A friend of mine told me last week: “I work for a wanker. The only problem is that I am the wanker.”

It was frippery, of course, but it captures our times as we’ve hit the depths of the worst recession in living memory. In the good times companies can afford to be benevolent to their staff; in the bad times they can get downright evil.

Even my friend, who has prided himself on evading the corporate world to create a sustainable small business is having to make hard decisions but because his staff are a small, close-knit team, he also wants to treat them fairly even if it means countless sleepless nights for him and taking a hit in revenue.

Most of us, unfortunately, find ourselves in the same position as our parents’ generation, working for big companies that we know will put us out to pasture at 50 because it’s cheaper to retrench us than keep us on at the salaries we’ve worked so hard over decades to increase.  We’ve seen it happen to many of our parents and, over the past year, to our older colleagues.

At the end of last year I was working for a big firm that cut a large number of staff in a voluntary retrenchment programme and witnessed the enormous damage to morale as people had to say goodbye to favourite colleagues and then take on extra responsibility for no extra pay and little prospect of bonuses or increases – all the while wondering if they were next, should the company move to involuntary retrenchments.

But I have also detected something else on the wind: an upsurge in entrepreneurial yearning where many are plotting how to break free from the corporate world and strike out on their own so that they can control their own destinies.

Right now might not be the time to do it but I don’t think we can underestimate the change in people’s attitudes to the corporate world and to money that this recession has brought… TO READ THE FULL PIECE, CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY WEEKLY MONEYWEB COLUMN.

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Not very witty, Wilde.

Mr Manuel, we are not amused.

I don’t know if your quip that “we’d all like to be more Catholic than the Pope” in Parliament this week following your admission that buying a R1.2 million BMW for official use was an “error of judgment” got a titter from the Honourable Members but for millions of South Africans, it was shockingly callous. Why don’t you just kick us while we’re down, sir.

Best to keep elitist jokes like that in your own circle. And what a rarified circle it must be, comparing the performance of your luxury vehicles that the Democratic Alliance has revealed has cost the tax payers of this country R45 million this year alone.

But to be fair on our national planning minister, the full quote (after the DA told Parliament that Western Cape Premier Helen Zille ordered that her MECs  to use a pool-car system of second-hand vehicles) was:  “So, we’d all like to be more Catholic than the Pope, and we commend the honourable Zille on having attained that status, but let’s be real about this issue as well”  – referring to the fact that there was no point in returning his BMW because of the loss in value.

Mr Manuel, sir, the citizens of this country know all about being real. Stunning as it may seem to you and your exalted colleagues, we do in fact live in the real world so let me remind you what it’s like.
Let’s take my fairly typical middle class family as an example.  Though many of us would hate to admit, it’s very hard to pay all the bills every month without dipping into our credit cards. Food, electricity, medical aid and school fees just keep going up and up.

You cough up R250 on essential food items and you walk out of Pick ‘n Pay with one bag. My household pays more than R1000 a month in electricity and we have a gas stove and have coughed up to get a solar geyser. There’s very little room to save more except that on power-hungry pool filter and we’re considering filling the pool in next year in the face of rising electricity rates. But then that might be a bad idea, considering our municipality has recently valued our house at R2.6 million despite the fact that we’d be lucky to get R1.4m if we put it on the market.

The rise in the valuation means our monthly rates have leapt from R1200 to about R2200 (though I can’t really tell as it seems to fluctuate). This despite the fact that the municipality can’t pick up the rubbish, cut verges or maintain parks across the city from the plushest suburbs to the townships and squatter camps.
Like many people of my generation, my husband and I support a set of parents financially and the school fees alone  for the two children we support will rise to R30 000 next year – and the older one is at a school with classes of 30 to 35 children so, no, it’s not a particularly good school.

We seldom eat out, do holidays at self-catering joints within a few hours’ drive of our home and on most weekends our recreation involves walking on the beach. We can’t afford a domestic worker and pay for a gardener once a week because we don’t know what he’d do without the money.

There’s not enough money to save for our children’s tertiary education or our retirement  and we have the pleasure of looking forward to the government exerting pressure on the schools we pay a small fortune for to increase class sizes not to mention the government’s ridiculous idea of undermining the private hospitals because the public hospitals are in such an atrocious state.

Like most middle class people, the only consolation is that there are millions more worse off, living in the direst poverty but as far as I can tell the rates and taxes we pay don’t do them a damn bit of good.

A former colleague of mine was in China last year to get married and met a couple of top government officials in Chongqing, for whom the standard official vehicle was a VW Passat – which goes for R290 000 new in this country.  The mayor of a Beijing district (Changping – where the Ming Tombs as well as a famous section of the Great Wall are), he was surprised to discover, drove an old VW Jetta – the box shape, before they became round body shapes.

Now, if ever there was a country today where the top officials can live a lavish lifestyle with no comeback or opposition, it is China.

So no, Mr Manuel, we don’t think you’re funny. And we don’t wish to be more Catholic than the Pope. We want to stop paying more for less and want you and your colleagues to do your jobs honestly and with integrity.

That means not siphoning off our money to family members and friends by corrupting tender systems and, most importantly, with thrift. In the real world, dropping R1.2m of tax payers’ money on a luxury car is just plain wrong – always has been; always will be.

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Just a quick post to say I’ve scanned the ether  and can say with confidence that a couple of hours after Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan’s mid-term budget in Parliament, Moneyweb wins hands down for accessable and authoritive insight into the budget.

The entry point to the package is the “Mini budget in a nutshell” (with a very quirky graphic of an unzipped nut), which is a neat little list of all the major changes with links to a bunch of excellent in-depth analysis, for example, the relaxing of exchange controls, concerns over a strong rand and the debate over inflation targetting. To get such  a wide-ranging package up so fast means they planned it in advance and then moved fast today. Well done, guys.

Most of the other big SA sites have focused on the fact that President Jacob Zuma’s bigger cabinet and presidency will come in an extra half a billion rand in “unforeseeable” expenses this year.

Glory be! That’s a bit pricey, especially considering that in the corporate world managers are being retrenched and positions combined because of the recession. But then what can we ordinary folk do? We must in the words of our past masters “mos kak en betaal”.

Click here for the full text of the speech.

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"I'm extinct too... how much would I get on auction?"

1. My absolute favourite story of the week comes from the dusty nether regions of the East London museum, where the world’s only known dodo egg is the subject of a court dispute with the family of the famous Marjorie Courtney-Latimer. There’s mulitple twists and turns to the tale but basically it comes down to the family of Courtney-Latimer, who was the curator of the museum for decades and put it on the map with the discovery in the 1930s of the coelecanth, wanting the dodo egg back as they say it was only loaned to the museum by Marg. Read this fascinating story here at the Daily Dispatch.

2. Then over to Mashable where Sports Illustrated in the US was outed by a Diggit bookmarker from Bahrain for soliciting bookmarks for the magazine’s website with an offer of Sports Illustrated merchandise. It’s the comments thread on the outing that’s worth the read with many people saying that this kind of thing goes on all the time. Here’s the SI email posted on Diggit but you gotta love these two comments on the issue:

“Oh my God! Companies pay people to plug their products and services on social networking sites!
Also, the earth revolves around the sun. News at 11.”

“Quick to the doughnut shop immediately….we have to contact Michael Moore about this evil capitalism going on.”

3. Then in the UK, there’s been a major stoem over a Daily Mail column about the boy band star Stephen Gately, which seems to be more than a tad homophobic. Twitter heavies Stephen Fry and Derren Brown denounced the column and there were more than 21 000 complaints to the country’s Press Complaints Commission, causing its website to crash — this is more complaints in a single weekend than the regulator has received in total in the past five years! Comments are streaming into the Daily Mail’s website and my guess is that the furore will cause a major spike in the paper’s site traffic. Click here to read the story with all the relevant links at Editor’s Weblog.

4. Then we have some excellent analysis pieces from law expert and blogger Pierre de Vos on the legal issues involved in Schabir Shaik’s bid for a presidential pardon, Greta Steyn of Fin24 on the electrricity hikes and the economy and an opinion piece at Business Day saying there is a case to be made for Eskom raising capital with the World Bank rather than punishing the SA consumer even more. If olny.

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Moneyweb has an interesting new columnist, Geraint Anderson, a.k.a. City Boy, who wrote an anonymous column for The London Paper about his outrageous life as an analyst in London until he came out last year. Here’s a Sky News interview with him and click here to read his first column for Moneyweb.

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In offices across the land, sales managers and managing directors of media companies are pondering what kind of ad rates hikes they will be able to get away with next year.

The new year’s rate cards tend to hit the inboxes of media planners in November and many, especially in the print industry, will be pleading increased costs (those bloody trees just keep get more expensive) to justify higher rates. Of course, there’s also the Soccer World Cup, which many media organisation are banking on being an ad-spend bonanza so they are likely to want to capitalise on that in the first six months of 2010.

A leap in ad revenue in the first part of next year will do a lot to ameliorate the annus horribilus of 2009 and those that report their year-end results in March and April should be able to plug a few holes in the dyke. There is no doubt that it will be a bumper few months leading up to 2010 from big above-the-line ad campaigns from government and the big brands wanting to be associated with the soccer tournament.

But media planners, those influential people who advise where and how advertisers should spend their money, may well have a few surprises up their sleeves for the media companies… TO READ THE FULL PIECE, CLICK HERE TO GO TO MY MONEYWEB COLUMN THAT GOES OUT ON A MONDAY.

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“So it’s a recession. What you going to do? Lie down and die?”

So said Terry Volkwyn, CEO of Primedia’s broadcasting division, to the company’s sales staff when the economic gloom set in earlier this year. And ad spend for the division, whose stations range from Highveld and 702 in Gauteng to Kfm and Cape Talk in Cape Town, has in fact shown a small increase this year as it has slogged away to find new business and focused on direct-response ads (advertising that calls for a response such as phone call to make a purchase).

The point, says the canny Volkwyn, is that even when we come out of the recession, the big spenders aren’t going to come rushing back with megabuck ad campaigns – that’s going to take years.

There are indications that the worst is over for the media in this recession. American advertising agency Magna said recently, for instance, that ad spend in the US bottomed out in the first half of this year and it will slowly begin to pick up next year though it will remain in negative territory. In South Africa we also have the Soccer World Cup to look forward to, which should boost the coffers somewhat in the ad-spend department.

Even the beleaguered Irish owners of South Africa’s Independent newspapers saw a rise in Independent News & Media’s (INM) share price when it released its dismal interim results recently – because the drop in revenue wasn’t as awful as the analysts expected… TO READ MY FULL COLUMN, CLICK HERE TO GO TO MONEYWEB

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Everytime I look at my toilet, I get depressed: this is what’s wrong about our times.

About 18 months ago, my husband and I gave our bathroom — which was a study in beige melamine — a makeover and, frankly, of all our renovation projects in our ’60s house, this is the one that came off the best. Sandstone floors, a sandstone wall; breezy yellow walls; a wooden Venetian blinds and a mobile made from sea shells picked up on the beach. We also invested in new handrails, basin and toilet. The latter had a pleasing modular design and is even environmentaslly friendly as it has two flush settings — one for pees that uses less water.

Trendy and modular... that toilet looks good from a distance.

The bathroom has been a source of pleasure ever since but now I’ve noticed that the toilet’s hinge is rusting.
How completely up the wazoo is that? It didn’t come cheap and I don’t think I’m alone in assuming you buy a commode for life. It’s hardly a fast moving consumable. Why on earth why I would grill the retailer on whether the hinge was stainless steel?

This says everything about our globablised manufacturing culture. Nothing is built to last — especially if you’re in a RDP house — and with China becoming the cheap-as-chopsticks manufacting powerhouse of our planet — everyone else in the rest of the world is cutting corners in order to compete.

An inspection of the nether regions of my toilet revealed that it is was made by Betta Sanitary Ware, which an online search told me is based in the Hecang Industrial Zone in Mingcheng Town in Foshan, Guangdong.

Now that's attractive... the rusty hinge.

Wikipedia says that Foshan is a city of about 5 million people in southern China and is famous for its porcelain. Well, that’s nice, but what about the hinge that goes with the porcelain of my loo? And where on this Godless planet am I going to find another hinge — and this time a stainless steel one with the correct measurments? I don’t have the slip for the toilet anymore so I can’t very well go back to the retailer in East London. I presume the hinge will continue its pathetic degradation and then the toilet lid will eventually fall off. Now that’ll go nicely with the sandstone floors.

It’s not that I have anything against the Chinese and, like most global citizen, I delight in consuming cheap goods like clothing, kids toys, DVDs… the list goes on.

I’m reading a fascinating book at the moment: “Where Underpants Come From” by Joe Bennet, who traces a pair of underpants he bought in New Zealand back to its souce in China as a vehicle for understanding our globalised economy. On a visit to a logistics multinational’s office in Shanghai, he discovers that just about the only thing that China imports is empty containers — for Chinese-made goods to be packed in and shipped out to the rest of the world.

I bet those containers are stainless steel.

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Now here’s a sign of the times. The Media Online reports today that a Chinese language newspaper has been launched in Botswana that will gradually be circulated throughout other African countries.

Much is made of the  Geel Gevaar and it’s true China cares not one jot for human rights but they are a  rising  superpower and it’s interesting to watch the balance shift.

Moneyweb ran an interesting piece a couple of weeks back about the increasing number of Chinese nationals doing business in Zimbabwe but the best insight I’ve had recently into China and its economic and political future is from a book published last year called "The Dragon and The Elephant" by David Smith, the economics editor of The Sunday Times in London. 

In the book, Smith looks at the future of the Chinese and the Indian economies. Of course, it’s complex stuff but not the doomsday  some would have us believe.

Yes, China is a huge economy and still growing, Smith says in the book, but it also has fundamental weaknesses such as it’s banking system, which is so up the pole that few multinationals are keen on being listed in China and that’s why the Shanghai stock exchange of little consequence.

Another point Smith made in the book was that he thought it perfectly acceptable — in fact desirable — for developing economies (such as South Africa’s) to protect their industries against cheaply made Chinese imports (think of our textile and garment industries) until the country is able to compete globally on a more equal footing.

David Smith has a blog, which is excellent for those with a basic understanding of economics.

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Recession is such good fodder for columnists and here are three interesting — but very different — pieces from South African columnists on today’s Interweb:

1. First up is David Bullard’s Out to Lunch column at Moneyweb, which uses the most recent — and rather fluffy — Sunday Times splash about the rich getting poorer to speculate on just how much FU money you need. An excellent piece and hugely enjoyable to read from someone who hobnobs with the wealthy enough to really know how it works.

2. Then there’s London-based and strangely named Jeanne Horak-Druiff, the woman behind the Cooksister blog, at News24 on how London’s fine dining crowd are still spending money like there’s no tomorrow.

3. And lastly Carl Collison at the M&G on dating in the recession. Pretentious headline (Love in the time of recession) but still a good piece.

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