Public-private wage divide gets 50% wider

Andy_L

MissMoneypenny wrote: »

Who can forget the bumbling Jim Hacker and crafty civil servant Sir Humphrey who was always trying to create jobs and get up to schemes to make himself feel important, in

and I'll raise you the Fall & Rise of Reginald Perrin, the first few episodes of the Good life, The Office & Dillbert for equally irrelevant commentaries on the performance of the Private Sector.

MissMoneypenny

Andy_L wrote: »

and I'll raise you the Fall & Rise of Reginald Perrin, the first few episodes of the Good life, The Office & Dillbert for equally irrelevant commentaries on the performance of the Private Sector.

On Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister

[FONT=Trebuchet MS, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Its closely observed portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power has given me hours of pure joy.[/FONT]
Margaret Thatcher


[FONT=Trebuchet MS, arial, helvetica, sans-serif]Its closely observed portrayal of what goes on in the corridors of power has given me hours of pure joy.
[/FONT]

ruggedtoast

All these threads ever end up as is an exercise in sour grapes. As a public sector worker with a final salary pension (that may if I cling on to my job forever and Gordon doesnt nick it to give to a privately owned bank just about mean I can turn both bars on in my dotage) I apologise for not being as imminently fcked as my private sector brethren.

If its any consolation theres another 100 people going at my workplace to join the 100 that went a few months ago. Maybe I'll be amongst them, off to join the slag heap of the unemployable unemployed with only the cosseted public sector on their CVs to compete with the lean mean private sector job hunters.

Meanwhile my reasonably average graduate salary will continue to be thrown into a mean that includes GPs on £100,000 p/a and compared against another mean that includes people who work part time in Greggs so you can all continue to be angry at me.

Really2

Sir_Humphrey wrote: »

It should be pointed out that local councils are not part of the civil service.

Wrong local goverment is?

http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/corporate/1079260

How would local councils gelt civil service awards if they were not?

Old_Slaphead

Andy_L wrote: »

They do. but to draw any useful conclusions from the analysis you have to dig deeper than just comparing private & public sector averages.
eg is the difference simply caused by the Public sector paying more than the Private for like-for-like work or is there something skewing the averages such as

Age profile - older workers tend to be paid more
Gender profile - women tend to be paid less
Education/skills profile - most unskilled labour has been contracted out
Industry bias - public sector is under represented in "sales occupations", the lowest paid sector, what effect does that have
Size of employer - do large/blue chip companies have better T&Cs than small ones?
Location bias - with it's "universal service obligation" the public sector has to compete in high pay areas whilst much of the Private sector can relocate where labour is cheaper.

In the olden days independent pay review bodies used to do this sort of analysis but were abolished (late 80s IIRC) except for the Police/Military as the conclusions they came out with limited the ability of the government to use Public Sector pay policy to influence the economy, eg by holding down pay to encourage the Private Sector to follow suit to combat inflation

I acknowledge what you say about the potential pitfalls of comparisons however as Cannon Fodder says with a sampling size of millions many of these deviations will have been ameliorated.

The overall fact of the matter is that 20 years ago it was acknowledged that public sector was lower paid. Many areas have been given considerable increases in the past 10 years and it is now clearly not the case. Now is the time to recognise that both sectors are on a par and to ensure that remuneration packages (ie including pensions) are in future, kept on roughly in line.

For ever low paid public job there is a low paid private sector equivalent that doesn't have equivalent T&Cs (ie holidays, pensions, job security). Now all the lucrative banking jobs are being eliminated the statistics will become even more stark.

The simple question is how can the rapidly shrinking public sector continue to support the ever increasing bloated and inefficent public sector. (I'm not suggesting individual, personal inefficiency but a systemic one).

One of Brown's stated policies at the outset was to decrease red tape - clearly he has failed abysmally....au contrair, he has accelerated the move towards a target driven, bureacratic culture the cost of which will impact on living standards the taxpayers wallets for generations to come.

Caroline73_2

gerkin wrote: »

Funny how the public sector workers try to justify thier job. When the govt runs out of money we will find out exactly whose existence is vital for the economy. Till then the pen pushing jobsworths can surf the internet at workplace at my expense and enjoy themselves.

I'm a nurse in the NHS - I think I am worth every penny that I am paid.

stonethrower

I think they will tax civil servants pensions eventually just like they have just done in Ireland.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2009/0203/economy.html

Jasper27_2

As a longtime civil servant I'm puzzled by many of the posts on this thread. If the public sector is all no work for great pay/perks and pensions why aren't you all jacking in your private sector posts and trying to get a public sector job?

Many government departments could run with less staff but this would mean the politicians and senior management getting their act together which is never going to happen. The biggest savings could be made by getting rid of outside consultants. In recent years due to programmes put into place on the advice of these consultants I've made shapes out of sticklebricks, drawn pictures of pigs and watched videos about a fishmarket. The taxpayer has paid for the time I've spent doing this none of which has helped me to do my job more effectively. I earn £18000 a year at the top of my scale, consultants can earn £1000 a day! Most of the public sector workers in this country are lower grades on less than average earnings, I don't know what we've done to deserve some of the vitriol and bile flying around this thread.

Old_Slaphead

Jasper27 wrote: »

As a longtime civil servant I'm puzzled by many of the posts on this thread. If the public sector is all no work for great pay/perks and pensions why aren't you all jacking in your private sector posts and trying to get a public sector job?

I think you'll find many people are (many who don't actually have to jack their job in because they've been given their P45) .
Local Government, of which I know a little, frequently gets in excess of 50 applicants for permanent jobs - sometimes as many as 300.

After all, other than supermarkets and fast food outlets, the public sector seems to be the only organisations recruiting these days.

Cannon_Fodder

Jasper,

If the public sector is as awful as you paint, why are you not following your own advice, and getting into the private sector where its so much better...?

This thread was not meant to pull the public sector apart, though, but to point out the "fact" that they are not all so hard up as they may say, when stating that their pension is needed to make up for a career of disadvantage.

Not everyone is on £18K...there are plenty of Government positions which get £50K+ ...http://jobs.guardian.co.uk/jobs/government/