Horse 2884 - "A Good Workman Never Blames His Tools" - How About A Bad Foreman?

 Practically everyone knows the proverb that "a good workman never blames his tools". That might be true in essence but I am sure that many workmen would replace their tools with better ones; thus turning good workmen into a great ones. Isn't that why the Church of Bunnings is so large? Moreover, a good foreman provides the tools necessary for a worker to do their job.

If this is a propositional statement were P=Q, then the negative of these statements should also be true where -P=-Q.

"a bad workman blames his tools" and "a bad foreman does not provide the tools necessary for a worker to do their job."

Let's assume that a are a bad foreman. It  follows that if you give bad tools to your workers then the results will be worse; even if the workers are trying really hard.

https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/increased-fines-test-and-isolate-payments-and-new-compliance-measures-as-nsw-battles

Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the vast majority of people are doing the right thing but there are a handful of people who are wilfully breaking the rules and putting the rest of the community at risk.

“The increased fines and heightened police presence are about ensuring people who are doing the wrong thing are caught and punished appropriately,” Ms Berejiklian said.

- NSW Health, 14th Aug 2021.

I do not mean to say that I think that lockdowns are a bad idea when there is a transmissible virus which has the impersonal goal of living inside people (the fact that those people might die is too lofty for a virus to care about) but merely holding people in place, when you've already used other tools badly, lowers the quality of the work being done. Going on to blame the workers because you didn't provide them with the necessary tools of quarantine, vaccination rollout and border controls, while at the same time then not providing them with the necessary vaccinations quick enough, suggests to me that instead of having merely a bad foreman that they look as though they do not actually care about the quality of the job.

I think that a great deal of the problem for the underlying lack of care is that practically nobody within government has lived through a pandemic or a war. The last veteran from the First World War has already died, the people who lived through the 1918-20 Flu Pandemic are at bare minimum 101 years old; assuming that there was a 15 year old veteran on the last day of the Second World War, they would be 91 years old now. The amount of lived experience and thus earned empathy of society, is therefore minimal to non existent.

Hard times build character. Collective hard times might build empathy and compassion, if and only if people are working together towards a common end.

The First World War especially, was fought by societies with very little amounts of common empathy. Often, the generals and politicians in charge of sending people off to their bloody fates, were either in tents that were not up and close to the battlefield, or in mahogany and leather lined rooms that were miles and hundreds of miles away. The actual price and cost for wars, is generally paid by the poor and less well off.

At least as far as Sydney is concerned, the costs of this war (as indeed most wars) disproportionately fall upon the poor and less fortunate. There are intersections of Venn diagrams which also include migrants and refugees. Those costs include the curtailing of civil freedoms in order to protect everyone else, and a disproportionate economic cost. The people who are generally the most well off, also have access to passive forms of income such as rent, interest, and dividends. The less well off in addition to generally being paid less by those same people, still have to meet their regular outgoing expenses which especially includes rent for housing and interest on mortgages. The people who can most ill afford to go without wages are being involuntarily conscripted to do precisely that; while at the same time continue to supply the most well off with rents and interest. This is the Matthew Principle in operation - to whom who has, more will be given; but from whom who has not, even what they have will be taken away. That's not how a cohesive society is built and certainly not through enacted and enforced policy.

This current war against an unseen enemy, is an outworking of bad foremen not giving sufficiently good enough tools to the workers which are necessary to do the job. If this is a war, then it is like sending troops out into the battlefield with no guns. The government has some vague set of slogans and the eerily familiar refrain that it will be over by Christmas. Meanwhile, that's scant comfort for those people who are trapped inside a lockdown, who might not be able to go to work; but who still have to meet obligations of rent and interest payments as well as utilities, food etc. That is separate from any responsibility that governments might have with regards vaccine rollout.

Still, the current orthodoxy being trotted out by the people who control the banks, the press, the Government, and the means by which a lot of people get their living, is that we're all in this together; even though through policy and outcomes, that's increasingly looking like it's untrue.

It is a strange state of affairs when it is the state government which claimed to take ‘best health advice’ when clearly it has ignored the advice of the Chief Medical Officer. It is a strange state of affairs when after failing to lockdown early, the official government statements start blaming us for the catastrophic numbers. It is a strange state of affairs to insist that the New South Wales lockdown is the harshest in Australia when anyone who has access to the internet and can read the terms of lockdowns in other states can see that that’s patently false.

You can not just yell at people to get vaccinated if you do not provide sufficient vaccines for that to happen. You can not yell at people and order them to stay at home indefinitely and then provide no indication of the terms in which those orders end. You can not simply yell at people to stay away from work and then not consider how they are supposed to pay the rent and mortgage, let alone anything else. You also can not blame people for getting sick in the middle of a pandemic. You may as well yell "keep warm and well fed" while leaving them on the side of the road. I think that it's unfair for a foreman to blame their workers, when the tools given are so inadequate.