“Warning to Government: Transport Goals Need 25,000 more workers” This was the NZ Herald front page heading last Thursday in a piece by Herald political journalist, Thomas Coughlan.
Thomas is one of our best political journoes but equally he could have been writing about say the Police, and most other sectors of society.
Here’s a quick solution to this perceived staff shortage problem.
Just as the world has woken to the problem with school children, ban bloody smart phones and suddenly the perceived personnel shortage will vanish.
The first nation to prohibit them in schools was France, since when most other countries have come to their senses and followed suit. However, France should not stop there and recognise this addiction is not confined to teenage girls but nearly everyone, everywhere.
Take their police. Outside my Parisian home, day and night lurk half a dozen machine-gun bearing, large black clad gendarmes.
They’re there supposedly to protect the Prime Minister’s Palace across the road. In fact whenever I emerge they never even look up from their total devotion to gazing and prodding at their ironically labelled smart phones, these in my view, inadvertently the greatest dumbing down device ever invented.
Does this nonsense go on with nurses and doctors? I don’t know but suspect their job pressures probably minimalises it in which event the medical staff shortage is real.
On my observation it’s most rife with road repairs and the building industry.
All of our remarkable human history of steadfast progress can be traced to a single behaviour, namely thinking. Gazing at and prodding at a so called smart phone is anything but.
It’s an amazing invention but its unforeseen addiction consequences are bearing a huge cost for outweighing its benefits.
6 Comments
Ironically, I completely agree. Smartphones in the workplace limit productivity seriously. Why “ironically”?
Heh heh. I read your article on a smartphone and am responding to it on the same device. However, I am not at work.
It is the phones that are smart, not the people.
As you have said in the past get a couple more in a road gang to work and you will treble productivity.
I totally agree, smartphones are also a very useful though. I’m travelling at the moment and using mine to follow your column, hopefully I’m not doing this to avoid thinking.
And like Elon Musk, mandate office employees work from the office, rather than at home which is clearly being abused…..the rise of unemployment is this space indicates employees no longer have the same negotiating power….
I have friends in HR which indicate there are now hundreds of applicants applying for jobs available….
Time Wellington set an example, for others to follow….
Totally agree with you! New Zealand is turning into a basket case… cuts are made in the wrong places, systems are broken… driven by AI next!
You are so lucky living in Paris a place of light, history and culture.No one thinks anymore… where is the reasonable balanced, moderate approach? Perhaps it’s because they don’t know their history. And that there is nothing new under the sun. Its ideology now.