TakingStock - Alarming new management tool to ease job crisis.

An alarming-sounding press release crosses the TS desk.[QQ] Urging companies to ‘put people first not down’, the missive from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development appears to suggest UK employers end the barbaric practice of taking the term ‘firing staff’ a little too literally.

We begin to sketch plans for fundraising rallies, petitions and thunderous leaders demanding that people are no longer put down in the name of corporate efficiency.

‘The findings of a series of reports commissioned and coordinated by the CIPD signal not a new fashion, but a historic shift,’ says Simon Caulkin, the report’s author.

We are singing from the same hymn sheet.

However when we read the report’s suggestion that much so-called ‘management progress’ has been at the expense of, rather than to the benefit of employees we realise we have got the wrong end of the stick. Chastened, we pack the banners away.