Civil servants - will you be striking on 1st Feb?

[Iamnotausername]

I know you probably can't say what dept you are in but will you be striking?

I will.

I don't think I ever said I wasn't in an advantageous position? I'm very happy with my job, wage and working conditions. That doesn't stop me from caring about other people.

And yes, I do think strikes are a useful tool for wage negotiation and more workers should unionise and employ them where necessary. The money is there. It is just currently entirely unfairly distributed.

No option to strike as we aren't unionised in my area. I suspect that will change this year.

I have lost over 25% of my team to the private sector in the last 6 months and I am far from alone in my area. I have had to recruit much less experienced people to cover roles and have to use a significant part od the capacity of the remain staff, including me, to trading and develop the new hires.

Great idea! Everyone who doesn’t get a 13% pay rise immediately should strike. Everyone. Care workers. Supermarket workers. The food industry. Farmers. Distribution workers. The emergency services.

This, but unironically.

No, you complained that your husband was underpaid and thus in a disadvantageous position. Remember?

Civil Service pay at grades HEO and under is propped up by partners who are working in the private sector. Myself and many others can only afford to stay because our partners are earning a decent wage in the private sector. I personally stay because I'm a carer and I'm lucky that I get treated well by the CS and can carry on working. I probably wouldn't get that elsewhere, certainly not in my former industrial area. There aren't a lot of options where I live. Unemployment used to be over 60% a few years ago.

I don't stay because the wages are amazing or even the pension (I've got over 20 yrs Service and my pension is currently forecast to be 6k, much less than my husband's).
For those who don't have partners earning a decent wage, they are the ones having to leave as they can't survive anymore. They are having to travel to other cities for better paid work as it's difficult to run a house on 1800 a month when rent is increasing, energy is ridiculous.
We don't want to leave, we just want to have a reasonable standard of living.

Spot on, work at an ALB and exactly the same here for lower paying roles. Only people who are staying are those that are the "second income earners" in their families as far as I can see. Lost three experienced people from technical/specialist roles who all said the same thing - enjoy working for me and the organisation but just can't keep supporting their families how they would like whilst staying in the roles. All have left for significant pay rises that mean that even though their private sector pension conditions are worse they are still better off pension-wise due to their much higher salaries.

I’m not in that Union so no

I didn't say anything at all about my husband. That was another poster.

My husband works in the private sector.

@Eleganz @Umbrio Yes, definitely. I’m single but the only reason I can continue to work there is because I’ve got no dependants and I’m frugal. Everyone I know at work has either got a well-earning partner or is single but childfree. I don’t know any single parents at all.

Interesting point - there are no single parents in my area either.

Are you talking about me? He’s not my husband, he’s my boyfriend of 6 months and we aren’t financially connected in any way so quite frankly, it doesn’t impact me. But again, I don’t have to be directly impacted by something to care about the effects on other people.

What exactly is your agenda in this thread? You’re against striking in general? Or just against civil servants?

This.... I couldn't afford to live alone on my wage. I do have a couple of single parents working in my team. I also have carers working a full time CS job, entry level. They get universal credit to top up their wage! So in essence the government recognise that they pay a low wage and top it up in benefits.

From a practical point of view how many staff hours are the government funding to administrate the universal credit top up for their own employees? How many employees access benefit systems? It's an incredibly inefficient use of public funds. It's madness! Just pay public sector staff a wage they can live off. I'm not expecting a 10% pay increase across the board and if that does happen then it has to come from somewhere so taxes somewhere will have to go up.

There isn't job security though. So many depts are dependent on the economy. The government are literally saying they want to make staff redundant.

The redundancy package is pretty average right now but again, the government is trying to reduce that.

Pensions aren't what they were.

We are loosing young staff as fast as they are coming in because there are jobs in the private sector which are better paid, have better promotion opportunities etc.

I think what has exacerbated the pay issues further is the continual corrosive statements from senior Tories about how useless and allegedly duplicitous the civil service are. This has massively eroded the goodwill of people who should really have already been striking about pay and conditions well before now.

We've again had JRM spouting off about how 'no-one will notice" that civil servants go on strike (lapped up by the usual sections of the media and erstwhile commentators). Due to impartiality rules it has essentially been open season on the civil service for over a decade now and people's morale is through the floor.

Strikes are absolutely a response to the government's openly hostile position towards public sector workers, particular civil servants who don't enjoy the same public support as doctors and nurses (most of us would kill for the pay deal that the nurses have rejected). We know that the Tories despise us.

The reality is that in my area pay has risen by less than 10% since 2010 against a 42% inflation rate according to the Bank of England's calculator for that time. That is a huge erosion of wages. The 2% pay offer is actually the highest wage rise anyone in my area has seen for over a decade and there have been 4 years of pay freezes in that time (the much vaunted lifting of the cap on public sector pay in 2018 did nothing to improve our pay offers). It is no surprise that people are leaving in droves and going on industrial action.

As for the pp who said we don't need unions because there are H&S rules and employment rights etc you are very nieve. If all employers followed them all the time we wouldn't have ACAS, employment lawyers etc. A minute on the jobs board on here shows why unions exist.

Good union employees are the front line defence so staff don' have to pay expensive lawyer fees and have personalised face to face support that ACAS can't offer. We are having a mini restructure in our dept and the union is providing an employee voice. They have already forced the employef to change certain things because it would be detrimental to staff.

It's a bit cheeky when people who don' pay for union membership get the benefits by default.

I know unions vary in quality though. Mine is very visible and thr office reps are noisy (in a good way! 😆).

Yes to when RJM was recently moaning about the people who are essential to him being able to do his job.

You’ve read my reply to Peachgreen and decided that it must be aimed at you. Do keep up!

I’ve never seen a disingenuous, ill-founded, illogical, self-interested argument that I haven’t wanted to demolish. That’s my ‘agenda’, if that makes you happy!

It’s not ‘broken’ at all. It’s actually sensible resourcing. If you have a project of limited duration it makes sense to bring in external specialists. Then you get (in theory) expertise from the cutting edge of private sector tech projects without the long tail of costs. Nobody wants to take on pension liabilities and high salary/NI costs for someone who isn’t needed after three years.

I assume that you’d be the first to call for the head of the CEO of Sainsbury’s when you couldn’t buy milk, right?

Yeah, that’s right. Everyone who doesn’t agree with you is in favour of low pay, the gig economy and a ‘race to the bottom’.

@Eleganz

spot on, people think of civil servants as Whitehall. To be honest, no one will notice if I strike, Im not public facing, what I do can wait for a day. But when people are moaning about delays getting passports, driving licences, backlog in the courts, etc etc, they will notice. The wider public generally does not realise the scope of the civil service.
I did a talk to my son’s GSCE Citizenship class on careers in the civil service and they were gobsmacked at the range of services it encompasses.

with regard to pay, I am pretty much on the same FTE salary as I was 10 years ago. Interesting what are @IamSamantha and @fitzwilliamdarcy said about single parents. I’m a single parent, I haven’t gone for promotions in those 10 years because I adopted a child with significant additional needs. My part time salary was propped up by the benefits he received and tax credits. I have increased hours as he has improved, with a consequent drop in benefits - as they righfully should.
I am in the fortunate, though carefully planned, position of being mortgage free since May. If I was still paying a mortgage, things would be getting very tight now.
I only know a handful of other single parents, none in my division.
At 57 I am leaving in March, as much because of what @Eleganz said as the pay issue.
I will be very sorry to go in some respects. I will miss my colleagues who for the most part are dedicated public servants.

Ex Civil Servant, in the 11 years since I finished the pay scale I was on has barely increased, I can remember having to have a pay increase when NMW was introduced. I support the strikes.

I would definitely be striking on the 1st February but...ironically my 20 years of service comes to an end on the 31st of January as I'm being made redundant due to 'relocation ' of work. This means around 5 local offices closing and a large hub opening in a location that's too far to get to for many staff. Hundreds of years of experience being lost due to this inane decision despite the union opposition. So yes, I support those striking as I've seen first hand how the pay has been chipped away at - the workloads have increased and become more and more complex for not much more than minimum wage. I'm sad to be leaving but it's probably the best for me.

It is broken. In many areas of public sector we are talking about long term liabilities that often extend even beyond the standard long lifetime used in the private sector of 25 years. Maintaining in house expertise in these areas is much lower risk for managing these long term liabilities compared to relying on private sector contractors as the latter simply have no duty to maintain that expertise and supply it to the public sector as well as the public sector body then having no expertise to hold the output of private contractors to technical account and this can and does lead to poor quality delivery.