According to one report anyway. Unions, of course, have said it’s balderdash. As they do.
IMPACT General Secretary Shane Cody said:
Most public servants work hard for modest incomes. Every one of them has suffered a pay cut averaging 7.5% just six months ago and they are not going to accept another pay cut.
While I’m quite positive many public servants do work hard for modest incomes what’s this about a pay cut averaging 7.5%. I must have missed that. Does he mean the pension levy?
At a time when private sector workers are losing their jobs, which those in the public sector are not, and at a time when private sector workers are taking pay cuts, which the public sector are not, and in a week when SIPTU are actually looking for pay increases for HSE workers, it’s hugely frustrating to discover the benchmarking process only works if you benchmark upwards.
Don’t like the way people are being pitched at each other, and labelling them as public or private . This is not helping anything. Very thin and irresponsible reporting.
But how are we supposed to know who to hate without irresponsible reporting?
In seriousness though, the public sector has got be streamlined. Or made more efficient. Or turned into magic mushroom dancing pandas.
I think the third option is probably easiest.
A civil war would be cool though.
Pubeys v Privates.
I’m very wary of non-smokers in general and especially fitness freaks such as joggers, those lycra clad cyclists and cunts who boast about running marathons.
Wrong thread, maggot
Yes streamlined, but it’ll never happen now. Cant , rhetoric and cheap shots from here on in. And fucking riots soon too, I think.
Time to set up that baseball bat shop I always dreamt about
Benchmarking seems to have disappeared when it suits all the cunts!
Bob Geldof the cunt was right when he called Ireland a Banana Republic.
Time to set up that baseball bat shop I always dreamt about
In Tallaght ? Was reading about Tallaght last night – one of the two eighth century “eyes of Ireland” Monasteries that was central to the Culdee reform movement. Made me think of you.
I’d go along with everything Sniffle has said thus far. Also, if they really must try to get people riled up with reports like that it’d be nice if they narrowed down the very broad term ‘public sector worker’ so we’d all know exactly who to hate. Likewise, ‘private sector worker’ can refer to the CEO of Tesco Ireland, or it could refer to a 16 year-old doing a few weekend hours in there for less than minimum wage.
The 7.5% pay cut mentioned does, presumably, refer to the pension levy, but may also refer to the fact that most public sector workers weren’t given the pay rise they’d been promised last January.
Are you a pubey at the moment?
The benefits in public sector pensions are astronomical when compared to anything that private sector employees can ever hope to receive. Maybe 20 years ago some lucky private sector workers (generally the top management) could have hoped for a similar pension – but not the ordinary joe soaps. If any private sector workers wanted a pension within an asses roar of what the public sector ones are guaranteed, they’d have to contribute a very hefty slice of their salary (more in the region of 20% than 7.5%). For this reason, I have absolutely zero tolerance of moaning by public sector employees who now have to contribute to their pension.
I don’t know if the pension benefits were taken into account in benchmarking, but I’d be interested to find out.
I attended a conference hosted by the public service recently. The idea behind it was that buyers working for the public service would meet with potential suppliers from the private service.
This was my first interaction with public service decision makers. There were 4 speakers.
I have my notes beside me. 1 of them kept apologising for the fact that the people who made commercial decisions had no business sense. Oh fuck. You’re joking. Tell me something I don’t know. His job was to fix it. The next person gave a presentation where my notes say JESUS CHRIST. YAWN. A fucking disaster. Probably on 100k. Unbelievable during the Q & A. Somebody said she may belong to Mary Coughlans cabal. Though to be fair; she wasn’t that fucking thick.
the other 2….puh
this country has people in positions of power who are thick as fucking bricks and have no idea of the value of money. All fianna failers too at the top because they have run the public service as a personal fiefdom for their mates and supporters. Look at fas. Look at evoting, look at o’donoghue, look at harney, spending public money as if they earned it.
Public service workers need to look at the figures. The money is all gone. The fuckers you voted for spent it all by buying your votes.
Bertie did a Bernie Madoff on the public service and they, like most fianna failers, just don’t get it. Pyramid is falling.
Bertie did a Bernie Madoff on the public service and they, like most fianna failers, just don’t get it. Pyramid is falling.
yup.
Are you a pubey at the moment?
Think I’m technically a private right now, for the first time in years.
Good stuff. I always thought you’d make a good private dancer. A dancer for money. And any old money will do.
Itchy – that is a gem of a comment.
This whole public sector versus private sector bullshit is starting to bug me even though I don’t work in the public sector. People in the private sector are not losing jobs. People in certain sectors of the private sector are, just as thousands of public sector workers (in health and education) have lost jobs as well. Plenty of people in the private sector have gotten pay-rises in the last year, about as many as have taken pay cuts. The levies certainly count as pay-cuts as well.
And the figures quoted are hardly relevant to the public sector in general. It’s not as though we can compare guards, nurses and teachers to private sector equivalents. Self-employed people in the private sector simply aren’t included.
As a rule, any statistic that comes out nice and round should be questioned. We all know why these magical statistics are coming out at the moment.
The thing I notice when people are complaining about the level of pay for Public Servants is that no mention at all is made of the boom times when those in the private sector were earning hand over fist more than the public sector.
It is a choice these people made to join the public sector where possibly they have a smaller salary when times are good (and the useless shower of cunts in the Dáil told everyone the goodtimes would last forever – and worse people believed them), but they knew they would have job security.
It’s a trade off. So now the public sector is to be punished because they went for security rather than the big money? Not fair.
There are however too many people working in the public sector in Ireland. A lot of desk bound paper pushers could be gotten rid of – early retirment for a lot of them. And hire only what is needed: Nurses, teachers, and possibly gadaí.
@AM: Strictly speaking the studies currently referred to examined pay levels in 2006 and 2007, which were still, strictly speaking, boom times. Which suggests that your claim is a tad inaccurate, does it not?
The way to deal with the public service cost issue is to leave people who deal directly with the public untouched – like CWOs, Nurses, Teachers, Guards, and totally gut the ranked administration echelons behind them, including the decimation of State agencies that used to be part of the fabric of government departments. The productivity of frontline public services is completely undermined by non-productive ‘management’ in offices all over the country.
My husband works in the “public sector”, but he is an ordinary worker, on a normal wage, and working shift hours to make a living. We have a mortgage, and car payments, an unemployed son and a cat and dog to feed!
For years, his income was pretty low, and only in the last few years has it reached anywhere near the “private” sector.
Now he has been hit with this levy, no staff are being replaced as they retire/ leave/ runout of contract, so he is now doing twice the work for less money.
If he could get early retirement, he’d take it.
In the papers, he’s being pilloried for all the waste in the HSE, the Civil Service, and God knows what else.
The media have demonised the ordinary workers, telling bare faced lies about salaries.
No doubt there are too many managers in the HSE, for instance, and the number has quadrupled, at least, in the last five years, but the staff on the ground are still run ragged, abused by the public, and now scapegoatted by a shower of lying bastards in Government!
Check out what John Fitzgerald of the ESRI had to say recently, basically that wide ranging pay cuts in the private sector hadn’t happened and that there was little of no proof to suggest it had. It’s an agenda being pushed by parts of the media & FF. Divide and conquer. The race to the bottom begins.
I don’t know anyone in electronic engineering who hasn’t had at least a 10% pay cut, which sort of contradicts Mr. Fitzgerald’s observation somewhat.
Yippie – I’m interested: what kind of pension benefit does your husband have (and more importantly – does it have a clause about keeping up with inflation/being based on not his final salary; but the ‘current’ salary for the role he was in that he retires on)? I’ve worked in pensions for 20 years, and my personal experience of working on calculations of what % of salary would need to be put in to meet the public sector pension promise is at least around 20%.
Another point I would make is that people’s costs – whether being a public or private sector worker – should have no bearing on what remuneration they should receive.
I would argue that, in the same way as guaranteed investments such as Government Bonds, the sacrifice for guaranteed security is a lower investment return, i.e. public sector workers are guaranteed tenure of employment; which private sector workers are not. Obviously in boom times salaries in the private sector go up; but the flip side is that in the inevitable depression, their salaries drop and their security is nil. It is not viable to pay public sector workers the same as private sector workers because they do not lose their security when an economic depression hits – as it invariably must; cycles of supply and demand dictate that it must be so.
It is a fair point that the base salaries of ordinary Joes in the public sector aren’t exactly hectic; but the long term job security and benefits must be taken into account in any assessment.
Same argument, different country. I think you lot in Ireland are a little bit ahead of us in terms of shit creek but it’s the same problem – massively expensive public services crippling any chance of a financial recovery. The gravy train has got too big and needs breaking up.
Once you seperate public servants (doctors, teachers – people who do stuff etc) from Civil Servants you find out where the real fuck up in all this is. Whilst we were all busy working our nuts off to make a boom somehow the civil servants (who lets face it contribute fuck all in real terms to society) have found themselves in a position where they are being paid way over what their private sector equivalent gets, 20% in Ireland, I think it’s about 25% on the IOM (most of these shit for brains couldn’t actually function in the private sector, never mind deserving a bigger salary).
I spent 2 years in the public sector, working in one of these offices surrounded by “it’s not my job”, “i’m off on flexi” wankers and 95% of it is unskilled labour. Sack the fucking lot of them and open up 50% of the positions at a much reduced package and you’d still have plenty of people biting your hands off, just for the pension if nothing else.
Almost forgot, being made to pay towards your own fucking pension is NEVER a pay cut either.
Only some life long public sector “I’ve never experienced a REAL pay cut” cunt would even dare to compare the 2.