Trudie and Sting still struggling to come to terms with their own actions

You'll recall a few years back Sting and Trudie Styler's chef brought a successful action against them for sexual discrimination:

The employment tribunal had been told that staff at the couple's country estate lived in a climate of fear because Miss Styler subjected them to abuse to make her "feel royal".

In a unanimous verdict, the tribunal members have found that Miss Martin was unfairly dismissed on the grounds of her pregnancy and had been the victim of unlawful sexual discrimination.

How did Styler take the result?

Miss Styler described the decision as "a travesty" and announced an immediate appeal.

Yes, she did. They lost that, too:

Judge Peter Clarke, chairman of the Employment Appeal Tribunal in London, said he agreed with the original employment tribunal judgment - which accused Miss Styler of using "shameful conduct" and subterfuge to get rid of Miss Martin.

Has Trudie accepted the now two judgements? Let's take a quick look at her interview with the Mail:

‘I was very wounded,’ she says. ‘I’m a champion of human rights. I embrace children into my life. Sexual discrimination? That’s something I don’t do. It was a travesty of justice.’

Yes, the victim of the story was not the pregnant woman who was unfairly sacked, and who was then forced to go through not one but two tribunals. The real victim here is Trudie Styler, who - despite the judgement of two tribunals - can't believe that she was guilty of sexual discrimination because she "embraces children". (That's the least successful use of the "I embrace children" defence since the Gary Glitter trial, by the way.)

Trudie doesn't explain how the judgement was a "travesty" - beyond telling us that she's so good it can't possibly be true. Perhaps while she's busily championing human rights she might want to think about investigating humility, too.

Who wants to fetch coffee for Kathleen Hanna?

Okay, okay, form an orderly queue, then.

Le Tigre are looking for someone to do stuff for them while they prepare a DVD.

Is having an intern entirely The Right Thing? I mean, I'd probably pay good money to hang out with Le Tigre and do their filing, but getting people to work for nothing on commercial projects doesn't really resonate with the equality and fairness doctrine you'd normally associate with the band.

Job vacancy: Keeping the dead alive

The University of California at Santa Cruz are hiring a Grateful Dead archivist. You can be pulling down $52,860 – $68,892 a year - the only problem being you must have a masters in archive management and, as the advert puts it:

Expert knowledge in the history and scholarship of contemporary popular music, or American vernacular culture, preferably the history and influence of the Grateful Dead.

Filing the Cherry Garcia ice cream might prove troublesome.

[via Boing Boing]

Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - The June Brides

Back when I was still in the target audience readership of the NME, indie pop stars would have their lack-of-music-based income underwritten by the then-generous dole. Nowadays, it seems the government supports indie gods by offering them civil service jobs later in the process. Fire Escape Talking catches up with Phil Wilson, June Brides and Customs tax-advisor:

You were advising on tax policy for Customs and Amelia Fletcher is now Senior Director of Mergers at the OfT. Is there a danger of indiepop taking over the civil service or is the civil service an attractive option for indiepop stars?Ex-indiepop people only have a few options - teaching, the civil service or destitution! The rest of the June Brides are either teachers (Big Jon is a deputy headmaster at a girls' school) or in the civil service. Who else is gonna take us on?! There were 3 indiepop stars in an office of over 1000 - so no great danger, as yet, of an indiepop takeover ;-)

[Thanks to RobF]

Gennaro Castaldo Watch: Green shoots

There is good news for the economy - at least in the West Midlands - and delivering it is Gennaro Castaldo:

Other big name retailers including HMV also announced recruitment drives in the West Midlands today. HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo said all stores, including branches in Walsall, Dudley, Wolverhampton and Birmingham, would be almost doubling their staffing levels until January.

“We’re looking at up to 150 fixed-term seasonal colleagues in the area,” he said.

Good news all round. Except, erm, for the 150 job losses in early January. But what green shoot can survive the cruel slap of deep winter?

PRS: Now hiring

Thanks to Ian for pointing us in the direction of the copyright investigator role currently on offer with the good people of the PRS:

Vacancy Notice
Job title:
Copyright Investigator
Department:
Public Performance Sales
Location:
Home Based
The Role:
The above vacancy in the PPS Copyright Protection Office has arisen, creating the
need to recruit a face to face Sales professional to cover Northern England, from
the Mersey to the wash upwards, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The ideal person
will be required to deal with Copyright Infringers who currently use PRS music,
but without the necessary PRS for Music licence being in place.
You will be required to manage the collection and processing of music data from
licensable premises to produce reports that may lead to civil action in the UK
courts for Copyright Infringement.
Key Responsibilities include:
• Conducts inspections of buildings / premises for music usage activities and
carries out personnel checks re: ownership of premises
• Issues copyright music licence contracts
• Conducts threat and risk assessments via undercover visits to premises
• Organises the collection of music usage data, collation and analysis of that
music data via undercover visits to premises
• Compiles and disseminates the music usage data using briefings, reports and
face to face meetings
• Ascertains the accuracy of data collected by checking various databases, this
then allows legal proceedings to commence if the customer refuses a licence
• Compiles legal infringement reports which are used in UK Court cases
• Attends UK Courts as a witness for PRS in current infringement cases
• Maintains manual and computer-based databases
The ideal candidate:
• Results driven and a sound record in achieving / over achieving revenue
targets and KPI’s
• Knowledge and experience of field sales techniques including preparation,
journey planning, influencing, negotiating, objection handling and
marketing
• Excellent communication and presentation skills required in promoting PRS
as a professional music service provider
• Strong initiative, dynamic, resilient, highly organised and self motivation
qualities are essential requirements
• You will possess good analytical skills and must be computer literate
(M/soft Office: Excel, Word and Outlook)
The successful candidate should ideally reside in the territories.
Salary: £30k per annum + annual bonus

There are a couple of things to notice about this. First: the job title says it's for a "copyright investigator", but they're actually looking for a sales person.

So is the PRS in business of selling or is it in the business of licensing? Both are about taking money off people, but there's a subtle and important difference between providing something that people need, which is a licensing role, and convincing people to buy something, which is a sales role.

Now, if the PRS wants to sell licenses rather than check compliance, fair enough. But there's something a little off with an organisation which equips its salesforce with a quasi-legal role, too. Door-to-door encyclopedia salespeople seldom had a separate role of compiling evidence to be used in court cases against those who didn't have the full run from Aardvark to Zygote.

And even then, perhaps the dual role wouldn't be so curious, were it not for this demand:

Results driven and a sound record in achieving / over achieving revenue
targets and KPI’s

The job is not about making sure everyone has a licence. It's looking for someone to hit - and exceed - revenue targets. And there's a bonus being dangled.

You start to see why mechanics get demands for radios in other rooms, and horses are suddenly finding themselves having to cough up for PRS licences.

And let's just consider this piece again:

Conducts threat and risk assessments via undercover visits to premises

Undercover visits? Do you also get a super-spy-decoder ring?

Hey - you know who would be perfect for this? That bloke with the hat who has been doing Tony Gordon's work for him. He already has the hat and the long-lens camera for playing at spies.

And, coming from Weatherfield, he meets that other vital criteria:

The successful candidate should ideally reside in the territories.

"The territories" being anywhere north of Peterborough. So you'd have to live in Manchester, or possibly Uist, or Belfast. Or maybe Scarborough. You know, somewhere local to outside London.

Let's remind ourselves, too, of the PRS' strange view of themselves:

Copyright Infringers who currently use PRS music

PRS music? What, exactly, is PRS music? It's music, surely, that presently the PRS handles some of the rights for. Even Capita haven't yet got so brazen as to pretend that TV Licensing owns the BBC.

And they're at it later on, too:

promoting PRS as a professional music service provider

But you don't provide "music services". You provide licensing services. You might add "for music" to your name, but you don't have anything to do with actual music, do you? You could just as easily be inspecting horsehoes or buckets.

Still, if you've got the right skills: your own trilby, a background in espionage and sales, and don't live very near the sparkling Regent's Park head offices, why not pop in an application? If the PRS don't strike a deal with the online music services soon, they're going to need to shake down as many small businesses as they possibly can.

Terry Christian gets the word from the judge: No

Terry Christian has been in court this week, somehow trying to argue that, despite having had a freelance contract to present on BBC Radio Manchester, when that contract expired and wasn't renewed that he was somehow treated unfairly.

He also complained - bemusingly - that his producers gave him scripts with things to say on them, like everyone else on radio gets from time to time. (Perhaps someone should have tried that when he was doing The Word?)

The judge has rejected his claims for unfair dismissal.

The fallen, phantom 750,000

At a time like this, when the doughty custodians of public money turn out to have not grasped that high rates of interest go hand-in-hand with increased risk, and ITN has sent someone up into the loft to see if they still have that UK Job Losses Map they used to track Thatcher cutting a swathe through British manufacturing, any threat to the economy has to be taken seriously.

Like, for example, the oft-quoted figure of 750,000 jobs that are lost in the US to piracy. Any threat to a quarter of a million incomes has to be taken seriously, right?

Only it turns out - after ARs Technica do a bit of digging - that this figure has no basis whatsoever; like a Wikipedia entry referencing an article which was based on the Wikipedia entry in the first place, it is supported merely by reference unto itself, perhaps sparked by a finger-in-the-air estimate made by Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldridge. That would be Reagan's Commerce Secretary. He was talking in 1986. Oh, and 750,000 was a top-end, on a range he proposed that stretched from 130,000. Take the lower estimate, and you've successfully re-employed 620,000 people. Job creation really is that easy.

Likewise, the USD200-250 billion dollars that is sucked from the economy? That appears to have come from a 1993 edition of Forbes, and referred to all counterfeit products. Oh, and that was worldwide. And when Napster wasn't really much of a threat. It's a bit like Sarah Palin using back numbers of Punch to try and create a foreign policy position.

It's possible, of course, that the damage to the economy might be harsher than these white-bearded old numbers suggest - the entertainment industry's reluctance to think about the numbers could, humorously, be actually making its case less compelling. We don't know. More importantly, though, neither do they - and they're calling for changes in the law on the basis of made-up numbers.

[Thanks to Michael M]

Oxegen of bad publicity

We know that part of the festival experience is meant to be the joy of roughing it, but not to this extent: cleaners for the Oxegen Festival this week were given a stable to sleep in.

Admittedly, it was good enough for the Blessed Virgin Mary, but the 52 cleaners were understandably unhappy. Especially since the floor of the stable was concrete, and apparently there were only about one third as many mattresses as people.

It took a call to the police to persuade the cleaning company to try and sort something better out - inflatable mattresses on kitchen floors.

Of course, Oxegen had outsourced cleaning to a third party, but still, you'd expect there to be some sort of corporate shame; perhaps a sense of apology?

The event's promoter, MCD, said it "worked with contractors in advance to ensure all staff requirements are fully met." Each contractor was responsible for its own staff welfare, it said.

The cleaners sleep like the Holy family; Oxegen's promoters behave like Pilate.

[UPDATE: company boss says conditions 'better than Glastonbury']