The council's own "Newsroom" has had nothing whatsoever to say about this council story, preferring instead to churn out pictures of Kevin Madge wearing a hard hat and various council dignitaries, including the Chair of Council, Daff Davies, bowing and scraping when they met old Big Ears.
Let's hope nobody told Charles about Daff's role in the Dylan Thomas Memorial Wind Turbine saga.
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| Psst, want to buy a wind turbine, Sir? Never used, honest. |
Cneifiwr has however seen one on-the-record response to a query about what was going on at CWM, and another, decidedly off-the-record opinion.
Milk and Honey
The official line was provided by Wendy Walters who signs herself as Assistant Chief Executive (Acting) in response to a letter from Cymdeithas yr Iaith.
It turns out that the controversial job advert was published in November last year. Following the, um, discovery, the council's own Policy and Partnership Team has held discussions with CWM, she says, and the agency which was seeking to recruit the staff has since apologised. CWM will also monitor all future job ads.
Ms Walters goes on to note that there are regular meetings between CWM's management and members of the council's Environmental and Public Protection Scrutiny Committee, and that questions regarding the use of Welsh feature regularly. The wording here is rather vague, but if the use of Welsh has indeed been raised with CWM, it has clearly had no effect whatsoever because CWM's website is in English only, in addition to the small matter of the job advert.
You do not get to be Assistant Chief Executive (Acting) without being able to spin difficult news, and having dealt rather vaguely with recent events, Ms Walters goes on to ladle out a large helping of honeyed words.
"CWM Environmental understands its responsibilities and the opportunities which exist for it as a company, and they are keen to develop this further after a successful period at the National Eisteddfod in August 2014."
Players of the popular game of bullshit bingo will gasp in admiration at that winning sentence which contains not only the words "responsibilities", "opportunities" and "develop", but also a completely irrelevant reference to the Eisteddfod.
The upshot of this is that the council and CWM will at some unspecified point in the future meet with Welsh Language Commissioner to discuss the development of a Welsh Language Policy for the company.
It will no doubt take months, and involve lengthy meetings and a great deal of recycled paper to come up with a plan when the council already has detailed policies of its own.
Off the record
A rather less diplomatic assessment of the situation came from another senior officer who told Cneifiwr that the whole business was a "fairy tale" and "Plaid propaganda".
Decide for yourselves which of these two different versions really reflects the view of the top brass.
What both Anon and Ms Walters could agree on was that CWM Environmental suffers from a high staff turnover, hence the need to recruit all these additional staff.
That staff turnover is high should come as no surprise given the dire pay and conditions on offer, but a third source from within the council told Cneifiwr that the real reason CWM needed 20 people in November was that it had kicked out another sub-contractor and the local staff employed by them.
Essential and "an advantage"
And finally....
Readers of this blog will know that whenever the council advertises for a senior officer, it states that the ability to speak Welsh is essential. Almost invariably it ends up recruiting people who cannot speak any Welsh on the basis that they will attend a few lessons.
One notable example of the council's interpretation of the word "essential" is the chief executive himself who after 14 long years has a decidedly weak grasp of the language. About all you ever get to hear are the words "diolch", "bore da" and "ymddiheuriadau am absenoldeb" (apologies for absence).
In Carmarthenshire, however, words often have a very different meaning to the ones you will find in the dictionary. Essential actually means "wholly unnecessary", while "an advantage" means "essential if you want to keep your job".
Come the revolution when Mr James and the rest of the ancien régime are packed off to man the sorting lines at CWM, and it is unlikely that the words "przepraszam za nieobecność" (apologies for absence) will be enough to keep them in the job for very long.
"Do widzenia", as they say in Nantycaws.
2 comments:
I remember going on a site visit to CWM back in 2006/2007ish and being shocked that nearly all the workers were Polish. When I raised the obvious question, I was told that CWM had run two adverts over a six month period but had no applicants from the local area. It even meant they had to delay opening the recycling facilities from running at full capacity. The only people willing to work there were Polish. Then lo and behold the community were up in arms about 'foreigners stealing our jobs!'
It is because they use agency staff and not a direct recruitment policy. I find their facilities fantastic but sadly the term recycling advisor on the rear of the staff jackets is not what it says on the tin. This is not the fault of the staff who I notice work very hard clearing up our rubbish.
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