibility of corporations to find work for those workers who are being "let go" before they're fired, or made redundant, or whatever lame-ass phrase the business community is using to deflect from the fact that a person who has a job today won't have it tomorrow. say, "sure, move those 1800 positions from here in australia to overseas, that's fine, but find all those out-of-work people jobs first".

maybe this kind of labour externalisation could be called treason. it might be acting in the shareholders' best interests but it's hardly acting in australia's best interests...