Road to salvation

In his brand new blog at Tikk-Tokk, psychologist Joshua Zammit discusses the privatisation of the shipyards and says that not everything in the private sector works like a Swiss watch.

..true there are fundamental differences between the private and the public sector. The private enterprise does not have a big brother, if the wrong decision is taken it will pay for it; those employed in the private sector will lose their job if their company goes bust and not be transferred to some department to experience a soft landing protecting them from the harsh realities of the market; the private sector needs to think about the future and invest to survive while the public sector thinks about the present because the future does not yet exist for it and the list just goes on.

What drives a company in the private sector is its very greed, it always wants more and the minute it stops doing that it is overtaken by the competition and dies. Private organisations exist for just one thing, to create shareholder value. Public organisations should exist to provide a service to the country but they have been transformed to become the private playing fields of politicians.

In one of the articles or blogs floating around in the blogosphere I read that privatisation is the only route to salvation for the shipyards. Why is that? Because it will bring with it professional management? because it will inject new investment into the yard? because it will change the current work practices? If the answer to these questions is yes then what the hack was the current shareholder doing in all these years? As the shareholder of the shipyards why did it not push harder for these things to happen during its watch?

Being a public enterprise, the ship yards are owned by a political machine and not a business organisation, and in politics taking decisions means losing votes. The never ending juggle of not doing anything but appearing to be doing something (even if it is just throwing money in a black hole) needs to be maintained up to the point when the whole situation is overtaken by events. And this is what happened in this case. The only thing is that this way of doing things has costed us taxpayers hundreds of millions of Euros, money which could have been invested in education, infrastructure or health services...