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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