The mystery of 'hire and fire'

Neil Warnock’s recent dismissal as Queens Park Rangers football clubs manager made me think. Why do we ‘hire and fire’ so much and at what cost does it come to both employers and the nation as a whole?

Neil Warnock...A recent casualty of the 'hire and fire' mentality

Hiring is of course necessary for both the stability and stimulation of the economy. If companies were not to hire, then their growth, barring a miracle would remain static and labour reliant companies would struggle to expand. Firing is a more complex issue, often dictated by outside markets company boards are often forced into redundancies when a crash in the market so warrants.

The total cost of these redundancies though, is the truly worrying fact. The average redundancy in the UK costs £16,375 and when you take into account the fact that since the recession over  1.9million people have lost their jobs the numbers begin to become genuinely worrying. Every year employees are spending over £8billion a year on pay outs. To put this into context the Olympics is expected to cost the British government £9.3billion. This means that in theory if no-one were to get fired for 14months the 2012 games would pay for itself. Happy times indeed.

There is of course, no chance of this happening, so in the meantime it seems that employers will quite literally burn money away as they continue to ‘hire and fire’.