To wonder whether the people in my office who think it's pointless striking....

[RedHotPokers]

...that its selfish and stupid, as the country is broke and we should be happy to have a job, will still take any financial improvement should the strike succeed?

something to make you go blind :o

Well said Headfairy.

OhSuzanna, I think you should take a look at this diagram.

It really does make a lot of sense.

tethers I think I love you ;-)

I never understand the private sector argument of "our conditions are shit so yours should be as well"

You might be earning £20k more but you would have no pension probably.Your pension is not being taken away,all the benefits currently accrued will be frozen in to the original scheme and will continue to be indexed until retirement.Then there will be a new scheme for contributions after that until the date of retirement.

If you look at the ratio between lifetime earnings to pension (and remember most public sector pensions also include death in service benefits and widows pensions and a tax free lump sum at retirement)then the public sector workers pension deal is very generous in comparison with the private sector .

I work in an industry where I deal with public sector pensions I cannot believe how generous the payments and total benefits are in comparison to what I could ever hope to accrue even though I earn a similar salary to these people.What private sector employer contributes 14% into their employers pension scheme.

Frankly I think the strikers are in cloud cuckoo land

Thanks headfairy and tethers. Social mobility is something you never hear anyone talking about now. It's as if everyone is collectively depressed and have just given up.

One of the public sector schemes I deal with actually has an employer contribution rate of 32%....every time we have an increase in council tax it has to pay for this ,not services ,something has to change ,terms and conditions get changed all the time ,you cannot expect to keep the same deal for 40 years

our broke nation seems to be able to afford this

Butterflies I never understand it either. Its not just about bleeding heart liberals wanting the poor to better themselves or other woolly ideologies, it's about hard economics. Governments short termist strategies are never going to get us out of the crapper... Infrastructure and social mobility are HUGE indicators in GDP growth and yet everyone seems to think they're too expensive to pay for right now. But failing to spend on them now will be far more expensive in the future.

Indeed headfairy but quite a lot of people seem unable, or perhaps unwilling, to think in this longer term, more strategic way and it ignores all the evidence, too.

I can in part understand why, politicians can't do anything in opposition. They're useless, all they can do is provide a counterpoint to whatever government is currently in No10. So whoever is in government really has to work towards staying in power, which means thinking about the next general election. Short termism is a by product of our political system. David Aaronovich did a piece about this in The Times a couple of weeks back. His conclusion was that we needed a benign dictatorship. Not sure I'm that keen on that either though :o