Pat Kenny won't cut the grass

squod wrote: »

No Topper, I've been working for these kinds of companies in Ireland since 1991.

I don't have the knowledge or experience to say definitively but I imagine that companies like these are in the minority.

squod wrote: »

But not necessarily right. There'd be no point in having any management if staff could decide willy nilly what they want to do.

Quite right, but staff have to have some level of security or management could potentially abuse their position. They can let off half their staff and have the other half take on the extra workload for no extra pay 'for the good of the company', while they keep their jobs and maintain their massive salaries. Then the company ends up with too many chiefs and not enough Indians, of which there plenty in Ireland and I do have experience of this.

ascanbe wrote: »

I'm not in the army, so i don't know exactly what they do all day.
But, our country sees fit to maintain an army and, presumably, they do what they signed up to do/what they were told the job would entail when they decided to join, in the hours they are paid to work.
This obviously didn't include 'cutting the grass' around army bases.
Do you propose they do it in their free time?
They have lives and family's outside of their jobs just like Pat Kenny.
So it's telling that someone like him would demean other professionals, and question the usefulness of what they currently do, by opining that they should do work outside their remit in order to cut costs, and entirely legitimate for someone to ask him if he would be prepared to do/why he isn't doing the same.

Your typical private in the army is not refusing to do this the way a teacher, guard, nurse or anyone else in the PS would be able to refuse. It's the army, they follow orders. The powers that be have decided (correctly in my opinion) that cutting grass would be a waste of the army's limited personnel resources. If they were told to do it they'd do it, the same way they do every other thing we ask of them

Gophur wrote: »

The Army service their own vehicles and cook their own food. Should these jobs be contracted out too?

These are skilled jobs that people in the army are trained and paid to do, at a lower cost than contracting them out. Training someone in the army and paying them above minimum wage, providing medical care pension etc and then putting them to work cutting grass makes no sense when you can contract it out for a much lower cost

gerryo777 wrote: »

This is the same army that sued the state for any amount of money over deafness claims from using their guns and in other cases deafness claims for playing in the army band.
Cost to the state? Over €321 million.
Imagine joining an army and then complaining about the noise of the guns or the musical instrument you were playing.

First off its not the same army, those guys were discharged as they did not meet the medical standard, due to deafness. So it's a 'different' army now. The state was negligent towards those soldiers as it ordered them to carry out certain tasks without taking reasonable precautions to protect them from unnecessary harm. Nowadays soldiers are provided with hearing protection and if they don't use it it's their own fault.
Just because they joined the army doesn't mean they should be harmed by their working environment needlessly during peacetime.
Using your logic:
Imagine working on a building site and complaining about falling off faulty scaffolding.

Gophur wrote: »

Why?

Because both forces mounted massive security operations involving huge numbers of their personnel, the difference in the cost was enormous due to Gardai being paid overtime, accommodated in hotels etc. which soldiers neither looked for nor received.
I'm not Garda bashing either I'm just saying its ridiculous to say the army costs as much as the gardai

Cian A wrote: »

Pat Kenny doesn't even cut his own grass.
I know because I've hired lawnmowers out to his gardener before.

What sort of shoddy "gardener" doesn't own a lawnmower?

PhlegmyMoses wrote: »

Er, loads of people would refuse to do certain work if it fell outside their contract boundaries.

I believe the colloquial term for these people is "public service employees" The "service" is, of course, sarcastic.

Sykk wrote: »

You know soldiers aren't just braindead people with guns? These people have professions within the army.

Lets say you're an engineer working for a company and they turn around and ask you to cut the grass. What would your response be?

My response would be, maybe it would be a better use of resources to get a youngfella or a trainee to do it and i can carry on engineering. Surely out of the almost 9000 soldiers, quite a few are not skilled engineers or professionals of any description. Also it's not like the grass needs to be cut every hour on the hour.
Barring that, i would have no problem cutting the grass if the grass needed cutting. In my job here the storeman comes in every second saturday or so and cuts the grass as needed - when he was out sick i saw the production director do it once or twice. I've never done it myself but not because it's not my job, i just haven't done it. At no stage was it ever considered to hire a gardener.
The reason? Because, as a private company, we operate in the real world and employees are expected to do whatever work requires doing wherever feasible- not to pick up the phone and ring someone else to do it!