Public sector pensions nearly over?

peterg1965

Let's not forget, it is the Public sector which is the 'unproductive' part of the economy. The 'State' sector should be as lean and efficient as possible. At the moment it fails on all counts - please provide evidence to the contrary if it exists. With every new Govt initiative (Socialist New Labour - Let us not forget) comes with it a Quango (Quasi Non Governmental Organisation) which is not accountable to the voting public. They all employ well intentioned individuals who do nothing to futher the economy - this is the long lasting legacy of Bliar and Brown.

The Taxpayers Alliance have a list of Quangos which probably add absolutely nothing to our daily lives, shoot me down in flames but disbanding the whole lot will enable us to pay off the public debt a little quicker. I can't believe anyone who works for such a farcical array of joke organisations doesn't believe they are living on borrowed time. Oh, and to bring it back to the original question, I suspect they are all happily accruing public sector pensions.

bumpoowee

marklv wrote: »

They probably had enough of arrogant !!!!!! like you! :rotfl:

Well all I can say on that, is that I didn't expect to go through a 4 stage selection process with minimum 2:1 degree requirement which included travelling to the other end of the country to expect to end up in a team where I had to tell a number of people twice my age how to do the very basics of the job, and have to pick up work they couldn't be bothered to do as it intefered with their 2.5 hour lunch breaks and journey home at 4pm. Not that they did much work in the 4-5 hours they were actually in the office anyway. It's just not in my nature to come to work and waste time on obvious inefficiencies and accomplish nothing.

bumpoowee

marklv wrote: »

Gravy train? What gravy train? Are you on drugs or what? The only gravy train is the one that the bankers and financial dealers have been on, with all their huge and undeserved bonuses. What do these !!!!!! do for the country? Buy and sell financial instruments, that's all. Big deal. They are just glorified gamblers, nothing else. Why don't you complain about these people instead of picking on public sector workers who are keeping this country going?

I honestly don't know enough about 'bankers' and top-end financial people to say whether they deserve their rewards, although I do expect they earn more than they should. It may be that they need to be reined in, but that's another issue.

What makes you think public sector workers 'keep the country going' any more than private sector workers? If everybody in my private sector job quit, there would be no ATMs, Internet/telephone banking, Debit/Credit cards and you'd have to queue up in the branch to pay any bills or withdraw cash. If private sector employees in supermarkets all went on strike tomorrow where would you buy your groceries? If private sector car companies packed it all in how would you get around?

At the end of the day in the modern world private sector companies cannot be reasonably expected to accept unlimited liability on pension payouts, so the public sector should not expect to receive preferential treatment.

marklv

bumpoowee wrote: »

Well all I can say on that, is that I didn't expect to go through a 4 stage selection process with minimum 2:1 degree requirement which included travelling to the other end of the country to expect to end up in a team where I had to tell a number of people twice my age how to do the very basics of the job, and have to pick up work they couldn't be bothered to do as it intefered with their 2.5 hour lunch breaks and journey home at 4pm. Not that they did much work in the 4-5 hours they were actually in the office anyway. It's just not in my nature to come to work and waste time on obvious inefficiencies and accomplish nothing.

I don't know where you worked, but I have never come across such a scenario in my experience, which leads me to think that you have a lot of chips on your shoulder.

Looking at my office I can tell you that my boss gets in at 8am and leaves at 6pm, having his lunch always at his desk. Most of the other managers do likewise. Hardly a 4-5 hour day, more like a 10 hour one. Speaking for myself I never take more than 25 minutes for lunch.

If people take long lunch breaks then it means that they are either very unmotivated or simply don't have much to do. The former is usually because their work never gets recognition and they are generally treated like dogsbodies, the latter means that their managers haven't planned the workload properly for the team. Therefore the problem is one of organisation and management at the senior end, not necessarily the performance of the team. Sure, you will get shirkers, as in any office, but you shouldn't jump to conclusions on that basis alone.

marklv

bumpoowee wrote: »

I honestly don't know enough about 'bankers' and top-end financial people to say whether they deserve their rewards, although I do expect they earn more than they should. It may be that they need to be reined in, but that's another issue.

What makes you think public sector workers 'keep the country going' any more than private sector workers? If everybody in my private sector job quit, there would be no ATMs, Internet/telephone banking, Debit/Credit cards and you'd have to queue up in the branch to pay any bills or withdraw cash. If private sector employees in supermarkets all went on strike tomorrow where would you buy your groceries? If private sector car companies packed it all in how would you get around?

OK, if ATMs shut down it's not the end of the world - people will just have to use human bank tellers like they did in the 1950s. If the NHS and Police shut down you get mass death, violence and anarchy. Which is worse?

bumpoowee wrote: »

At the end of the day in the modern world private sector companies cannot be reasonably expected to accept unlimited liability on pension payouts, so the public sector should not expect to receive preferential treatment.

The public sector doesn't get preferential treatment - this is a misconception fed by right wing papers like the Times, Telegraph, Mail and Sun. Private sector companies offer bonuses and sometimes profit share payouts (e.g. John Lewis/Waitrose); public sector employers don't offer these. Private sector employers often offer private healthcare and company cars/car allowances to mainstream staff; public sectors employers offer these only to senior managers, if at all. I could go on and on. So, you see, even if private sector employers now generally do not offer good pensions, they offer a vast range of other benefits that are not on offer in the public sector, and I repeat what I said before: I could earn 10-15% more in the private sector for the job I do. I have checked and verified this very thoroughly - not a day goes by without an agent leaving a voicemail on my mobile telling me that such and such an employer is interested in my CV etc. All this in a recession!! It takes strong willpower to resist calling the agent back.

marklv

peterg1965 wrote: »

Let's not forget, it is the Public sector which is the 'unproductive' part of the economy. The 'State' sector should be as lean and efficient as possible. At the moment it fails on all counts - please provide evidence to the contrary if it exists. With every new Govt initiative (Socialist New Labour - Let us not forget) comes with it a Quango (Quasi Non Governmental Organisation) which is not accountable to the voting public. They all employ well intentioned individuals who do nothing to futher the economy - this is the long lasting legacy of Bliar and Brown.

The Taxpayers Alliance have a list of Quangos which probably add absolutely nothing to our daily lives, shoot me down in flames but disbanding the whole lot will enable us to pay off the public debt a little quicker. I can't believe anyone who works for such a farcical array of joke organisations doesn't believe they are living on borrowed time. Oh, and to bring it back to the original question, I suspect they are all happily accruing public sector pensions.

Indeed. And many of these 'quangos' deserve to be shut down as soon as possible. I am totally in favour of a 'lean' public sector as long as public services don't suffer and essential tasks are not outsourced to incompetent private sector companies that pay sweatshop wages and employ clueless individuals. Saving money is all very well, but work needs to be done properly.

My employer uses a lot of consultants, the opinion of senior management being that these 'experts' are needed for large, complex projects and training internal staff would be too expensive, leading to the latter eventually being 'poached' by private sector employers. Nonsense, of course, but the senior management have been given tough objectives to deliver some key projects and they want to play as safe as possible, even if it means the taxpayer forking out extra billions to Accenture, Deloitte, etc.

What needs to change is the mentality of ministers and the senior people in the public sector. We need to go back to basics and focus on delivering useful services to the public at competitive costs and stop using all the ultra-expensive consultants that have no personal stake in making the public sector work well. The public sector needs fewer 'eggheads' with IQs of 180, MBAs, PhDs and what not, and more people with plain common sense - people from an operational bakground who know why things are going wrong and have clear and practical ideas as to how to fix the problems. Only then can we move forward.

peterg1965

marklv wrote: »

common sense - people from an operational bakground who know why things are going wrong and have clear and practical ideas as to how to fix the problems. Only then can we move forward.

ABSOLUTELY. A phrase that has been sadly lacking in many, many aspects of our lives for the last decade.

dzug1

marklv wrote: »

. I would also freeze the pay of all public sector workers who earn above a certain level for one year, and in the case of the very highest paid for several years. .

Unfortunately I fear a more likely outcome is the freezing of salaries BELOW a certain level

peterg1965

dzug1 wrote: »

Unfortunately I fear a more likely outcome is the freezing of salaries BELOW a certain level

Another bête noire of mine. NO ONE in the public sector should be paid more than the Prime Minister - absolutely no exceptions. CEs of NHS Trusts, BBC Director Generals (and other assorted overpaid luvvies including 'celebs' contracted to the Beeb), Judges, Heads of Quangos (various).

dzug1

peterg1965 wrote: »

Another bête noire of mine. NO ONE in the public sector should be paid more than the Prime Minister - absolutely no exceptions. CEs of NHS Trusts, BBC Director Generals (and other assorted overpaid luvvies including 'celebs' contracted to the Beeb), Judges, Heads of Quangos (various).

Well yes - but one conclusion you could draw from that is that the PM is underpaid