You are living the good life and you don't even know it, that's the point. Your pay, conditions and pensions are much better than you think. And you have not suffered the same pain that the private sector has had to endure because you are cocooned and cossetted from the harsh reality of the commercial sector.
Public sector pay freeze
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You are living the good life and you don't even know it, that's the point. Your pay, conditions and pensions are much better than you think. And you have not suffered the same pain that the private sector has had to endure because you are cocooned and cossetted from the harsh reality of the commercial sector.
Fair comment, but I repeat - if your employer hires poor contractors that's down to them.
Thats true. But when you are a large Trust in our case there aren't that many large IT organisations that can provide the support needed. We have done the rounds on most of them and now its almost like going full circle. Im not having a go at private sector workers as i said in my original post there are definitely good ones about in our industry but nowhere near enough to go around unfortunately.
And thats why i get so fed up with hearing things from people as if the public sector is the only place you get people who can be paid well who aren't up to the job. I see loads of it in the private sector from my experience.
The difference is this. If a private company employs useless people, that's up to them - it isn't costing me anything. When the public sector hires unproductive people or pays excessive salaries and pensions, I am paying for that.
But what about before the recession when the private sector was enjoying massive prosperity. You didn't hear public sector workers saying "It's so unfair, people in the private sector are earning so much more, so we want the same".
It's like Fox said earlier, generally speaking, in the public sector you have stability but less pay and vice versa for the private sector.
What rubbish. I bet before reading some posts in here most non public sector workers didnt even realise that in my example the NHS in Wales has had a jobs Freeze for the last 2 years which in reality has meant people leaving and no people coming back in so the people left behind have to struggle doing more work than they can cope with. And for example Councils have already been on a 1 year pay freeze and with the additional pay freeze's coming thats 3 years pay freeze.
What i meant by my original comments is that people like me who work on the admin side of public sector realise that sure we dont get a lot of the perks of the private sector but that the few good things that come with working in the public sector are what you end up looking at and settling for.
Another fine example most private sector IT guys i come across love doing an out of hours on-call service because the pay is very rewarding. i get paid £90 a month for a 24/7 on-call service supporting anything and everything IT related for over 8000 users 1 week in 4. Think thats well paid do you ?
There are millions in the private sector on below average wages, many on minimum wage. So they don't all enjoy 'massive prosperity'. They also have less generous (or non existent) pensions, sick pay and holiday entitlements as well as less job security.
Yes he did say that, but it is a myth nowadays, it no longer holds true.
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Thing is though, some public sector jobs are neccesary (teaching, healthcare workers, policemen, firemen etc), they may not have the "harsh realities" of the commercial sector, but they have things to deal with too! Emergency service workers as has been said, often see things and do things that would make most people's stomach churn, they also get spat on, assaulted and have to put up with people calling them out when they really aren't needed, despite there being a backlog of people who do need them, teachers (at least in secondary schools) have to deal with abusive kids who abuse them and treat them horribly, they also have marking to do that goes on after the 1530 end of school. Doctors are highly skilled and have to go through years of training, and still have a large debt to pay off after it. The point is that you seem to think they have a cushy life, they don't as such, they have to deal with a lot of rubbish AND there are budget cuts, so there are cuts being made! They aren't totally protected, I mean in the ambulance service there are no where near the amount of staff and vehicles that are needed (let's put it this way, in the trust near me they have 15 minutes to drop a patient off at hospital, clean the ambulance, complete the paperwork and get back on the road, if they don't they get in quite a bit of trouble. 15 minutes really isn't that long, especially if you spend 10 minutes of that loading the patient onto a bed in A&E etc.)
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Rubbish, firstly Torys want to get rid of all the waste in the NHS, which is the 1-1.2million clerical staff, of which probably 600-700k of them are completely not necessary.
Which would actually leave a heck of a lot more money for nurses, doctors, equipment, beds and frontline staff in general. Also English nurses are the highest paid in the world. Of course that means everyone wants to be a nurse here and therefore nurses generally don't leave to do other things very often and nurses from other countries come here.
So realistically you should see Torys increase frontline staff eventually, but nurse jobs will be hard to get without the Torys in power as every nurse in the world wants to be a nurse here.
Also Sukh, yes pensions for public sector jobs are a little out of hand but, likewise it also helps prevent a generation of poor pensioners. Pension funds now have taken insane hits in the last couple years, lots of funds could essentially be wiped out and you could have millions of old people with literally no money, what are we going to do, let them all starve to death, no they'll end up with state pensions also. The fact is society has to pay for their elderly, society just doesn't want to, neither do they want to pay for the disabled or anyone else in need, though fairly don't want to pay for scum to sit around doing nothing.
Remember also that many, public sector jobs are crucially important and not well paid. To encourage quality personel into public sector jobs, a decent pension is part of the package, get rid of decent pensions, add in the horrendously overly complicated jobs with more and more paperwork being generated and theres very little reason for qualified people to go into public service anymore.
THe real issue was handing out the great pensions to people who take the job regardless, as Labour have massively expanded say the NHS, with unqualified people to do newly created and pointless jobs, they've increased the tax burden massively, for people that would have taken the jobs without the great pension and with no other choices. The best people should be given great pay, pensions and promoted to positions where they can really help public sector services, to prevent these people going private sector.
So we used to give great pensions and careers to people in a bid to have the best people possible in the most important jobs, now as we flood the public sector with new and pointless jobs we've given a whole workforce a massive pension who didn't need one, arent' deserving and weren't required to keep these services running well.
But thats what you get with labour, massive massive bloating in services with very little quality increase, exponential cost increases and not a single seconds thought into how it will effect the country any more than past the next election.
Not exactly sure how you equate one (biased) report saying the UK health system is more efficient than the US health system as "Public sector services are generally more efficient"? And why do you think the only thing you can cut is the front line? Does the NHS only employ front line staff? Do the police force only employ front line staff? Obviously not, so yes, you can make cuts to back office, support, management. The sort of cuts that get made in private industry when you need to reduce costs but impact frontline services as little as possible. In fact that sort of cuts that actually led to me being made redundant...
Why? Is that the only model in the private sector? Or could they actually do something a little more intelligent than that? Like many business have had to do? Or are you trying to say the Public sector is incapable of that sort of change?
So what happens when the first line support can't solve the problem?
Which seems to me to be part of the problem. Why should it take 8 years to get to the top if you are good enough to do it in 4? If you are only really good enough to get to pay point 4, do you automatically get 5 after your fith year? Yearly increments and guaranteed pay deals should be a thing of the past if you truely believed in a meritocracy...
Yes, life is hard. And? You are well rewarded for your work - if you don't like it, get a job in the private sector.
Look, there are probably five million people in this country at least who are unemployed and who could work. When you have that many people out of work, many existing jobs should only be paying minimum wage due to market forces. Moaning that your job only pays £28k or £35k because it's a hard job makes me laugh. You are earning 2-3 times what someone on minimum wage earns. Suck it up.
That's quite true and is always going to be the case - poorly trained or lazy workers can be found in all sectors and walks of life.
The point that most private sector people make about the public sector (and I think this is a hugely misunderstood and poorly explained point) is that we pay for it and yet the public sector seems to often give poor value for money - and then adds insult to injury by complaining that we (effectively) aren't paying enough!
However I think that in fairness to the public sector guys, the rest of us need to remember that the public sector isn't comparable to - for example - the retail sector where we can DEMAND customer satisfaction or take our business elsewhere. The public sector can return the favour by remembering that they have a monopoly on the services they provide, we can't refuse to pay them and go elsewhere and therefore they should (and mostly probably do) make sure they don't take advantage of this fact.
We are all in this together after all.
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There's annual increments, but there are reviews of skills taking place and you can't progress above certain "gateway points" without developing your knowledge, there's 2 per band. So in band 5, there's 8 pay points, of which 2 points require you to have a job evaluation meeting etc. You also need a job evaluation to progress onto another band.
Right back at you! If you think the public sector "get to live the good life" then why don't you get a job in the public sector! What a poor argument.
I have no evidence to back this up, but i strongly suspect that 28k-35k is not the norm in the public sector without 8-10 years of service. So, using that figure is misleading and is only being used by yourself to try to reinforce your (erroneous) point that the public sector is overpaid.
And lol, "suck it up"? Ok, next time you moan your poor working conditions and "rubbish" pension, i'll say the same to you.
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The whole point is, for a job that *is* highly skilled like a paramedic they shouldn't be on the minimum wage. The fact is that comparing it with the minimum wage is a load of rubbish and you know it, I wonder, if you actually spent a week going out on ambulances with the ambulance service, whether you'd be saying the same thing.
The figures of 28-35k were mentioned by others.
I maintain that a load of jobs which pay anything over minimum wage are overpaid, due to the massive level of unemployment. If a job pays say £14k and there is someone willing to do it for £13k, or £12k, then according to simple market forces it is by definition paying too much.
Yet from the reaction to the pay freeze for people earning over £21k (nearly double minimum wage) you would think the sky has fallen in and they are going to be destitute. Perhaps they would like their jobs to be exposed to the full force of the jobs market and then they would understand the fortunate position they find themselves in.
I don't doubt that it is a tough job and I never said otherwise. It does however pay massively more than minimum wage jobs which are also often tough
All the tougher for the crap standard of living you 'enjoy' on them.
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The fact is though, at least with regards to paramedics (as that is what I aim to be), it's a 2-4 year degree course before you can do it, you have professional registration to uphold, so anything you do while not at work can end up ruining your career, it *is* a tough job and I don't think that anyone would do it for the minimum wage, especially not considering the hours, the inability to have a proper social life and the strain it puts on relationships outside the emergency services/hospitals...
Not sure where you worked but ive never heard of this 'private sector wage parity scheme'. I do know that in some areas they get a Recruitment and Retention Payment for certain hard to recruit jobs mostly in Cities as Cardiff is the only one i know of around here. But even that doesn't bump the pay anywhere close to private sector equivalent.
[edit] I assume you worked in London from your above post after re-reading it
Yeah it probably was a London only thing, i can't remember the exact name, it was similar to London weighting, not included in the main salary but a hefty bump up, tens of thousands in some cases. It was probably a good idea at one point that has just been used far more than necessary for people who never really had any intention of leaving.
But even then my job didn't apply for that and i still got a wage on par with the private sector, it was just the norm. Add the other benefits like flexi-time and it's not half as bad as it's made out to be, it's certainly not a blanket rule that the public sector pays less.