Public Sector Pay Restraint Ending?

Thrugelmir

sevenhills wrote: »

All the workers on a low wage will not be bothered what rise they get, as the minimum wage has increased so much. The Tories would have you believe that all council workers are paid well above minimum wage, but that is not the case.

Just looked at our local council vacancies. Lowest advertised vacancy (traffic warden) is £1,500 above minimum wage rate for same number of hours. Then above that banding kicks in at around £4k more. For semi skilled manual and administrative work. That's around the going rate locally at organisations such as Nationwide BS etc. Better than the 24 hr distribution depots. Where the additional benefits will be much lower.

BobQ

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Just looked at our local council vacancies. Lowest advertised vacancy (traffic warden) is £1,500 above minimum wage rate for same number of hours. Then above that banding kicks in at around £4k more. For semi skilled manual and administrative work. That's around the going rate locally at organisations such as Nationwide BS etc. Better than the 24 hr distribution depots. Where the additional benefits will be much lower.

The trouble with this debate is that it makes no allowance for variations across the public sector. For example not all get increments and where they exist they are much shorter scales to avoid claims that they are discriminatory on age grounds. Osborne ordered the public sector to phase out increments and this has happened in many areas.

Similarly the public sector is quite varied. Some jobs require relatively few qualifications but others require high levels of education. In the past the public sector paid the less qualified better than the private sector but those with professional qualifications less.

We hear a lot about the nurses but there are many parts of the public sector where salaries have fallen, the best people have left, and significant sums are being spent on hiring contractors and agency staff to provide the service as the vacancies grow. These temporary workers cost a fortune and they move on increasingly to avoid IR35 issues.

In any commercial organisation if you had a continuing need for staff and were relying on contractors that cost you twice the economic cost of employing someone, you would offer better salaries and save money. This appears to be the case with agency nurses but its also the case with a lot of other parts of the public sector. This does not square with Conservative free market thinking does it?

Thrugelmir

BobQ wrote: »

The trouble with this debate is that it makes no allowance for variations across the public sector.

Nor is there comparison to the private sector. Salary alone being only one factor. The whole package needs to be considered. Working in one sector or another shouldn't make someone entitled to a better salary. There needs to be justification. After all the UK's productivity is shockingly poor. Probably because many people spend their working hours on their mobile phones etc. Something which was never once allowed. At work one worked.

The NHS has a multitude of factors in play. I personally know of several highly graded NHS staff. Who have taken their pensions at 55. Collected their lump sum of 3 times their annual pension. Then become agency staff. Choosing when and for who they work. Often at very good rates of pay on night or weekend shifts given their specialisms.

Barny1979

Thrugelmir wrote: »

What's the differential within the scales between points.

http://www.nicva.org/sites/default/files/d7content/attachments-articles/nicva_njc_payscales_aug_2016.pdf

vivatifosi

Part of the issue with public sector pay awards is that they are national, and many schemes for local weighting etc have been abandoned. A reasonable wage in Sunderland or Wolverhampton is not the same as one in Surrey, Herts or London due to housing costs. This division has got even wider at the same time as public sector pay restraint.

The problem now is that we have a government that doesn't have a magic money tree, but neither do their workers.

sevenhills

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Just looked at our local council vacancies. Lowest advertised vacancy (traffic warden) is £1,500 above minimum wage rate for same number of hours.

Enforcement Officers earn around £19k-£21k; certainly not the lowest paid at councils.
I am sure I am biased, because I work for a council, when the minimum wage was brought up to £7.20, I was on £7.19 so I got a pay rise.

sevenhills

vivatifosi wrote: »

Part of the issue with public sector pay awards is that they are national, and many schemes for local weighting etc have been abandoned. A reasonable wage in Sunderland or Wolverhampton is not the same as one in Surrey, Herts or London due to housing costs. This division has got even wider at the same time as public sector pay restraint.

The problem now is that we have a government that doesn't have a magic money tree, but neither do their workers.

And when they want to keep low wages down because there are numerous low skilled workers coming into the country, do they also want to keep the wages of teachers low, and nurses, now that foreign nurses no longer coming here to work has led to a shortage.

StevieJ

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Majority are also on incremental grading scales that run for 10 years.

.

Does that mean they are underpaid for 10 years?

Mistermeaner

if the pay is so bad why on earth does anyone want to work there?

Why don;t these highly skilled professional people get a job with the salary and conditions they deserve somewhere else?

HornetSaver

Debates on this issue (in general, not criticising this thread) tend to be oversimplified and politicised to the point that it's not practical for those who make the decisions to change anything. As exemplified by the following letter - and the reaction to it - that I'm sure most of us have already seen.

https://twitter.com/DerbyChrisW/status/881750287081459714/photo/1

In a nutshell before I try and expand on my reasoning: I want public sector pay to stay where it is in real terms overall, but am not happy with the manner in which pay has been distributed.

There is no reason why public sector administrators and lower/middle managers should be paid a penny more than their private sector equivalents, if anything there's a compelling argument that they should be paid slightly less due to the level of job security and the quality of the pension. There is plenty of reason why nurses, firefighters, police officers and community support officers, military personnel, should see their pay keep pace with inflation most of the time (with higher pay awards where appropriate, for instance if higher, long term demands are being placed on the individual members of a particular service due to restructuring for efficiency's sake, then it's appropriate that some of the cost savings be passed on in terms of a real terms pay rise).

As poorly as it sits with those of a left-leaning persuasion in principle, I have no problem with those at the higher end of the public sector food chain to be well paid - the vast majority of them could earn more for an equivalent role in the private sector. The issue at that end of the market is the lack of accountability (a larger proportion of their pay should be performance related than is actually the case), the ease with which someone under a cloud can be moved sideways and still looked after (the recent departure from Southern Health NHS Trust for instance), and I do have a problem with the pay of politicians on the grounds that they actively seek that office and there are no supply and demand justifications for the level of pay inflation they're seeing.