… On an unpaid holiday, that is!

PwC Chief Executive Mark Johnson, while revealing that his staff had decisively voted in favour of the unpaid leave

Biff Tannen - not the only one getting his calls wrong

In these times, a lot of people have the feeling of the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.

You’re not alone if you suddenly get an image of Kevin Rudd attempting to appeal to the true-blue Aussie by saying ‘fair shake of the sauce bottle mate’. That is, they’re both erroneously rendered and poorly targeted comments. The problem with Johnson, aside from probably having no idea of the level of anxiety endured by his employees, lies in the poor choice of Greek legend to sum up the present situation.

You see, Damocles is a story about a poor courier given an opportunity to sit in the seat of the ruler (Dionysius II) for a day. At the end of the day, he looks up from his meal to see a sword hovering over his head, threatening to come down to kill him. He promptly reliquishes the seat back to the ruler. Moral of the story: people with great power always have to be wary of someone trying to seize their power.

Of course, much like Damocles, there’s probably plenty of PwC staff who feel like their heads could roll at any moment. However, the partners - those sitting in the proximate position of power to Dionysius in the story - cannot realistically assert that anything endangers their position of power. Mark Johnson would have us believe that earning six (or seven?) figures as a PwC partner carries with it tremendous danger that it could all be lost in an instant. Surely the abrupt institution of two waves of redundancies and a veiled pay reduction, both methods of preserving the value of equity points, would have dispensed with any realistic danger presented to PwC partners.

Can anyone see a sword loomimng over the heads of the PwC partners?

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