Conservative proposals to freeze public sector pay-what do we think??

[MavisEnderby]

Good idea or not?

Do the rich just teleport to work? We all have expenses. It is up to the employee to fund many of these.

I have to pay to get to work, and also have to pay for the clothes I wear (eg suits that I would never wear at home). I also pay a lot of money out of pocket just to get my job done without having to ask my bosses for permission which they might refuse 'in the current economic climate'.

Will this include nurses on 17 grand or more, cos thats not much money and what about there mortgages?

You're seeing polarisation where I intend none

of course the rich have costs also,
but if your salary leaves £28 and transport is £27.50 then happy days

If your salary is £26 oh shite

to paraphrase a novel LOL

All I am saying is that salaries shouldn't be affected until they cover a basic subsistence level, which is what minimum wage represents to most, and as prices rise that wage will cease to cover it. I am not an affected person on munimum wage, have no eprsonal axe, but it is basic life that you can only suck up the loss if their is sapce in your costs, and those most affected will be the poorest.

There is a minimumlevel at which work would satrt to cost too much. I don't mean 'wpuld be a biot better of on benefits', I mean can't manage childcare or the petrol any mroe. At that point there is something wrong, and this rule would palce peoplemoreat risk.

As it happens I think this is another example of bankers do the crap, we take the flack (yep am credit free and innocent LOl- I do get to moralise .

Given that the mortgage rate is near as dammit to zero, that is hardly relevent.

If you are so worried about 50p and don't have a fag habit/Sky TV addiction to give up, then you are probably below the £18k that will not be subject to the freeze.

I thought Labour were doing the same? (warning DM link)

Ok I understand the idea that the books need to be balanced but I cant help but think that this idea is based on some sort of revenge for the private sector having to suffer cuts (from politicians). It is lazy politics.

An awful lot of employees are not much above minimum wage levels, a lot (educated to degree level) still qualify for tax credits. We may have had decent wage rises the last 10 years but we were starting from well behind.

There are other ways to save money in the public sector; eg senior managers actually talking to frontline staff about how the service can be improved instead of employing a consultancy for 1.5 million. Or in the case of ppf actually getting the company to do what they promised instead of diverting senior clinical staff away from their clinical duties.

Or ensuring that private firms providing th catering and cleaning provided the service promised and could be sacked if not. Thats just nhs I'm sure over sectors could come and rant about the wasteful mismanagement.

it's an allusion to literature

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.
Author: Charles Dickens

right off for dinner

adieu

short termism in the extreme. real solution is to cut number of public servants, particularly those in whitehall, the vast marjority who seem to do jack shit and are laughing all the way to bank with their salaries, final salary pension schemes and over inflated egos/vastly inflated senses of self.

You need to stop socialising with those civil servants, honesty. They're bringing you down.

I have had enough of the attitude from "the public" voiced many times on this thread, that it's about time the public sector faced cuts. I am a civil servant and the cuts started in 2007, while the private sector was riding high. Nobody else seems aware of this. I can't remember the exact figure but thousands of posts have been cut since 2007.

oh elvis my heart bleeds.... get real. private sector suffer cuts year on year on year. efficiency and effictiveness. unfortunately, Civil Servants dont seem to grasp that the show is over...

chillax

'Civil Servants dont seem to grasp that the show is over

where is this public - private polarisation thing coming from?

Listen, most people go to work, earn less than they deserve or need and get on with it

That does not depend on your sector

The gutter press fiocus somuch on the higher paid members of the public sector, the bankers in the private...

relaity is that most people answer phones, file paper and take home very little. In both areas.

Wishing redundancy on anyone is evil as well- this is real people. It happned to us and God forbid it happening to anyone else.

Um interesting so how about a public sector pay freeze if 80% of private sector signs up for this to?

to include ?all ?90% (not sure how to police this) of private sector employees earning over 50K

I was employed in a recent job to do a particular task (public sector) that task has finished so I moved on, after a while I have been replaced the person replacing me has the equivalent of one days fixed work a a week he sits in an office answering questions the rest of the time. The previous question answerers are still there and have taken on no additional work.

So why shouldn't that job go and his salary be used to give some hard working front line staff an inflation meeting pay rise (it would make a change!)

There was a hysterical news piece on the radio one morning about a job ad for a street naming operative on 29k by one council
fine as they said

except it was to join the street naming team

flipside is various management consultants/PFI/continual reorganisation which wastes more money than you can imagine

I thought public sector pay freeze was going to save about 3 billion a year whereas raising retirement age from 65 to 66 would save 13.2 billion? (maybe they got the figures the wrong way round )

Jobs will go both in the public and private sector

Freezing pay will reduce public sector job losses

Agree with those who said we should ditch the consultants and quangos and non jobs

Oh and tax & NI will go up for everyone too

i actually think its utter frustration with the pensions timebomb that is being created and exacerbated by an overstaffed and overpaid civil service while frontline staff get paid jackshit for delivering the services that really matter to people (nurses, care workers etc)

Yes to cutting non jobs- but ralnon jobs though, not the raljobs with stupidly named job titles- remembering that article in the press years ago where they listed non jobs and when people went through them, quite a few were sound just given stupid titles.

And there should be realisation that redundancies alrgely shifts the tax burden from employment to benefits; and there are interesting arguments to be ahd about whether unemployment (ans we do have a saturated job amrket atm) costs mroe when you factor in benfits, hosuing, stressrelated healyh and SSD costs, possibility of increased generationalpoverty etc etc

It's never as simple as 'we need £60k, off you go'

Problem is that 'Public Sector' covers too many strands for this type of proposal to be realistic. On one hand you have front line staff who are underpaid and very stressed, and where job vacancies cannot be filled because it is just not worth it. On the other hand you have shocking inefficiencies (I have private sector friends who have worked at various points in time in 'admin-type' areas of the public sector - they have all been rendered near speechless at the low levels of productivity); You don't solve either of these issues with a pay freeze, all you are doing is a spot of marketing ahead of the election.

The difficulty is that what is really needed is a roots-and-branch reform to remove inefficiencies, reallocate resources to the areas that are stretched, and lea dto long term savings. This is usually possible even in huge organisations (we have seen it happen to the privatised industries, for example). But that is near impossible in public sector because (1) Unionisation in the UK, (2) the short-termism of UK politics, (3) you need a strategy to deal with the fall-out (you need to be dynamic enough to deal with effect on unemployment etc, and regional imbalances that would arise), and (4) The initial investment would be huge (eg you can only cut costs in HMRC for example if you first simplify the tax laws in the country).

There is one EU country that I think has started such a reform but can't remember which one, and it has only been recently so effects not yet known. In an economy of our size it is theoretically possible, but would be political suicide and might create too much of an imbalance of borrowings in the short term to be sustainable in terms of our global position as a country.

So the govt avoids the big problems and announces a few crowd-pleasers that will probably cost more in red tape to implement than is saved, and also will, in some cases, be illegal (wage cuts, for example). And I guess all the parties equally hope that global hyper inflation will come along at some point to clear up the debt mess, so we will end up with the 70's again. Which will be a tragedy, however often it gets repeated.

Sigh

Cutting less-valued jobs means that those individuals are out of work.

This is harsh if the objective is to give you a small pay rise. You get 5%, they get minus 100%.

But once we agree that as a country we can't afford to pay someone to do very little it becomes clear.

I have given a very specific example we all know that there are oodles of wonderful nurses working very hard at a shitty job for little pay and we all know that there are oodles of lazy f^%$£&s busy telling everyone else what (not) to do.

why should one member take a pay cut to pay for the others really are you all prepared to take a pay cut so the street naming team can get another mamber? why shouldn't my replacement go and get a real job doing something useful?

I'm not so sure freezing pay will reduce job losses tbh, I just hear projected increases in budget cuts rather than decreases

I know this is an old thread but we have yet to have anyone from the private sector come on here and say 'OK we're all in it together' if you will I will

I think those less valued jobs probably do add value (otherwise they wouldn't exist). Eradicating them comes down to mostly selfishness, and ideology.

I can't see how socialists can view a small pay rise as justifying someone losing their job completely. Those are harsh encomic decisions not normally attributed to wishy washy socialism.

Are we confusing our ideologies (not for the first time)?

Sorry if I confused you I was referring to my earlier post about someone who replaced me but since most of the work I did finished when I left he effectively does 1 day a week for a full-time salary.

I suspect his job would be very 'valued' by the gen public but ultimatly he was given it because my boss wanted the kudos of having me replaced and couldn't accept that the job was done.

However his boss should have said no.

This is a classic example of public sector waste and poor management, ultimately I am not prepared to take a further pay cut (I have had sub-inflation ie 1% or less for years) to keep this guy in a job sorry ditto for the street naming operative

bizarrely I don't feel remotely selfish posting that at all