Post by cjm on Jun 3, 2019 17:06:59 GMT
My own experience of performance agreements is that they are a deeply unpleasant business that has little if anything to do with the performance of employees.
Their sudden appearance in the work environment, handed out in a cavalier fashion by a cretin from upstairs with the instruction they be signed and returned to managers by the end of the day, is a sure sign that a “realignment” is on the cards. It is at such times that the services of a labour lawyer be retained, and pronto.
If I may further digress, it is often taken for granted that the parlous state of South Africa’s remaining newspapers is due to the internet and the rise of digital journalism. Very little, however, is ever said of the appalling management that existed for years at the media houses. The places were run by f*ckwits.
For many journalists, the end came with prattle of “corporate culture” and other Orwellian horrors from the HR management manuals. Suddenly, there were posters about social values in the stairwells and next to the elevators.
Guff about strategic vision, talent nurture, value-building, cultural integration and onboarding programmes rose like the gorge on the socio-auditory scale, but nowhere, oddly enough, was anyone talking about producing newspapers.
Little wonder, then, there came the ritual humiliation of signing performance agreements and the denials of retrenchments followed inevitably by actual retrenchments.
The most welcome departure, though, is that of the shambolic Bathabile Dlamini. Performance agreements are probably of no use whatsoever where she is concerned. She is said to suffer from a form of diplopia so severe that she not only has double vision but often sees objects upside-down hanging in cupboards. Signing agreements and documents are out of the question as she routinely struggles to place pen on paper.
Dlamini’s replacement as minister of women, youth and persons with disabilities is former rural development and land reform minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane. A fiercely loyal supporter of Accused Number One, she comes to the job with an apparent disability of her own: she once claimed in a TV interview that she had a hole in her skull from carrying buckets of water on her head as a child.
Nkoana-Mashabane is just one of several baffling inclusions in the new government. David Mabuza is on board as deputy president. Which is just plain scary. Angie Motshekga is back as basic education minister. Just as scary.
And it may explain why Ramaphosa has given the public works portfolio to outsider and former Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille. She’s had a few dinners with property developers in Clifton and knows a thing or two in this regard.
But she is an independent sort who reportedly knows her own mind — in much the way Mussolini was an independent sort who knew his own mind — and the ANC may come to regret their association with the loyalty-fluid De Lille in much the same way the DA did.
Part of the reason the president’s new men and women all seem so unimpressive is possibly due to the delay in their announcement. The jokes have not been kind, and I particularly enjoyed the comments on Twitter that, for all their faults, the Guptas never took this long to choose their cabinet.