ChristopherWhite.info/blog

I handed in my notice at work the other day. I’ve only been at Campaign for seven weeks.

Understandably, they weren’t best pleased.

“I don’t think you’ve behaved very well,” my editor said, and perhaps she has a point¹.Certainly were I in her position I’d hit the fucking roof. And yet at the same time, if I were ever in a situation where an employee showed up one day and told me they’d turned down a job paying over 50% more than their current salary (and particularly one that’s within their area of interest/expertise²), I’d be half-tempted to fire them for being a gibbering idiot.

But a thought occurred last night: for all the talk in some circles about nasty businesses exploiting their workers, employees leaving, at some point, for something better or better-paid is actually expected. The equivalent from the company – firing an employee simply to replace them with someone better/cheaper/faster – is at the very least frowned upon and probably constitutes unfair dismissal³.

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1 Mind you, she doesn’t know this was the second interview I’d had since starting at Campaign -– both for jobs I’d applied for before applying for this one, however. The first was for a science writing job on The ENDS Report for which I’d had to return the writing test by the day I started at Campaign. At the time (as I was re-leaving home) my dad also seemed to frown upon my willingness to change jobs so readily, but he’d begun work in an age where reciprocal loyalty between employee and employer was a given –- ironic since most of the industry in town, which will soon come to include his employers, has pissed off abroad.
2 As the assistant editor of Interactions, the Institute of Physics’s newspaper.
3 Though not after seven weeks, obviously

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I refused the opportunity to cast a vote in last week’s London mayoral/assembly elections. Normally I’d consider this a dereliction of duty, but did so for two (related) reasons.

Firstly, I don’t consider the “expression of popular will” aspect of democracy¹ to be as important as the chance to easily change government — as Tim says, “the occasional opportunity to throw the bastards out”. (Hence most elections being fought on competence rather than policy.)

Having lived in London for less than three weeks before the election, it wasn’t remotely my place to do so.

Secondly, I would’ve lost my vote in my native constituency², and feel obliged to vote against both my [former] MP (Helen Goodman, idiot toady to the Labour party leadership) and MEP (Fiona Hall, just a plain idiot).
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1 Because what we’ve been lumbered with is too top-down for this to actually happen anyway.
2 The system having been mended since the 2005 General Election, when I voted in Cardiff Central and Bishop Auckland.

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