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

Hear hear erebus

Could it actually be that both public and private sector are crap at delivering services, but only the public sector workers have enough pride in their work to care about it? Just a thought.

And before anyone says 'if it was so bad in the public sector, why didn't you go private?'- well, at a stage or two I did, and I was so appalled at the low acceptable standards of work, the complete lack of ethics, the poor quality of the equipment we were expected to use, I returned to the public sector at the first opportunity.

There is no thing as a 'private sector'. Each private company is out there competeing against and undercutting other private companies. You may choose to work in one then get head hunted by another.

You get paid mainly according to one thing- how much better at nailing down costs and upping profits in your company.

In the boom times, you flourished. Your pay and bonus went up (thus your pension contribution). You bought houses, you traded up, up, up.

Meanwhile, there were those in the public sector, a far more coherent group. They got their wages. Their wages doing the same job at the same level were the same in Berkshire as in Northumberland. They fell so far behind their private colleagues the government introduces the 'Shared ownership' housing scheme, so summarily were most priced out of teh market.

The last government invested in many public services. Yes, some pay went up but by and large, the money went into upgrading facilities- and some more personnel. NHS waiting list plummeted. The NHS has, depending of which survey you read a 70%-89% customer satisfaction rating. Many private companies would kill for that so they must be doing something right.

Anyway, now that people in private industry are hurting, instead of saying 'we want to get our incomes pegged to those of the public sector' they are saying 'Sack the public sector workers!'.. Not forgetting that many of your pay levels were calculated by seeing what an equivalent public sector worker was earning and slapping 10% on it!

I don't recall any of you marching outside Parliament to increase my wages to a living minimum back before the last Labour government, so please don't expect me to feel much sympathy for you now the show is on the other foot.

For those of you who can't be bothered to search, here is the thread in Employment that I referred to.

I will be really interested to hear all your comparable private sector nightmares.

Either a lot of you in the private sector can't read, or you simply don't want to accept what you are being told. Many staff in the public sector are at breaking point. Comprendez?

For many of us this is not about pensions, not enough pay, pay freezes, even pay cuts. It is about being unable to deliver services because they have been cut too deep for too long. Why is this so hard for people to grasp?

Another friend who works for a drugs company has just been on an all expenses paid trip to Dubai, the whole thing cost them (the drugs company)£3million. It's fking wrong and immoral and people are getting very very pissed off.

Not since 2008 you don't, 80% of the British sales force was made redundant in the UK/USA's biggest drug company and they never take the R&D nerds to see daylight nevermind Dubai.

i am not so sure about that byrel.

i think most good people can see that how they are treating their public workers is very unfair. most people can also see the damage in our pubic services that has only just begun. they have not seen the worst of it yet by a long chalk. most people can also see how they are hurting the most vulnerable in the country. homelessness has gone up already and this is before people really feel the axe in their housing costs. most people can see how the government are stripping workers of rights and drawing a balance backwards in far more favour of 'business' and employers. i think while some bitter people maybe hacked off with strikes, the majority of people will see that there is little option and will support it.

i don't think most people are the same as they were under the previous conservative government. people learnt a valuable lesson then and they riddiculously thought this conservative government would be different. however, i think alot of their newest supporters are realising that it is not much different at all, afterall.

. We have lost a third of our team but are expected to have exactly the same output and meet the same target. Morale is at an all time low, people are getting sick and the only thing on the horizon is more redundancies. We are chasing targets rather than trying to achieve the purpose of our jobs, which is good for noone.

Without joint action, what do we do?

The whole thing is ready to collapse and only a complete change in the way things are done is going to stop that. Individuals are unable to say how bad things are as they are worried standing out will put them first in line for the chop in the next round of cuts.

So again, what do we do? Watch as the system collapses and takes us with it?

I can't see how it will end any other way. I have no sympathy for the private at all.

I work as a senior(ish)clinician in an NHS department. We're running on less than 50% staff because posts have been dissolved frozen when people retire/leave no backfill for maternity leave. All our brilliant admin team recently down graded and redeployed. just waiting for the "productivity and efficiency" savings to hit the clinical staff then we'll be downgraded too despite the fact our job profiles/KSF indicate otherwise.

I know someone who works for RBS £2ook a year plus bonuses. Another friend who works for a drugs company has just been on an all expenses paid trip to Dubai, the whole thing cost them (the drugs company)£3million. It's f**king wrong and immoral and people are getting very very pissed off.

Every single service we used to refer to to help children and families has been dissolved, or redesigned with fewer less well paid but equally qualified people staffing them. Demand for these services has actually gone up. I have to tell families all the time we can't help them and we don't know who can. I know schools struggle with this too. It's shit really really shit.

mamatomany - "I personally don't care what private sector workers will and will not stand for"

Thats what the unions said in the 1970s too and the Govt backed down to their demands. Then we ran out of money and then the Labour party became so unpopular it was out of office for a generation. The same is going to happen again.

That said, I dont think the Coaliion is doing any good either. Will Self made a powerful point on Question Time this week. He asked the very simple question of the Govt. "What is the Plan to get us out of the current financial mess?". As he rightly pointed out, it just seems to be to get us all buying and selling houses again and borrowing on our credit cards.

Not much of a plan and neither is loading the entire burden on the private sector while unions demand ever more from the public purse.

If the unions call general strikes etc they will become unpopular very quickly with the public and strengthen the Governments position.

The private sector has taking its medicine since 2008. The public sector continued to grow for the past three years. So the private sector has no sympathy for the public sector.

The private sector pays for the public sector. As you can clearly see from government finances, the private sector isn't generating enough tax revenue to pay for the current size of the public sector. Cuts are required.

The public sector can strike as much as they want. All they do is damage the private sector, which means even deeper cuts to the public sector later on. We can only have a larger public sector when the private sector has expanded.

People just need to accept their standard of living will fall for the next 5 years and get on with it.

I do wonder about mass strikes though. Bob crow et all do tend to p me off. Strikes should not be used as a blackmail weapon and should be the very last resort.

I also dont actually blame the government. I realise we cant keep spending like we were. My beef is with the way organisations are handling it. Noone wants to be the first to say we cant do everything we used to.

Just because some in the private sector are bending over and taking it up the jacksey doesn't mean that everyone should be suffering.
We were made redundant in 2008 and have come through what I feel has been the worst of it, if they start attacking the public sector we will be back to square one as will many other private business' who provide services to the public sector, we're much more interdependent now than in the 70's.
I hope the unions make their point, otherwise this isn't going to end well.

BeenBeta - I personally don't care what private sector workers will and will not stand for. Half of them don't know they're born. Nowanewme is right - people, and services, are reaching breaking point.

ok there needs to be cuts and downsizing, we all get that. However we alll need to accept that these cuts mean that the public sector will be able to do and provide less.

The situation, as it stands, is that public sector staff are being asked to provide the same service with greater restrictions, recruitment and pay freezes, fewer staff, less training and less equipment. All while being told that if we cant do this and cant cope our jobs are at risk, our jobs are at risk anyway and we should suck up any bad treatment as we are lucky to have a job in the first place.

I find the prospect of strikes very uncomfortable and would rather avoid if at all possible.

But people are breaking and the cuts are being used as an excuse.

abdnhiker - we're not talking about pay cuts here. We're talking about essential workers doing the work of 2, 3, 4 people because colleagues have left and haven't been replaced. People putting in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime who still can't manage their enormous workloads. Staff on professional grades spending halk their time doing clerical/admin work because they have lost their support staff. I don't believe this is replicated in the private sector because a business performing as badly as many public sector services - through no fault of the poor staff - would simply not survive.

There is a thread about this in Employment if you can be bothered to look.

mamatomany - back in the 1970s when the union movent had a lot more power it did strike and what happened was public sector and nationalised industry workers got tgeir jobs protected and inflationary pay rises. Unfortunately the private sector took the full hit of the economic downturn. It is well documented that public sector and nationalised industry workers fared far better than private sector workers.

I really feel that this time round that cannot be allowed to happen. The private sector has already taken many job losses and wage cuts. The public sector has to take some of the pain too. The unions though I think are aiming to have a rerun of the 1970s and try to ensure the private sector takes all the pain.

Private sector wokers will not stand for it and the unions are far less strong. Labour runs the risk of being seen as too beholden to the unions and will pay for it at the ballot box.

If the public sector don't strike everything will be a little bit worse for the private sector too, there's very little most employees can actually do, the unions in the public sector still have a little power and they should use it IMO.

It won't achieve anything because I think nearly everyone accepts that things cannot carry on as they are now and that changes are needed. Add to that the trade unions only seem to want to introduce some form of class war by endless shouting tax the rich and have no real constructive argument against the Governments actions.

I don't know what it will achieve if anything. I would like to hope it will achieve a change of thinking and planning from the governemnt.

As for' "That's it really. IMHO, very little bar a reduction in public sympathy and even worse public services for those who use and/or need them". Well, I think maybe the same if they don't strike and unite. When patients cant get the help they they need because the funds and staff aren't there, when peoples children cannot get the same support as they had previously in school and previously from social services, from childrens mental health teams etc, when you can't get help from the police because they are overloaded and lack resourses etc etc. The public workers won't get sympathy when this happens, they will get more brow beaten and of course the 'consumers' will have a less sympathetic/effective pubic service.

The way cuts are going so fast it is hard to keep up. I am a teacher and there are less and less support services availiable to the children in my school already.

I don't want to strike but if they want to take an extra £100+ from my wages every month, towards a pension that I cannot rely on even being there in 30 years time, which I cannot afford to loose and which will inevitably drive me into moving back to living with my 70 year old mum [with my children] in order to even live then I will strike.

What really gets me is the reference to cutting 'back office' jobs. These are not superfluous jobs, where I work we used to have a colleague who did the admin, answered the phone, did all the 'back office' jobs. She left, we were not allowed to fill the vacancy - there's been a vacancy freeze for at least 2 years anyway. So now we all spend more time doing routine but necessary paperwork (like paying invoices) and less time doing the specialised jobs we have been trained for and could otherwise be doing.

Reducing these staff may look like an easy cut, but it will have an effect on front line services.

The irony is that it isn't the well paid civil servants that are being chopped no it's the people at the bottom, the ones that actually provide the day to day service.....

They are spending out lots and lots of money setting up committees (all well paid posts) to decide who to chop. Why not just take a slightly longer term approach, cut jobs through natural wastage and voluntary means and rejiggle.

So lots of poorly paid people made redunant and then start to receive state benefits - how are they saving money.........Only works if they were well paid in the first place!

I don't want to strike, but I will if there is a legal ballot and one is called.
I hope the general public realise its not just selfish 'fat cat' public sector workers being greedy, but instead have some sympathy that it is a desperate last attempt. Personally, I don't think it will achieve anything as this Govt has an agenda that it will stick with regardless of the human cost. (Remember Maggie and the miners - theres a thread about that on MN tonight too).
The Tory ideology strongly desires a reduced level of Local Government and the current financial situation allows them to slash jobs and services with impunity.
I don't think walk outs will actually achieve anything, other than a small reduction in pay and pension (you don't get paid whilst on strike and you also get the time deducted from your pension accrual, so people do not lightly go on strike - it has a real cost)
But I do think the Council tax paying public are going to have a terrible shock when the effect of these cuts really start to bite.