so, we are all shafted then. public sector workers in poor areas to get pay freeze

[ThatVikRinA22]

here

this is a great idea. NOT.

as a fairly new police officer, i was horrified to read Windsors 2nd review, basically, as a 40 year old woman, i would not have got in to the police service under these new recommendations. The police will lose all their protected rights but still not have the legal right to strike.I am still wading through it - this job is far far tougher than i thought possible, and at the end of most shifts i look back and think "i was in real danger there...." Reading it, it looks like it is stacked against older officers and women, and if you are injured (even while on duty) and on 'light duties' for more than 12 months, they can get rid of you.
Thats before they make the fitness test harder for older officers and increase the retirement age/pensionable age to 60, (but i know i wont be rolling around on the floor with people at 60, or running a fitness test - they will have rid of me long before tha,t i suspect) as it is we have a 2 year pay freeze with then only a 1% increase for the following 2 years, and they want to reduce the starting wage by £4500 while asking that you have a degree to join....it is ludicrous.....this is all while numbers have dropped and police budgets lessoned by at least 20%, in reality i can see since i joined that our numbers are less and it makes the job dangerous - i have been in really precarious situations where i needed back up and there has been none (im thinking of one particular night shift where there was myself and my female colleague being the only available car left in our district when we got called to a burglary in progress in a remote scrap yard with no back up available)....anyway enough of me....

because now, our dear PM has decided that teachers and nurses in poorer areas should have a pay freeze because they live in a poor area and obviously dont need as much to live on for that reason, while teachers in more affluent areas should be on more money.

i wish i could say i was incredulous. sadly im not.

he also said minimum wage shouldn't go up, to encourage firms to take on new workers

so my £6.08 an hour will need to stretch even further then....better cancel Barbados then

It's nothing new Vicar unfortunately. I'm a public sector worker in a ex mining town in yorkshire so I guess that would be considered one of the poorer areas. I think this is our third year of pay freeze.

Unions are still thrashing out over whether we are going to have a pay cut in april too though it looks like those of us who are among the lower end may escape it now though the deal is not yet finalised. I think 4.8 percent was first touted which is frightening when you add that to what your wages should have been if we'd actually had an annual pay rise lately.

It's nothing new Vicar unfortunately. I'm a public sector worker in a ex mining town in yorkshire so I guess that would be considered one of the poorer areas. I think this is our third year of pay freeze.

Unions are still thrashing out over whether we are going to have a pay cut in april too though it looks like those of us who are among the lower end may escape it now though the deal is not yet finalised. I think 4.8 percent was first touted which is frightening when you add that to what your wages should have been if we'd actually had an annual pay rise lately.

Time to get out of public service roles.

I have nursed for 18 years, pretty good at it and work in an area where experienced, senior staff are gold dust (Elderly Care).

Sadly my commitment to the service and trying to ensure older people receive high standards of care cannot be be carried to the detriment of my pay packet repeatedly.

As you say cuts in services are making our roles dangerous and I am sick of being complicit in allowing this to happen.

I don't doubt for a second your job is incredibly hard and I have the greatest respect for the police.

That said, this proposal is not just targeted at the police but all public sector workers. Personally I'm open minded about the changes. Given there is a huge difference in living costs between the South East and the North East (for example), I can see the logic that pay should be varied.

As for fitness tests I must admit I and probably many others would have assumed that they were a matter of routine and I'm surprised they are not done at all after you've joined.

I don't see if an officer has kept a certain level of fitness why it would be hard for them to do this as they get older? I know quite a few people who are 60+ and would put me to shame fitness wise. My ex-FIL is 60 this year IIRC and has run half marathon's each year for the last 14 years.

Otherwise I agree with the rest of your post and I am also sad to see police budgets slashed so much. Personally I would like to have seen other areas take bigger cuts but that's just my own view.

So which geographic areas of the country would see a rise in income? Poss SE? So Wales and the NE get less money, which then generates less income locally, which menas the entire area gets poorer, which means accorsing to Osbourne, they need less wages.....ad infinitum.

PS workers are paid slightly better than PrS because they are older, more experienced, better educated and more valuable as a result. They also do stuff that others would baulk at, such as Vicar's job.

But niceguy the job is the same whether you live in London or Leicester.

A Ward Sister will have the same roles and responsibilities in both locations.

If anything, it takes longer to reach a senior role in nursing outside of London, due to less posts and a bit of 'dead man's shoes'.

Can we really justify that an individual gets paid less for doing the same job, just a few miles away and could possibly have more experience and skills that the other?

Exactly freshegg.

How many people would have been willing to be in work at 07.30 this morning, to help wash, dress, feed 34 dependant people with dementia and multiple complex needs?

It's nothing about 'flexible' work markets. It's about a political philosphy of greed and unfairness, and a hatred of public service, because rich investing chums can't be minted from it so easily.

I worked as a teacher in a posh area of London, got the weighting and had a lovely MC school with involved parents and high expectations. I moved to a very poor area of the NW, bought an enormous house for the cost of a garage in my previous location and worked in a very challenging school with a high immigrant population, huge social and economic problems, drugs, violence, discipline issues, gangs, majority on FSM and clothing coupons, parents' evenings where 3 or less turned up.
Then I moved a few more times, am currently in a leafy green high-achieving school, parental support and generally easy children. My house is smaller, but my life is a lot easier and safer and my children's environment improved immensely.
So if the proposals go through and wages become linked to the regional wages, where do you think the competitions for jobs will be greatest?
Who will want to work in a school with a myriad problems and demands, with a national expectation from OFSTED about standards and paperwork and levels at a lower wage than me in my lovely little nook?

This is a bollocks proposal from the Tories

I live in London and am public sector. I could earn more switching to the private sector. Will they raise my pay what about nurses? They should earn more. Will they raise it? Teachers?

It'll make things worse - private sector employers will have no incentive to pay decent wages. Local pay bargaining will be an absolute nightmare and will be more of an administrative headache for the government. What happens with departments who have offices across the country? How will they draw the boundaries?

It's just like what they're doing with pensions - a race to the bottom.

They're slowly eroding the rights of all workers for the benefit of "business". Business who happen to be men like the Tory cabinet. I'd like to know how a business making huge profits stands to benefit the low paid worker?

And Labour have their knickers in a twist so will offer no credible opposition.

We already have London weightings built into most public sector pay schemes.

There is already a lot of admin work being done in places other than London and deliberately banded lower in the pay scheme.

This is a thinly veiled attempt to aim cuts at traditionally labour supporting areas. Disgusting.

I think it is a bizarre proposal actually, because it will widen the gap in living costs/house prices and so on even further.

In many 'poorer' areas, public sector employment makes up a unsustainably high proportion of employment so this could take a lot of money out of local economies.

This is ill-thought out.

On the contrary, it's beautifully thought out from a Tory perspective.

Public sector pay has gone up relative to private sector because all the really badly paid jobs have been out-sourced and now some one has to make a profit out of cleaning and catering the cleaners and caterers are getting less money - its not rocket science to work out that public sector workers have not recieved fat pay rises, further cutting their pay is not going to help us out of recession, nor is it going to narrow the gap between the top earners and the rest of us.

Anyone would think the country is being run by rich morons who really don't give a toss about anyone except their rich mates.. wait a minute.

Well at least in a democracy we can vote them out.. oh hold on that isn't quite the case is it.. fuck

ThisIs I'm a Tory and I don't think it is.

We heard about this a few months ago. It is a fucking disgrace - divide and rule - destroy the power of collective bargaining and cause infighting in the public sector. The apparent higher pay of the public sector is because they compare it against very low paid manual labour in the private sector.

I joined the civil service about 10 years ago; at the interview the panel were pratically begging me to take the job, even because of relatively low pay and I did because of the benefits - flexible hours and deferred pay in the form a good pension. I am on a 3 year pay freeze, I reckon I have been diddled out of around £20k over the 3 years, which I thought was mine contractually. Now I and most of my colleagues (we are "professionals") are looking to go back and take our chances in the private sector. Our union was under the foolish notion it could negotiate - but the Government refuses.

They want to destroy the public sector and privatise as much as possible - look what is happening in local government re libraries and such like.

will MP's whose seats are in less affluent areas or live in poorer areas be similarly treated ? Or am i just being daft ?

screwed.

just waiting for the NHS to implode and that'll be me (and millions of other people, whether employees or users) completely fucked.

rose of course not - they compare MPs to high paid professionals

Kesington. It ain't much better, if at all in the private sector.

I haven't had a payrise for 3 years. Anyone who leaves isn't being replaced. Many jobs are being offshored. Pension changes forced through for those lucky enough to have been on final salary pensions.

Which is why it's scary niceguy because they should be thinking of ways to protect all employees. People can accept pay cuts/freezes if they know they'll be rewarded later on. Doesn't seem to be the case here...

To the OP, I'm an operational civvie with the police and I agree with everything you say...especially about the low number of frontline officers, which is decreasing all the time.
And for the record if anyone actually believes any police force which says that officers are not backfilling civvie functions where people have taken redundancy/retirement options...please see the reality...half of my civilian shift is now made up of operational officers who have been pulled in off the beat, and it's only getting worse. (and these officers are paid £13K more than civvies carrying out the same function, so that's a saving HOW?)

This is basically linking wages to house prices as they are using that as a benchmark or at least one of them. The govt will do anything to keep house prices elevated! Why don't they increase salaries in areas where the cost of living is high rather than the reverse

I'm waiting to see if the MPs (public servants all of them) are included in this.

I'm not holding my breath