This excellent article by Ian Martin in the Guardian has reminded me of a time in the early 00s which sums up privatisation with all its excesses.
I left University in 2000 and scratched around doing temporary work for a while. I was initially looking for a job in or closely-related to Graphic Design and I thought I'd got one at a reprographics company in Manchester. The job itself wasn't as important as the opportunity to expand my social horizons. This was my chance to get out of the insular town that ridiculed me and made me feel totally unwelcome and experience a 21st Century city with bars and clubs that didn't demand you wore smart clothes to get horrendously drunk and into needless fights (I didn't want to do any of these things but in places like Chorley or Wigan in the 1990s, it was mandatory if you were young and wanted to socialise). It was great: the best decision I ever made.
The job did turn out to be crap, though. A sweaty, cramped space on a busy road with far too many big, hot, frequently broken printing and copying machines and very little ventilation from the polluted street. The clients giving us the most work were the big building contractors and their mysterious parent companies and clients. This was the New Labour boom years and Manchester's regeneration was still in full swing.
In the above paragraph, I carefully chose the rather clanging phrase "The clients giving us the most work were the big building contractors..." because it accurately describes the situation, much more so than saying "The biggest earners were the jobs for the big building contractors..." because these huge companies spent a lot of time and effort avoiding paying anything at all. There was one printing company who we sent a lot of large jobs to who were so infrequently paid by their largest client that they closed down three times in as many years, only to open again shortly after under a different name. This was the days when few people paid their debts (have they gone away?).
Around 2001/2002, our biggest client became a company called Catalyst Healthcare (I think this happened because my employer poached two sales reps from a rival company who had held the contract - because that, depressingly, is the way things work). Catalyst were the PFI arm of Bovis Lend Lease (and may still be) and whenever public money for a new hospital was up for grabs, they threw millions at it.
Catalyst were throwing so much money at us that whenever they were preparing a bid, they basically took over the company. We switched from 8am - 7pm opening to 8am-8pm and 8pm-8am shifts 7 days a week for fortnights at a time, The night staff just worked for Catalyst; the day staff were meant to do just as much for them but everything else too. Catalyst staff stayed in the nicest hotels they could find nearby at short notice and hung around the already-overcrowded printrooms, hooked up to caffeine drips and occasionally disappearing out for meals and drinks. They proudly told stories about corporate excess, such as the guy who told us he'd recently bought a new Audi TT, taken it to a race track for a spin and promptly blown the engine whilst doing doughnuts. They had us putting together and printing masses and masses of bid documents, only to then change a bit which meant a complete reprint. This happened again and again and again and each time, they paid for what had been produced and subsequently binned (as far as I know, anyway).
The wasted money in the bidding process that I was aware of was shocking; I wouldn't even like to guess at how much each bid cost in total. Just thinking about the money spent on bids they didn't win...the bids they did win must have been so worth it for them.
I worked there far too long and was eventually fired for losing my temper (within earshot of the shop) when, under immense pressure, another printer broke on me. I could have appealed: no kind of proper disciplinary process was carried out, but I was only too glad to leave and I have the great pleasure of being able to say I have never since had to work on behalf of such free-market wastefulness ever again.
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