Managers face more strike misery

Senior managers across the country are preparing for the worst, after the TUC voted in favour of industrial action for Britain's underpaid Management Consultants.

Management Consultants: On Strike

And with three of the four major Management Consultancy Trade Unions supporting the strikes, up to 80% of the nation's Management Consultants could be picketing as early as next week after failure to amicably resolve a dispute over poor pay and conditions, and unworkable market strategies.

The NUMC, MCTU and MACCU have all agreed to the Trade Unions Congress's proposals for a series of one-day strikes, with only the more moderate GMMC now refusing to sanction industrial action.

Militant

Some particularly militant consultants are even refusing to provide case studies to potential new clients, and the Dow Jones has seen plenty of downward action from companies traditionally dependent on Management Consultants' advice, amidst fears in the City that the action could last for some time.

'To be honest I'm really scared and so are our shareholders' said one Senior Account Manager for a major communications company, 'our success is almost entirely down to the advice we recieve from our Management Consultants on a daily basis. I honestly don't know who we'd turn to if we needed some fresh strategic thinking on how to best consolidate our role as market leader within the comms sector'.

And it's not just management who are feeling the heat. Some of the Consultants themselves are said to be deeply unhappy with the situation and earlier this week, a 24-year-old Oxford Graduate, described as 'an expert in procument and retail strategy with a bright future' attempted to commit a suicide on himself, rather than join the NUMC picket line outside London's Canary Wharf.

Fear

The strikes are set to be the worst since the late 1970s, a time which many remember with fear and bad recoiling:

Livingstone: Support

'Those were really dark days' recalls retired Captain of Industry Arthur Stoat, 'One day we all came into work, and just didn't know what to do. We needed advice on strategy, we had to make important judgment calls, and there was no-one to tell us what to do.'

'And two days after the Management Consultants started picketing, came Black Thursday, when it was announced that the Marketing Gurus were also on strike. I hope I never have to live through another week like that.'

But London Mayor Ken Livingstone has defended the Union's right to take industrial action, considering it 'an inevitable by-product of a monetarist ethos' and adding that 'No Management Consultants would be striking if their views on e-business and Organisational Effectiveness had been taken into consideration in the first place.'

Big Idea

The last-ditch attempt at averting an extended series of strikes could rest on the shoulders of Management Consultants Slaughtered & Poor, who are proposing, in a 300 page document entitled 'The Big Idea', that Management Consultancies consult one another until between them they have generated ideas and concepts that become more important than the process of thinking them up, and which therefore add value greater than that which would be gained from industrial action.

The one caveat is that even other Management Consultants don't understand what this means.