Saturday, July 16, 2005
Oh, to work in the Public sector.
Life continues to look rosy for "stressed" public sector employees.
Despite announcing 40,000 Whitehall jobs to be cut in the 2004 budget, Gordon has managed to find space for 72,000 new "keyworkers" to add to the public sector payroll in the year to March 2005.
They are still able to retire at 60, the Government can only threaten the private sector with retiring at 70.
They now also earn more than their private sector cousins according to a Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) report. In 2004, public sector workers earned 3.5% more per a week than their private sector counterparts. It gets worse, on an hourly basis, public sector workers earned 17% more on average for 75% of all workers
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3 comments:
I hope you are not shocked by this.
Alice, I am not shocked by this but I really wish wish I was.
The chances of reversing this public sector "gravy train" seem remote given that staff are heavily unionised compared to their private sector counterparts. Few governments will ever have the strength of character to resist the unions when so many voters continue to sympathise with the "keyworkers".
Whilst expedient in the short term, such public sector employment largesse will create a second pension crisis in the future that will be a burden to all of us. The pensions liabilities of all these public sector workers are underwritten by general taxation.
Need to differentiate here. What Browny refers to as "Key Workers" isn't infact Key Workers : Teachers, Doctors, Nurses, Social Workers, Policemen etc etc. but non-entities who do nothing in the managerialist culture.
If there were sufficient *real* key workers no-one would object too much ; but public sector numbers keep going up and there are still shortages of staff.
Their pension liabilities aren't underwritten at all ; the government just hopes no-one notices.
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