Why should staff have to take abuse for the bosses?

WHILE everyone must feel sympathy with the bank staff who are the victims of abuse and threats from members of the public (Irish Examiner, February 19), we should not lose sight of the fact that staff in shops, restaurants, cinemas and other service industries have had to deal with similar abuse on a daily basis for many years.

Unlike many bankers, most service industry staff are usually badly paid, badly resourced and often badly treated by their managers.

During the Celtic Tiger years, the public were encouraged to treat staff in service industries with little respect. Consumers mattered most of all and if their often unreasonable demands were not met, they were deemed to be fully justified in discharging a tirade of censure against the unfortunate staff member with whom they were dealing. An abundance of new money caused codes of basic decency and courtesy to disappear and it unleashed our potential to become a nasty nation of demanding, petulant, self-obsessed little people.

Anyone who has worked in the service industry can testify to this. The people on the front line of any business have always taken the flak for decisions that were not made by them, and it is regrettable that bank staff should now have to tolerate this, too.

Granted, the banking crisis is indeed serious and the public are rightly concerned and angry. But victimising the staff is going to have little effect, as there is little they can do to solve the problems.

The bank directors who have caused this chaos are not going to come out and accept responsibility for their recklessness, and they certainly aren’t going to leave the cosy confines of their boardrooms to support their staff in these difficult times. Corporate directors rarely bother with the messy nuts and bolts of running their businesses.

That would take too much time away from feathering their nests, playing golf, and indulging in the other futile pastimes which the profligate rich enjoy.

So while it is probably asking too much for businesses to be run efficiently or ethically, the least that service industries could do is implement procedures to protect their staff against obnoxious outbursts from the public.

Failing that, frontline staff could supply customers with the names and addresses of senior management and shareholders, and direct complaints to where they really belong.

John McSweeney

Old Blackrock Road

Cork