Gold plated public sector pensions

hyubh

Terron wrote: »

I was the best at what I did in Europe and among the best in the world. The products I worked on had been bought by our main competitor. They kept supporting our exisiting customers, but stopped new sales so it was in a gradual decline. The alternative jobs on offer were at a much lower level technically, and management never appealed to me. My more tranferrably technical skills such as COBOL programming were also not in demand after Y2K.

So, taking redundancy and investing in property was more exciting than learning a language newer than COBOL. Great! Still not sure what this has to do with your elder sister's pension...

I was not the one who made the original comparison. That was my sister.

You're the one banging on and on about it in this thread! How much did the local county council pay its software developers back in the 90s and 00s? Those people would be your direct public sector equivalents, not your teacher sister.

Or, looking on jobsogopublic.com just now, I see Hackney council have a few openings: Lead Developer - £55,341 - £56,364, Developer - £39,484 to £41,371, Junior Developer - £32,743 - £34,495 (norm in local government is that you go in at the bottom of the range). Given that's London, on the face of it, the pension makes the package, rather than being just the icing on the cake...?

hyubh

Peelerfart wrote: »

Clearly no idea of the industry.

Go on, teach me!

PS - I (a) work in the private sector (b) have a mediocre occupational pension (c) spend at least 50% of my working day doing coding of some sort

uk1

In the end the threads on this subject always tend to degenerate into personal attacks.

People in the public sector receiving better pensions are understandably protective and defensive about them, and few are likely to believe that they are undeserving of them. Those in the private sector however will continue to feel agrieved at being forced into pay for them when the vast majority of them cannot afford the costs of paying for similar benefits for themselves. Isn't it perfectly understandable?

I do not see an imminent meeting of minds likely on the subject.

woolly_wombat

uk1 wrote: »

People in the public sector receiving better pensions are understandably protective and defensive about them, and few are likely to believe that they are undeserving of them. Those in the private sector however will continue to feel agrieved at being forced into pay for them when the vast majority of them cannot afford the costs of paying for similar benefits for themselves. Isn't it perfectly understandable?

I do not see an imminent meeting of minds likely on the subject.

The thing is, many of us have a foot in both camps:).

In my case, paying for extra years and additional regular contributions into the LGPS went some way in later life to repair a rather large hole caused by investment in an Equitable Life with(out)-profits pension scheme way back in the 1980s when working as relatively highly paid IT contractor.

Others can make the same choices, although I cannot recommend working as a member of school support staff as a road to riches. Learning support assistants and science technicians are not well paid.

I am constantly baffled by the number of staff who opt out of the LGPS; when my children were young, part-timers were locked out of these pensions and people fought long and hard for the right to join!

Despite a very bad experience with ELAS, I have always told my offspring to start saving into a pension from the very beginning of working life. Fortunately it's something they have both taken on board.

fred246

I worked in the public sector but could have made much more money going freelance. I used to talk to people who had gone freelance. They'd be making four or five times more per hour. I used to say "you lose your valuable pension, but I suppose you'll be ploughing it all into a private pension so you'll be better off in the end." They used to look blank. No way were they paying into private pensions. It was always live for today. No planning ahead. And then at the end they'll say "I fancy having your pension now please."

Terron

hyubh wrote: »

So, taking redundancy and investing in property was more exciting than learning a language newer than COBOL. Great! Still not sure what this has to do with your elder sister's pension...

It has nothing to do with my sister's pension. It is to do with your continual misinteropretation of what I wrote, which is getting rude.. I know lots of languages, such as IBM 370 assumbler, C, C++, HTML, SQL, Javascript. COBOL is just the only one I can point to a job where I was specifically programming that language, i.e. the only one I can demonstrate the experience that employers want.

You're the one banging on and on about it in this thread! How much did the local county council pay its software developers back in the 90s and 00s? Those people would be your direct public sector equivalents, not your teacher sister.

It was the mid-80s and as I have already said it was my sister who decided to make the comparison, not me. Stop saying I was making an invalid comparison. It wasn't my choice.It was my sister making the incorrect assumption that her salary was lower than mine. Yes she was wrong, but it wasn't my mistake.

Or, looking on jobsogopublic.com just now, I see Hackney council have a few openings: Lead Developer - £55,341 - £56,364, Developer - £39,484 to £41,371, Junior Developer - £32,743 - £34,495 (norm in local government is that you go in at the bottom of the range). Given that's London, on the face of it, the pension makes the package, rather than being just the icing on the cake...?

You seem to be proving my point by making the same mistake my sister did - over-estimating private sector salaries. According to glassdoor the average salary for a junior developer in London is ~£26kpa. £32k looks pretty good even before the pension, apart from being in London.


At the bottom of the ad they say they don't discriminate by age, but at the top they say they want "people who want to develop their careers with us" which implies not people nearing the end of their careers.

Looking on glassdoor.co.uk the average salary for a senior consultant in London with the company I worked for is ~£38k pa. I was at level, not based in London, but earning considerably more. As for my not getting a rise, every review on the first page on glassdoor complains about no, low or difficult to get pay rises. I wasn't the only one, though it had been different before the dot com crash.

Muscle750

fred246 wrote: »

People have paid into pensions their whole working life. When they took the job they agreed to the deal on offer. So you can't take pensions off people. So what does the original website actually want to happen? They argue that all new employees should pay into DC pensions. So the government would then have to pay current pensioners but have no income from current workers. So current taxpayers would have to pay more tax. That would really upset Muscle750. It would take at least 80 years before all the current public sector workers had died and the government would then have no income and no expenditure on public sector pensions.

"So they cant take pensions off people" What the hell did they do when they ripped our FS scheme from under our feet which we had signed up to? Please enlighten me and everyone else in the private sector who have lost thousands in this scenario

marlot

Muscle750 wrote: »

"So they cant take pensions off people" What the hell did they do when they ripped our FS scheme from under our feet which we had signed up to? Please enlighten me and everyone else in the private sector who have lost thousands in this scenario

I had my pension scheme made worse at four different employers. Three private, one public sector.

I agree that it is a real blow.


And that doesn't include the swapping from RPI to CPI which happened as well.

TonyMMM

I have a very good public sector pension for which i am very grateful - but I paid a huge amount in contributions for it.

I was talking about this to some younger people recently - they were telling me they paid pension contributions of 3% which they thought were higher than most of their friends and were amazed when I pointed out that I paid 11-13% into mine (and in fact in some months I was I paying more into my pension than my mortgage repayments were at the time) ...

Tromking

Muscle750 wrote: »

"So they cant take pensions off people" What the hell did they do when they ripped our FS scheme from under our feet which we had signed up to? Please enlighten me and everyone else in the private sector who have lost thousands in this scenario

As usual you display little more than displaced anger borne out of your frustration at your own personal stitch up.
I wonder if back then you dripped as much to your boss about your own pension as you do now about other people’s?