A couple of years ago, I was working at a place where the boss was much younger than me. He was the typical HR wunderkind - believer of corporate spiel and psychobabble, but generally harmless. Until, that is, we had a disagreement about the way he'd implemented a new policy. In the great scheme of things, it wasn't too big a deal, but - and this was a min wage job - it could impact you disproportionately if you had to take time off due to being injured at work.
By way of explanation, I was employed as a support worker for adults with learning disabilities. The residents, or 'service users' as we were expected to call them, could get frustrated and 'display challenging behaviour' - in other works, they'd give the support staff a slap, punch of kick if they were pissed off or faced with a set of circumstances that were causing them stress and anxiety.
I'd got on the wrong end of a kick doled out by a large resident whose behaviour had been 'challenging' all day, and by the end of my 12 hour shift, decided to lash out. The result was that I ended up with two cracked ribs and a month off work. On my return, the policy implications were made painfully clear - I would only be paid for three days at my full rate, the rest, was at the positively miserly statutory sick pay rate. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was then my turn to display challenging behaviour of my own. This led to an exchange of views with my boss, who fell back on a variation of 'just obeying orders'. Which is when our age difference became apparent.
You see, I'm a child of the 60s, and also a child of parents who went through the Second World War, in my father's case as a conscripted combatant and life long 'antifa', as we'd call it now. The concept of 'only obeying orders', was utter and complete bollocks to me, thanks to my upbringing and later legal education. And I told my boss this, by giving him the reply 'a Nuremburg defence is no defence'. He responded with 'what's that?' - which is when I realised that there are some lessons that have to be learned anew by each successive generation.
It also meant that I was going to get no-where by trying to appeal to his sense of justice - there's simply no room for that type of cock-eyed sentiment when you're climbing to the top and going by the book. Private sector involvement in the social care sector isn't necessarily as evil as Nazism, but at times it sure comes close.
