To think public sector workers

[firsttimemum77]

Are being 'punished' for mistakes made by bankers / previous government? I work for my LA and at the moment everything around making savings is centred around our jobs and salaries! People think we earn loads, get bonuses etc etc - I certainly don't and I work unsociable hours with no bonuses and a average wage which pays my mortgage and bills...

So AIBU to feel like this or do I deserve it because I work in the public sector!

The article talks about like 4 like comparison

And why wont anyone talk about the elephant in the room that is Public sector pensions.

Haven't you all in the private sector that you'll be claiming clothing out of 'Sally army' bins to cloth yourselves whilst your average public sector worker nets more than 1k per month

YANBU and no, "we're" not all really sharing the pain. I've worked in both the private and public sectors and anyone who thinks that people doing similar lower-ranked jobs in the public sector are so much better off than those in the private sector is kidding themself.
Don't get me started on legendary "gold plated" pensions of £50k. The average public sector pension is a fraction of that.
And this "Sorry to be bitter but you could probably slash public sector admin staff by 90% put in a few trained monkeys and get a better job done." is too idiotic and reactionary to even merit a reply.

sure thing, agent!

I've worked in both private and public sector (and the voluntary sector too for that matter) and I certainly earn substantially less in the public sector for a similar amount of responsibility. Plus I had a non-contributory pension in the private sector, performance related pay and bonuses.

But it's an age old comparison this public/private sector lark - both have their good and bad points and both have workers who do next to nothing yet reap the rewards.

splodge...your comments on this thread are offensive

splodge2001, you seem to be forgetting that a large proportion of the public sector is actually frontline workers - teachers, nurses, doctors, emergency service workers, the people who empty your bins. A number of studies have shown that bloated bureaucracy is not the sole preserve of the public sector. Labour Force Survey data suggests that many parts of the private sector, and in particular the financial services sector, employ proportionately more administrative staff than does public administration.

PS, don't believe everything you read in the Times, it is an absolutely shite paper.

No, OP, you are not being U. It stinks that majority of UK citizens (and that includes rank-and-file bank workers) get to take the hits for the excesses, greed and stupidity of a few.

Can we please stop these futile public v private sector threads? All of us are going to get screwed in the years ahead, while the wankers on the Times Rich list have seen their incomes soar 30 PERCENT in the last year. That's our money they've been swallowing, fellow taxpayers.

BTW -- public sector workers pay as much tax as private sector workers, you know. All those of us earning under £50K should have a pact of solidarity on this issue.

Fluffyone

I'm not talking about 50k pensions I'm talking about the reality of 2/3 final salary pensions which rise with inflation.

This means that the average full time public sector pension is worth around £15K per year.This is 3 times what I'll be getting if I'm lucky and I put £400 per month which I can barely afford into a private pension.

Narmada

The stats are from the Office of National Statistics

And, public sector workers have been contributing to their pensions for the whole of their working lives, in my case since I was 20, whereas many in the private sector don't start to do this until they are a bit older. I was paying my superan from the age of 20, most of my mates didn't even think about pensions for another 10 years or so.

ANYFUCKER

we'll your name is quite offensive ;-)

as is your punctuation

The average public sector pension for women is less than £3k per year splodge2001. Facts, not press propaganda.

oh yes, it must b l8, that's when the extra apostrophes come out

There's not enough understanding of the causes of the recession on this thread.

It's sloppy thinking to blame the bankers. The issue was caused partly by a global recession fuelled by too much borrowing as well as too much lending. But the Labour government ran a significant budget deficit even in the good times in order to pay (primarliy) public sector workers.

It is simply inaccurate to suggest that the public sector is funding the bankers. It is complete nonsense to state that 'the top 5% see their pay go stratospheric'. The top 5% have to pay far more tax to keep an already bloated public sector going. They've been hit hard and hit first.

You haven't actually suffered any pay cut or pay freeze or redundancies yet, have you? That is because the public sector has by and large been insulated from the massive and widespread redundancies, pay cuts and pay freezes that the rest of the country has suffered.

And do you know that employees in the public sector earn more on average than those in the private sector?

We all have to make sacrifices, and divisive threads of this nature really don't help.

txtspk too?

gosh, you private sector employees really put the rest of us to shame

Fluffyone

I'm afraid that your figure is somewhat misrepresentative. The unions also like to quote it.

It is £3k because women tend to work more part-time and for fewer years. They still get pro rata 2/3 final salary which it would take the average private sector worker 4 times as long to accrue

I do think public sector workers are an easy target for people who don't really know a great deal about how the public sector operates and wha it is all about these days. i always think there is much to be said for differentating between public sector workers as a whole and those higher paid earners such as senior civil servants/senior officers. I work in local govt and we have had paltry pay rises for many years, even when the country was booming.

My husband works for a large international private co, and whilst there is more focus on the bottom line, there as many ineffective people who toss it off, play the system etc. IME the public sector is much more efficient and stream lined than it was even 5 years ago.

All I can say is that if i did my job for a private company, i would earn more money, but would probably work more hours. I choose to get paid less, but have a better work: life balance. That does not make me a slacker.

I'm all for a pact of solidarity but feel public sector workers have got to accept we simply cannot continue with the ludicrous pensions situation and that the public sector is seriously over staffed and cuts have to be made just like they've been made elsewhere.

My dp was promoted a year ago, promised a rise with the extra responsibility and stress-to date buggar all. His pay has been practically frozen too even though his company is making good profit. However he has a job unlike his mate who was made redundant so instead of winging he just gets on with it along with many others. Public sector workers will simply have to do the same.

Winging about something many others have already gone through is a tad annoying. It's shit but as many private sector workers have already discovered there is nowt you can do about it.

Depends whether you are one of the 70% lazy public sector workers who take their full entitlement of sick days as holiday or one of the 30% that works extra hours and carries them!?

Even if the top 5% have been 'hit hard and hit first', I still don't see too many of them suffering. Fred Goodwin and his like are nicely insulated, still, from the cutbacks affecting everyone else. Tax them till they squeak, I say. Hey, with our shiny new liberal coalition government, it may even happen

OP - YANBU.

YANBU

narmada and Fluffyone
you both got there before me, find attitudes like splodge2001 pretty offensive but as the OP wasn't trying to compare public and private sectors won't get started on that one.

All I will say is that I also feel like I'm being punished for previous mistakes of bankers, the government and those people who borrowed excessively with no means to pay it back. I work in the public sector (and have worked in the private sector as well) and have also been prudent with my finances and yet I'll be lucky if I still have a job by the end of the year and in the meantime won't be rewarded for being careful financially either.

Sorry I didn't start this post to be divisive at all! Like I said I see all the reports on a daily basis so it's all to close to home! Btw yes we have had a pay freeze already! A number of redunancies have already been made and there are plenty more on the cards!

I seriously didn't think this would become a private v public sector thread! I started this thread because obviously I feel a certain way and wanted to know whether my 'feelings' were R on UR and have had a mixed reaction here! So it's been interesting!

At the end of the day I don't think anyone deserves what's coming private or public - we all have bills etc to pay - children to feed blah blah blah!

P.s I don't pay into the public sector pension because I can't afford to on my salary!

Public sector workers are easy targets. It's a very easy linguistic generalisation for one thing, and we are linked in some way to the Government which makes us bad.

People do realise, don't they, that public sector workers (at least in my branch of the public sector) do pay into their pension scheme? And the local government pension scheme is 1/80 of your final salary multiplied by the number of years you've worked. On those figures it's nigh on impossible to achieve a pension of more than 50% of your final salary. So an average of 15k assumes that the average public sector salary is significantly more than 30k. I don't think so! Or perhaps other parts of the public sector have more generous schemes, in which case please don't lump us all together!

Yes the pension scheme is better than many have, but for a lot of people, especially low paid workers, the pension scheme is one of the only benefits of working in the public sector. Plus I believe the big deficit in the public sector pension pot has rather a lot to do with GB's tax raid on pension schemes - I'm pretty sure that hit public as well as private sector pensions, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

Quattrocento, have you read the thread? The "public sector earn more than private" is hotly disputed by people with experience of working in both areas.
Looking back though, I remember in the Thatcher Years being very envious of the generous annual pay increases and bonuses paid to my friends in the private sector. Our LEA annual pay rise was always small, and bonuses for admin minions were unheard of. I was also "losing" a higher percentage of my pay packet every month as I paid my compulsory percentage contribution to my pension, while my friends in the city had non-contributory company schemes. So, none of this is as simple as people seem to think, not if you look back over the last 20 years or so, rather than taking a convenient snapshot of the last few years.
Every 2-3 years the LEA I worked for would have a re-shuffle and people would be put "at risk" and have to apply for jobs. There were always cuts, but normally by the time the reorganisation was complete they would have been sorted by natural wastage. So it's not as if the public sector has led such a sheltered existence. There are huge job cuts in progress in Kent County Council at the moment by the way, cuts that were already decided before the new government.