So which public sector jobs are better paid in the public than the private sector?

[lesley33]

I am sure you have read in the news about the proposal to freeze or reduce public sector pay in poorer parts of the country. Part of the argument being put forward is that public sector wages are higher than in the private sector, in all but the South East. However I am struggling to think of jobs where public sector staff are paid more than the equivalent private sector staff. However, perhaps that is just in my area of work.

So if you know of jobs where the equivalent post is paid less in the private sector than in the public sector, please let me know.

Xenia - the majority of the private sector is so badly paid because rich fuckers at the top scrape off all the profits. (and go and buy islands for themselves or some other sort of selfish arsed acts)

Getting rid of admin services for constants/doctors would cost money not save it. The time it takes to type up patients notes, referrals, gp letters ect is vast, it's a far better spend to have someone on £15k/pa doing this than a consultant on £60k. For 1 hour of a consultant ou an have 4 of an administrator. As for comparing a hospital consultants administrator with a school administrator is just crazy, it's not like for like, school letters tend to duplicated per year group nt pupil.

Also this race to the bottom is wrong.

I don't know how to make this comparison

No-one in the public sector does my sort of work

Certainly very few people in the public sector are paid so well

You are comparing apples with pears. There is no direct read-across

national museums generally try to pay a living wage to their post-graduate qualified specialist staff whereas private museums generally pay something close to minimum wage as people do the work for the love of it

oh, and the result of this is that national museums have diversity programmes which confirm that to get a mix of staff from different ethnicities and with varying social backgrounds you HAVE to pay a living wage... private museums are generally staffed by older retired people, those who have private money or women whose husbands are high earners as a 'hobby'.

I think you are missing the point about full time versus part time workers making better managers.

My own profession is heavily female-dominated. Managers in this sector are almost universally female (I've had nine managers I ought to know!). The ones with kids who opt to work part time rarely if ever become managers because they are not given the opportunity to job share a post with a colleague (on the rare occasion they are, it actually works well).

The ones who become managers are either the ones without kids or the ones who will commit to working full time after having children. This doesn't mean the rest of us wouldn't make better managers - we're just not given the chance to job share because nobody thinks laterally.

My last manager was a spinster. She worked with kids but didn't much like them. She was bloody awful but hey, she could work full time. Senior management loved her because she did as she was told. Staff despised her and staff turnover rate/sickness/stress was high. She had no idea how to manage people.

She had no management credentials or qualifications aside from 'doing as she was told.' Her job was advertised internally as a full time role. Nobody else was in a position to do it but I'm sure there would have been better candidates externally.

In the end she was promoted and promoted and now runs a major section of the local PCT. It is staggering.

Nurses earn more in public sector than private

You'd have to break that down into an hourly wage, though, milkys and be absolutely sure you're comparing apples with apples.

Having one or two nurses on a night shift minding 10 post elective surgical patients, patients taken on because they were fit and healthy to start with can't be compared to 2 or 3 nurses looking after a 24 bedded ward of all-comers in the NHS at night.

FWIW radiographers tend to be paid more privately BUT they sacrifice a proper pension scheme, career progression, the knowledge that their kit is safe and new, the ability to say 'no' to completely spurious requests and they lose the ability to adapt their technique to accommodate those all-comers as the vast majority of their clientele are 'the worried well'. It's considered a 'winding down towards retirement' thing to go private as a radiographer.

I earn more now I've left public sector admin.

I started off in the private sector, then went to the Civil Service, now work for a big charity. Private was by far the best paid and came with perks as well (subsidised canteen, gym membership, health insurance). I took a big pay cut for more interesting work (I did something for the CS that the private sector simply doesn't do, although it did need my professional qualification), then moved on last year rather than waiting to be made redundant (for another pay cut because what I used to do was so specialised and didn't have a non-government equivalent so eight years' experience was effectively valueless, hey ho).

The comparisons are mostly fairly duff because all the really low-paid work has been contracted out to the private sector (cleaning, security, etc). The evidence seems to suggest that highly-skilled professionals get less in the public sector than they would in the private (which was certainly my own case), but the picture's more mixed in mid-range admin-type jobs.

I think you have to be better at your job to be highly paid in the private sector. Top firms just don't tolerate coasting.

I'd be more impressed if the public sector unions hadn't been enthusiasticly cheering Labour on as they implemented mass immigration to suppress wages. They clearly never considered that it might affect the public sector as well as the private.