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Tuesday, December 02, 2008

It goes beyond horrifying Mark and I would hazard a suggestion of inhumane! The simple fact that people, human beings, are either taking their lives or having them taken for them would suggest this. What could push somebody to the point that they feel they have absolutely nowhere to turn and no other course of action than to take their own lives just to escape the horror? It is so wrong. Then we have illness, life threatening illnesses, heart attacks, cancer, strokes at a time when help is required for the people suffering is there any forthcoming, is there any empathy, is there any conscience? Then we have the financial side, bankruptcies, homelessness these all cause huge amounts of stress and stress can be a killer, in fact many of the above can be contributed to by stress! The amount of hours that some have to work just in order to try and survive causes illness and yet they have no choice, working up to 100 hours a week, week in, week out is not good for anybodys health and it will have a detrimental effect! Does all of this just affect adults or does it affect the whole family, children included, of course it bloody does!

If tenants were employees these companies would have stopped in their tracks years ago then I suppose that that is why they are not employees, however that does not make it right!
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Inez my dear you are absolutely right. And this is where the Sociopathy comes into it. This is how the people who operate these pubcos have managed to get away with their abuses for so long. Many people reading these threads - specifically everyone with no experience of working with a modern tied pubco - will only be able to read them with incredulity. What we describe is so extreme, so inhumane that just describing it in writing sounds like a gross exaggeration. I can't tell you how hard I found writing my submission to BESC. It's the MOST difficult thing I've ever done. I wanted the tome of it to remain unemotional, calm and rational but I wanted anyone reading it not to be musguided by its politeness. I wanted to convey just how the behaviour of these people affects lessees. It was a surprisingly difficult experience.

IN FACT if these companies - and the people who run them - WERE our employers instead of us being their SLAVES they would be out of business and have a queue of employment tribunal hearings to defend longer than their collective arms for which they would not have a leg to stand on. I like the visual of all those CEOS with suntans hopping around on one leg waiting to go to a tribunal with their arms completely full of case studies of their negligence and casual disregard for human suffering they wilfully created on their march to wealth and riches.

These people MUST be held personally to account for the crimes they continue to commit against thousands of others with arrogant impunity.

I don't know what it should be called but there's a reverse analogy here with the pubco / employees situation:

Whereas an employee is protected by law - by society - from abuse or inappropriate behaviour by employers (as long as the employee know anything about personal human rights) they can simply go to the Industrial Tribunal Service and fill in a form and the rest is taken up by the Service and paid for by the taxpayer. Even an employee with no true grievance can create a lot of mischief because the default position is if an employee makes a claim, the employer must proive they are not culpable. If the employer wishes to defend their position and avoid punitive damages, the entire onus is quite simply up to the employer to prove the employee is wrong, has lied and so on - through proving they are a good employer and have all the necessary procedures in place to monitor employees' and their own - actions adequately.

With the above pubco / lessees scenario - the reverse is true and our law actually PROTECTS the pubco from financial harm when they abuse their position of strength over individuals and the cost of standing up to the corporation completely isolates individual lessees and effectively makes it impossible to get justice of any kind.

There is no legislation which protects the lessee from abuse (why do you think pubco employees always make a big thing of the landlord tenant act - as if it offers some benchmark of security for the tenant. It does no such thing that can't be run rings around by pubcos). And at final furlong in rent review there is the arbitrator, the independent expert, the RICS trained objective 'expert' to tuck the lessee up like a kipper and serve them back to the pubco beaten and dispirited on the track to bankruptcy whic finally shuts them up.

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