“Bosses Rapped for Valid Sacking.”
Come again? Well, as the paper reported, “The nation’s industrial umpire has ruled that a long-term employee who was legitimately sacked for repeated safety breaches must be reinstated and paid compensation because of his poor education and poor job prospects.”
Okay, let me see if I follow that: his poor education means that it was unreasonable ever to expect him to do the job. Therefore, his inability to do the job is why he must remain in it in perpetuity. Gotcha.
Interestingly, what he was in breach of was a failure to observe Health & Safety regulations. Like the rest of the developed world, Australians labour under ever more intrusive ’Elf ’n’ Safety rules. One has always assumed the fellows who impose this stuff on the rest of us believe in it themselves: at the headquarters of Britain’s Health and Safety Executive, for example, staff are forbidden to move chairs due to the risk of injuring themselves. Instead, if you’re minded to move the chair by the pot plant over to the umbrella stand you have to book a porter 48 hours in advance and he will reposition the chair in compliance with safety procedures. But at Australia’s Norske Skog Paper Mills, Paul Quinlivan can ignore Health & Safety with impunity because his lack of prospects would make it impossible ever to get a job where he’d be expected to be able to follow them.
Perhaps he could sell hot dogs to minors. From the Toronto Star’s “Parent Central,” Lesley Ciarula Taylor keeps us on the non-cutting edge of Health & Safety developments:
“Redesign the Hot Dog, Doctors Urge…”
No, that’s it. I’m done. I’m outta here. That’s gotta be some fake-o spam headline generator that infected my laptop when I got hooked on the vomiting transsexual porn. But no, it’s real:
“Hot dogs need to be redesigned so they aren’t potentially lethal to small children,” reports Ms. Taylor. Yet Janet Riley, president of the U.S. National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, prefers to keep hot dogs sausage-shaped. Needless to say, she “agrees with the need for education, and points out more than half the hot dogs sold in the United States have warnings to parents to cut them into small pieces.” But presumably not at concession stands in Vancouver, where Joe Biden groupies could easily buy them and force-feed them to distracted under-14s standing around agog at the non-functioning electric zamboni.
Speaking of “the need for education,” London’s Daily Mail reports:
“Girls as young as 11 are to be offered pregnancy tests at school.
“They will also have access to contraception, the morning-after pill and advice on sexually transmitted infections.”
Lovely. And, if that works out, we can start educating the nine-year-olds. I’m surprised there’s anything still left to teach British schoolkids in this area. As the Guardian reported a few years back, “Oral Sex Lessons to Cut Rates of Teenage Pregnancy.” This was part of a policy to wean the li’l moppets from intercourse to the joys of “outercourse.” Alas, teen pregnancy rates went up last year. Not sure how the 11-year-old pregnancy rates are looking, but I’m sure the eight-year-olds are holding steady. Still, whatever its deficiencies in reducing pregnancy, you’d have thought that an education system that teaches schoolgirls how to perform oral sex wouldn’t also have to schedule time to teach them how to consume a hot dog safely. Multi-tasking, people!
