Any Public Sector workers here?

Hectors_House

I work in the private sector myself but have a friend who was at managerial level in the public sector up North.

From what I can gather she worked for some kind of quango lobbying ministers for funds (she actually left a securer job the year before when they told her cut-backs would mean her loosing her first-class travel/stays in a good hotel during her days spent in London...she told them if she couldn't have her 'weekly jollys' she'd go elsewhere).

She was made redundant BEFORE all the coailition talks of cut-backs started and didn't see it coming (she had just bought a house when it happened) and is unsure what package she will get as she hadn't been in her new job very long when the axe fell.

To start with she was confident she'd pick something else up quickly but is now hearing jobs are hard to come by.

The Harrods wine hampers are going have to be put on hold for a while I guess!

dopester

twirlypinky wrote: »

The public sector isn't just a bunch of people you pay for through your taxes. We run the support structure in this country.

Privatise it all. The jobs are still there, but we can't afford the level of pay and costs involved.. Some of us have held off from buying a home for a long time during the Labour debt/spend miracle years. The money has run out now. If you've taken on debt believing in constant boom, or believed house prices double every 7 years, well that is your own lookout. The values of houses can fall, and fall significantly.

It doesn't have to be ruinous for many people, especially if you have a lot of equity in your home already - although it will hurt if you've left yourself in a crisis prone position by not knowing enough or believing people like Gordon Brown and Kirstie Allsopp and many of the other air-heads.

I'll pay a private firm for regular rubbish/refuse collections, and if fee structures are lowered, for health-care including private GP (as Bupa have). Prices will have to fall for because fewer people can afford it if they are out of work, taking pay-cuts, or having to do jobs at lower salaries than during Labour's miracle boom. And new business entrants will be willing to offer services to meet demand the lower prices - rather than it just come to a total stop.

Gwhiz

arby wrote: »

i'm not sure why the current frenzy over public sector job-losses. Since the recession, there's been well over a million private sector job losses while the public sector has increased employment. All this means is that now the pain will be shared a little more evenly. Sure, it's bad for people involved, but welcome to the world that most people have lived in their whole lives, ie, fear of redundancy, pay freezes when money is short, constant 'restructuring'. It's not pretty, but that's how businesses have to operate to stay efficient. Hopefully the public sector can become more efficient without too much disruption.

Have to agree with this. Public Sector has become bloated beyond belief during the last 12 years.

jockosjungle

I'm a public sector worker - my advice would be not to worry, I am completing on a house on Friday.

A senior guy in the council is different, what does this guy do? He may have been told or assume the writing is on the wall, the general rule is that you can save a lot of money by losing senior people and still maintain frontline services by keeping the staff that provide them.

They'll lose people thru natural wastage, etc. I think you have almost no chance of being made compulsory redundant. That'll be a last resort and saved for people whose offices are closing who refuse to move to another office.

I work for a large government department and I am 29, I wouldn't get a massive redundancy. However before they would consider making me redundant, they would offer early retirement and voluntary redundancy.

I assure you, that if they offered people terms to be made redundant, there would be a queue a mile long. I have known several people whose dream it is to be made redundant.

Only then would they be making people compulsory redundant, so I think you will be ok unless you do a job that really is pointless

R

RuthnJasper

mrcol1000 wrote: »

There a lot of council workers and managers who have had an easy life and have spent all day doing little for the last ten years are suddenly very nervous. Us council workers who are forced to work harder than our low salary pays us to are pretty confident.
Basically if your a manager who don't have anyone to manage or are bored at work or you have a non-job that doesn't really fufill any real priorty then you should be worried.

Oh, don't even get me STARTED on the corporate non-jobs. It really makes me LIVID.:mad: I've heard rumours that some councils are looking to employ "2012 Legacy Managers" to do some random stuff linked with the Olympics. Why? WHY?!? What's wrong with the good folks who are already working hard with sport and young people within councils? I bet they'd love the chance to use their skills and experience to link-in with the Olympics.

IMO, FAR too much money has been squandered in the past (can't speak for my own organisation - I've only been here for 3 years) on folks who have to CREATE work in order to justify their posts. drives me nuts when there are decent folks plugging away at their jobs for years who keep their heads down and seem to get forgotten.

RuthnJasper

jockosjungle wrote: »

They'll lose people thru natural wastage, etc. I think you have almost no chance of being made compulsory redundant. That'll be a last resort and saved for people whose offices are closing who refuse to move to another office.
R

100% spot-on Jocko; that's what I was trying to say, but you put it much better! :beer:

Hectors_House

jockosjungle wrote: »

I'm a public sector worker - my advice would be not to worry, I am completing on a house on Friday.

A senior guy in the council is different, what does this guy do? He may have been told or assume the writing is on the wall, the general rule is that you can save a lot of money by losing senior people and still maintain frontline services by keeping the staff that provide them.

Yes, from the anecdote I've given above I'd have to say my friend chose A) the wrong time to change jobs (for a not very realistic reason), and the wrong time to be so c0ck-sure that the bad stuff only happens to the little people.

Several of my friends are above the average in what they earn and it's a sign to me of how bad things are getting that they are only now starting to feel it - not always through loosing their jobs either. One chap I know earning about £40k is having to take on more shifts over weekends to fulfil his contracted hours because the level of freight has dropped with the recession as well as having to deal with more voids and problem tenants in his BTL properties.

I did try to warn all of them that some bad times were coming down the line but human nature being what it is no one wanted to listen so I kept my worries to myself.

new_home_owner_3

the public sector jobs that should go are the ones that we know are not being done, its like all the people who where supposed to be protecting baby p and the ones who let that little girl to starve in birmingham.

These people are just picking up there wages and not doing their jobs properly, they need to be weeded out and removed.

nurses, doctors and front line police dont need to be removed, but when you read stories about community officers who can not arrest anyone and will actually watch a person drown, because they dont want to get wet should aslo be removed.

What is the point of paying a community officer 15000 pounds a year when they are pointless, all they can do is advise, these are the pointless jobs that need to be removed.

id prefer them to cut community officers and put proper police on our streets.

it comes to something when community officers outnumber normal police officers and that whats happened.

Theres loads of wastage in jobs within the public sector and its about time it was addressed.

Im not saying all public sector jobs are not being done, but i bet when you look at the bigger picture there are loads of public sector workers who pick up a wage every month for not doing jack.

FATBALLZ

RuthnJasper wrote: »

I'm an Area Officer for a County Council. Yes; times are bad. My pay has been frozen for at least two years (at time of writing). _pale_

Without wanting to get into a public vs private debate, you really don't help yourselves with these sorts of comments. I've had no pay rise in two years either but thats standard fare in the private sector. I certainly wouldn't say it warrants 'bad' being heavily emphasised and a face with the colour draining away.

Bad is when your whole department is sacked off leaving 200 people out of a job - I think given the attitudes on this post it's likely times really will become bad - are 600,000+ public sector workers going to leave in a couple of years through 'natural wastage'? Where are they going to go? I'd imagine the attrition rate is very low.

princeofpounds

Yes; times are bad. My pay has been frozen for at least two years (at time of writing).

Yeah I was amazed by this comment too. Private sector pay per worker is flat over the same period (although more volatile - went down in recession and up more recently).

If you add in the fact that private sector employment fell and public sector increased over the crisis, then as a matter of fact time are somewhat better than average.

I don't totally blame the poster, as there has been inflation and so it's not going to feel nice, but so far the public sector has in truth been been sheltered - after all, public sector output in GDP actually *increased* over 2009 thanks to the pre-election spending splurge by Labour! There was no recession in the public sector.

What is coming over the next couple of years is the result of two things. One is an adjustment to reflect the plain reality that the economy has contracted and so can afford less baseline public spending, the other is an adjustment to reflect the fact that we have reached our sovereign 'credit limit' and so must also restrict the spending above the baseline that we have been doing with borrowed money to date.

I get really depressed when I hear people criticising the coalition for making these decisions, because if you actually look at the numbers and have a knowledge of finance, you realise that there really was no choice. They are actually being rather responsible in terms of making hard decisions above party politics, yet they will probably get the blame for the pain when the root cause was, almost unarguably, the profligacy of the previous administration.

As to why you don't hear much about sackings and so on, I believe the departmental-level spending reviews aren't supposed to be completed until October, so the worst has not yet hit.