What, if anything, would public sector mass walk-outs acheive?

Why do these threads always have to come down to public v private?

We're all being shafted.

although i agree with you on the last point, in answer to the first - because people make false claims. they say the public sector is poorly paid. it isn't. they say it demands you work for free - well it does, but so does the private sector.

it comes down to prejudice -

public sector workers imagine working in the private sector, doing 9-5 and then buggering off home on friday to enjoy the weekend.
Private sector workers may imagine the public sector workers are not managed as closely, do not, therefore, try as hard, enjoy secure employment and good benefits and retire on fat pensions.

both generalisations will be true for some, some will have stats to back them up.

IRL it is very much an individual matter about job type, location, personality of your line manager...

^

that should be non-clinical role

A lot of what is being described as happening in the public sector has been happening in the private sector for years though.

No payrises

Recruitment freezes

No backfill for staff that leave, or for maternity cover

Pension benefits cut and downgraded, even for staff who are only a year or two away from retirement

Yes there is competition, in theory, but when no-one in your sector is hiring then that vanishes too.

I know a lot of people who work in the public sector, including my own parents. Most work incredibly hard, but then there are many that don't.
Someone who I used to be friends with worked for the NHS in a non-clerical role. She had her job description pinned up on her notice-board at work, and every piece of work that she was asked to do, she would check against her job description. If it didn't match, she would refuse to do it and e-mail her union rep. to complain. And then sit at her desk all day making phonecalls. All the while knowing she couldn't be touched because she was doing everything on her job description, her job was secure and her pension happily accruing.
Her whole department worked like that, with the exception of a couple of people who kept things ticking over.
Stories like that are the reason that public sector employees won't have much sympathy if they strike.

EdgarAleNPie, completely agree

When public sector pay was less than private sector pay, public sector unions complained the public sector workers were poorly paid.

Now that public sector pay is 20% higher than private sector pay, the same unions argue public sector employees are poorly paid but the 20% difference is due to the public sector being better qualified!

The fact that anyone in the public sector gets a final salary pension is a total disgrace (though thankfully not all do anymore). The UK unfunded pension deficit is £3.8bn, almost 4 times the national debt. Private sector workers take risk on their defined contributions pensions - returns vary with the markets - and are by definition fully funded. Our children won't have to pay for their pensions.

Defined benefit final salary pensions have no risk attached, have a payout based on final salary (average earning over career £50k but if final salary is £100k get pension on £100k!), and are unfunded since they are basically unhedgeable. Why should my DC and unborn child be in debt and be taxed more heavily to pay such a overly generous pension.

I would happily take a 50% pay cut to get my hands on such a pension.

Why do these threads always have to come down to public v private?

We're all being shafted.

I for one dont expect the goverment to cave. But i do expect that individual public sector employers to admit we cant do everything we used to. Not to expect us to do it all for less and to treat staff better. Its not all about the cuts. For me it is about the way the cuts are being handled

here it is

and i quote -

The difference between the median level of full-time earnings in the public sector (£554 per week) and the private sector (£473 per week) widened over the year to April 2010, following annual increases of 3.0 per cent and 2.0 per cent respectively.

my private sector pension lost 85% of its value last year.

As a public sector worker (front line NHS) I agree that tehre needs to be cuts. I agree we need to accept that our standard of living will fall. I have already, down from 4 days a week to 3 days a week and a pay freeze for the next 2 years.

However our trust that needs to save £30million next financial year has just advertised 10+ posts that are "deputy director of this, deputy director of that". All on 90k a year salaries. Its taking the piss when we're not even allowed paper clips or staples on the ward as we can't afford them.

gaelicsheep I work for a private company with a local authority. We are all going through similar things.

I am in full sympathy with public sector strikes - I think it's the only way to make their voices heard now. I don't think they will achieve the desired outcome, however.

what Erebus has said is actually factually incorrect. public sector pay overtook private sector pay averages i the Blair years - comparing like with lnike. (eg graduate in first year of employ vs public sector graduate...public sector grad an average £1k better off..)

what would it achieve op = nothing. it would massively annoy most people that don't work in the public sector and many that do.

if the government caved it would lose my vote, and not gain any from the other side.
Therefore it's not going to cave.

And I'm not saying people shouldn't strike, just that they gave to be very aware of what the reality is for others. Strike for cuts to care, hospital front line staff, SN services, etc and I believe it'll be well supported. Strike for general jobs and salaries and the rest of us will probably tune out at best.

Quackers - my dh could say exactly the same thing over the past years. He would go away on trips when the kids and I were sick because he was worried about job security. It's just a crap time for most employees regardless and the few good employers are the exception.

Maybe the big difference is that remuneration in the public sector includes a good pension (if it lasts) and that makes people less likely to move around. Private salaries are higher but when you calculate the benefit from a pension often the difference narrows to nothing. For example a 25k per year job with final salary pension is the equivalent of 12k per year of deposits into a private pension (based on the advice from our bank's financial advisor). Of course sometimes salary is more important than pension - it was to us when I couldn't afford childcare in my government job. Now I don't have a pension at all and can't afford a private one in the short term. But at least I'm working and keeping my earning potential for the future.

I agree that the private sector is varied. But at least there is competition.

There is no directly comparible role to mine in the private sector. Nothing is moving, jobs wise, in the public sector. Therefore staff can be treated however they want as they have us over a barrel and all we can do is take it.

Industrial action should only be a last resort but afer all other reasonable avenues are explored to no avail, what is the alternative?

Gaelicsheep - in our experience the private sector shows a huge variation in how they treat their staff - my dh was treated very poorly by upper management over the past few years because they knew he wouldn't be keen to switch jobs during a recession as the sole breadwinner. He has a lovely supervisor but his hands were tied in trying to help dh. Now that I'm back at work and we have more options dh will have to look for a new job along woth most of his team - so the same experience you had. The private sector is hugely varied (I've landed on my feet luckily) and it's just not that simple to say that the private sector values staff.

My team had 24 inc admin and managers.

We lost 5 posts. 2 more have left in the last month and we are unable to recruit into these posts. Another staff member has been off sick for over 3 months (thankfully this length of sickness is very exceptional in my team). My flexible working request was refused as they were unwilling to attempt to recruit into a job share role (despite similarly qualified people being made redundant in other departments).

There is zero training budget.

No bonuses.

No inflationary payrise. No performance payrise.

No overtime.

The service would cease to function if people didnt do unpaid overtime.

Through all this our targets have not been altered at all and we have been told that if we do not achieve them we are likely to be seen as a failing service, and a prime target for even further cuts.

Yeah for the cushy public sector! I think not....

I agree about the focus of the protests . I'm not actually meanking to imply that public sector workers work harder than private sector ones. This is a massive generalisation, but I don't believe that, some minimum wage employers aside, there is the same level of exploitation going on in the private sector.

My impression is that in general the private sector values and wants to retain its highly qualified and experienced staff. The public sector no longer does. In my part of the public sector there are no merit based pay awards - length of service only, there is no paid overtime, there is no money for CPD or any external training. I think many of us are just so fed up at being totally taken for granted. The only reason many services function at all is because dedicated staff are working way beyond what they are contracted or paid to do, and have been for years.

Just one example. The organisation I used to work for carried out the required job evaluation and managed to achieve an outcome whereby highly qualified professionals were placed on admin grades. It was pointed out to them that they would recruit and retain only people just starting out who would quickly move on to pastures new. Not only would huge amounts be wasted on continuing recruitment, they would retain nobody with intimate knowledge of the job. It fell on deaf ears. Bums on seats were all they cared about. Whether that was recent graduate or a professional with 20 years experience they cared not one jot. Last I heard 33% of my old department were actively looking elsewhere.

Gaelicsheep - I don't disagree with what you've just said - I do disagree that Public sector employees work harder than private sector ones though - I think there's a lot more similarities than People realise. And I'm one of the ones with family who left the public sector - so I've no rosy illusions about it. I don't want to see cuts to front line services either - but I do feel like the current system is unsustainable. I just think any protests re cuts need to focus on what is being cut and the impact on services, not the cuts themselves because there isn't the money to let us keep living at the level we've become used to.

abdnhiker, you are missing the point. Firstly, very few people would claim the public sector is a "better, nicer employer". I'm not sure where you got from but you clearly haven't bothered to read the thread I pointed you to.

I don't know how to say this any clearer - you work individuals into the ground, public services suffer. People have been putting up with this sh*t for years and years and the only reason people stuck it out was firstly, a terrific work ethic but secondly, the job security that the public sector used to provide. Now people are being "asked" to do even more work with even fewer resources, and finding that the few things that made it worth putting up with - like that job security - are disappearing. So more and more people, especially those with children, are going to decide that their physical and mental health is more important and they will start leaving. But many organisations are not filling vacant posts so that leaves the same work being not done by even fewer people. It's a slippery slope and everybody is going to suffer. If you can't find any sympathy for the public sector employees in this climate of squeezing them dry, perhaps think about that understaffed hospital ward or child protection unit that will result from this continuing erosion of staff morale in the public sector.

Incidentally, I do not agree with the self serving way that the unions operate. They also spectacularly miss the point almost all the time and do a great deal of damage in the process. That is one of many reasons why I do not belong to a union.

Actually, I think Erasmus is right.
But I also think that this government has done a fantastic job of dividing and ruling, making people that are not that well off despise those that are even less well off etc.
Whilst the private sector may not have much of an appetite for strikes, I, as a public sector worker am highly pissed off at the level of abuse we get on public forums and the ignorance of those who assume that we all have 'gold plated pensions' and job security.
There is no job security and there is no gold plated pension for many in the public sector. 'Tis the stuff of the daily mail.
I would happily agree that there are some staff in the public sector who are lazy, demotivated etc but I assume that there are many in the private sector also.
It may be a simple thought process but I also believe that there is not really any such thing as a private sector in this country - not when practically every single employee is in receipt of working tax and child tax credits. I see this as the propping up of poor pay practice by employers.
The thought that the private sector employees think that the public sector is holding them to ransom makes me more than cross - of course the highly paid bankers aren't doing this with their threats to move their business to other countries.
Just saying...

Sorry for the spelling errors - stupid phone predictive text!

Erebus - my experience of switching from public to private has been the complete opposite to yours so I dont think any generalisation is useful. Not only do my colleagues work harder in the private sector, while I was working forgets government I had to make a claim if harassment against my line manager and saw numerous examples of gender discrimination. The union wasn't helpful because we were all members and good staff were leaving in droves. I'm not trying to claim all public sector jobs are like thus bug I'm definitely despising the claim that the public sector is in any way a better, nicer employer.

Gaelicsheep - I've had three friends where the primary breadwinner was out if work in the private sector for mist of 2009. We count ourselves lucky to have just had a small paycut. That's what reality has been like in the private sector and the public sector needs to acknowledge that and understand that money is tight. The rest of us font want to see services cut too far, no one wants any cuts to the most vulnerable (we don't) but all we hear about in the media from the union spokespeople is bloody job security which isn't going to win friends.

Actually as I've written this I've tried to stay calm and reasonable but the comments about private sector workers by Erebus are so insulting. I cam feel all my natural sympathy for people in the public sector who are going to have a tough time evaporating. Don't you see that it's just that attitude that will ensure the general public don't support you?

My work is involved with err food & farming so we cut back on what we do, something will envariable happend some sort of animal outbreak perhaps or mass poisoning to crops or water and it will cost this country billions.........THat's the issue in the short term they can cut costs but the long term consequences are scary.

I don't know what the answer is though. I think as a nation we do need to accept that our standard of livings expectation have been unrealistically high for too long. However I do think people should be able to eat okay and be warm enough. I think our expectations of house size/number of bedrooms etc needs to be lower. I don't like it but I think that's the reality of what is to come.

I should qualify the "crap" there. I don't mean that public services are inherently crap - many are very good - simply that they are becoming that way because of the endless cuts.