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!

Quatro, but the public services were crap in the first place. They need investing in, not cutting.

Whether workers in the public or private sector are getting the best deal is beside the point. If the suffering in the private sector is a result of lack of growth, to make severe cuts in the public sector now before recovery is underway is surely only going to make the situation much worse as unemployment rises.

Firstly OP - YANBU - of course not your fault and frustrating it affects you although as others have pointed out private sector workers had the redundancies etc over the last 2 years. I was made redundant 2 years ago as soon as this all hit and in my new job no one has had payrises for 2 years now.

I'm probably going to get flamed for saying this but I don't think its the banks fault. I used to work for a bank, and everyone knows banks just want to make as much money for their shareholders as possible. The problem is that the government/regulators took a light touch approach and didn't regulate them properly - so if you want to blame someone blame the government.

banks were hit this year by the bank payroll tax and I am sure more long term measures to achieve the same will be put in place

It's not fair. Nor is anything else.

ZD, I see you are clinging to the GB policy of carrying on spending even though there is nothing left negative money in the pot. It was excessive spending that got us in this mess in the first place; more excess is not going to cure anything. Mervyn King agrees with the policy of addressing the issue now, not burying your head in the sand and hoping that it gets better of its own accord.

It's not just GB, and it's not a question of "hoping it gets better on its own accord".

By what mechanism are you expecting growth to increase at this point without public sector investment.

community work - bullshit job example. these have been around for decades with massive govt funding - in the town i used to live in there was a huge 6 MILLION single regeneration budget which incorporated a brand new team of community workers ( i was one) and the manager, ooh and the house that we rented, the resources that we had to have.

its all bullshit. its nice bullshit, meet some great people, get paid ok, powerpoint presentation here or there, training some staff or community members on how to make a newsletter occasionally, encouraging involvement in community activity, oh ohh, doing a 'baseline' survey for every bullshit ativity you you can 'measure your targets' or conduct an 'impact assessment'

its all bollocks

take this money and put it into schools.

better education, more tewachers and resources, and you would soon, soon see a difference becuase i firmly believe that the BEST way to change lives - is NOT through encouraging community participation ( i say as a firm lefty socialist) it is through education. parental education and education of children.

show children that actually they can write, they can read, they can get qualifications. open the door which will allow then to access a decent job rather than ignore them becuase its easier when you have a large class.

i vote me as the dictator or this country i would have it ship shape in no time.

youth workers - another bullshit job - they get paid quite handsomley too - take a look at your own councils job page.

promoting 'diversionary activities' bollocks.

i have worked in two completely different areas of the country and every time i have come into contact with youth workers - yes yes - they provide some nice activites and tips out to theme parks, and rock climbing etc for kids - but they catch only a very few truly dissafected kids - and these kids would be cought at school if they disbanded the whole of the youth service and invested that money in schools.

then in a Cameronesq move, we could have volunteer run youth clubs.

...will think of more bollocks jobs

"By what mechanism are you expecting growth to increase at this point without public sector investment."

INVESTMENT!? Don't talk rubbish. Paying public service wages is not an 'investment', it is an expense.
It is the private sector that will produce growth. It is always the private sector that produces growth because there is no public sector without the private sector.

Your policy might possibly have worked if GB had put aside some money in the good times to tide us over in the bad times (like he said he was going to do) but he spent all he had and some more that he didn't have. He forgot all about his Golden Rule.

'So, if people feel pee'ed off that I'll get my final salary pension that I signed up to so long ago, well so be it. I certainly don't feel guilty about it!'

This raises another very important point.

A not insignificant number of public sector workers do very physical jobs or jobs that require standing on their feet a lot, very good eyesight, hand/eye coordination, etc.

These people may well likely not be able to perform these jobs to standard retirement age.

The system needs to have flexibility built into it to accommodate that.

take a look at the Tenant Services authority ( my copy and past isn't working)

in itself a regulatory body - which is bullshit.

now this bullshit body of people funded by communities and local govt ( that's your money then) to rgulate social housing landlords.

promoting 'tenant empowerment' bullshit

what we need is social landlords providing a service they say they will

a decent home to live in and maintenance of that home and common areas.

thats ot hard.

no seriously its not hard

yet a whole industry is set up to 'empower' residents and get them involved int he decision making processes.

which BTW is all bullshit in practice.

Fembear I sincerely hope you are right that growth will come from the private sector. But I have not yet heard any coherent answer to the point that these economists made very publicly on this issue last month.

Some of the figures being quoted about final salary pensions are a bit wide of the mark, but I do agree that they need to be stopped now for all new employees. BTW I work in local government.

Also, many of the 'redundancies' are actually early retirement - I know of several senior managers who have been given 'access to their pensions' to enable them to leave quietly. The youngest was 52 and on a very sizable salary.

A lot of what has been suggested is merely tinkering at the edges. We need huge reform of local government. In the county I live and work in we have 13 chief executive's (disticts and a county), plus 13 senior management teams and endless duplication. Add in 50+ councillors per authority and you've got about 650 councillors (doing what?), plus parish/town councils. It's a huge waste of money!

But Zeph, what is the alternative? Continue borrowing and borrowing, raising more and more tax to pay for it?
At what point is that no longer feasible?

I agree with Custardo. There are a lot of community/youth work/engagement jobs that are a waste of time, and I used to work in that area. In the organisation I worked for, there were more managers than front line staff, and a lot of the front line staff work was nice but not essential.

There is a very odd culture in the youth service (not my area, but was a related field. They are very keen to pick up the 'cool kids' through paying for detached youth workers (people who walk the streets engaging with teenagers) to get kids into diversionary activities. I pointed out at a conference that they are missing a lot of the most troubled kids - anorexics, suicidal, self-harmers, depressives, child abuse victims etc because those kids often aren't out hanging around in city centres or walking into diversionary clubs and council youth cafes.

All of this engagement could be do at a fraction of the cost and pick up four times as many of the most vulnerable children if the youth service was shut down and extra pastoral staff were put into schools.

But that isn't in the culture of youth work. You don't look 'down with the kids' if you work in a school rather than walk the streets smoking in a hoodie asking teenagers to come and do a bit of diversionary graffiti art with you.

I work in the public sector.

I work hard and there have thankfully been no cuts in my area because people will insist on popping out children which they then want teaching, chuh what's up with that?!

I do not apologise for my pension, why should I? It is one of the perks of my (quite frankly tough) profession.

You don't like it? Apply for a PGCE, GTP whatever.

Or were you not talking about frontline services?

rofl ZD. That letter, which says carry on spending public money, is signed only by loads of academics who get their money from ... um, let me think about it ... the public purse.

Litchick there is no alternative to cuts, but there are choices to be made about the timing of them in order to minimise the risk of returning to recession. See David Blanchflower on this.

Hey hang on a moment Fembear. There's a common misconception that academics are publicly funded. The reality is that they only partly are, the extent depending on where they work and in what subject. UK higher education is in fact one of our more successful 'export' industries with many thousands of foreign students paying fees which are much higher than those paid by home students. The department I used to work in paid for itself many times over.
Dunno what job you do, but I would be surprised if you brought as much foreign currency into the nation as I used to.

OTBMS, I don't think anyone is denying that your job is difficult, as are a lot of other jobs in the public and private sector.

But we cannot create a two tier system where people in one sector can retire earlier and with much greater pensions than the other. It is going to create an incredibly unfair two tier system in years to come, with many people working into old age and receiving tiny pensions later while many other people are not in that position.

Suggesting that everyone who wants a good pension should go and work in the public sector is obviously unworkable. We have to stop playing people off against each other and make sure that people have access to fair wages and broadly similar pension schemes. If wages were fairly assessed you might find that your profession received a higher wage while your pension was brought in line with other workers.

Fembear, you clearly hold academics in some contempt, but these economists do make a serious point. I would be more than happy to be persuaded that they are wrong, but I have not yet heard any argument as to why this should be. Do you have one?

Zephirine, I think it's a trade-off between not cutting too much too fast, and sending the right signal now about willingness/political ability to make cuts. As someone said somewhere recently, sending the right signal now will pay for itself. If we did nothing and got a downgrade, it would end up costing us a lot more.

Can we all just agree that everyone is being shafted by the bankers

Re all the extra managers discussed somewhere I have just worked out that there is 5 above me then the director and I cant work out what they all do except manager each other.

I don't hold academics in contempt but why was it only academics signing the letter? Vince Cable is held in respect because he used to be Chief Economist at Shell and people knew that he had been at the sharp end; he knew how it worked in practice, not just in theory. So, where were the Chief Economists of FTSE100 companies when this letter was doing the rounds?

The 'serious point' you seem to be missing is that you don't spend money you don't have. As I said, this plan might have worked if we had reserves but GB forgot all about his economic cycles and spent his rainy-day money. We are already teetering on the brink of losing our AAA credit rating. Imagine if we carried on spending so much that our economy was unstable and therefore our risk factor increased (like the PIGS countries). That, combined with a much-anticipated increase in base rates, means that we would waste a huge sum of money on servicing the interest on our debt instead of on useful things like doctors and teachers.