And on public sector pay? Temporarily, granting the rise with restrictions attached will work. It will also reduce support for industrial action. But (and it is a big but), most of us will know someone working in the NHS or schools and no one is under any real illusion as to how hard it is. People leave for easier lives in the private sector precisely because that is what they get. Working in the state sector is tough,
Delusion much?
Well, I’ve never tried working in the private sector, but I’d have to agree with you Tim.
I worked in a University (well ex-Poly) at the start of my career. After a spate of thefts, the campus security people proposed a staff identity card to more easily separate staff from students (or others) as most parts of the campus were open to all.
The proposal went down like a bag of sick with the women lecturers – their rationale? It’d allow people to identify them as women!
The public sector is tough, not because of hard work required (we can all see that isn’t the case), but the effort to respond with shite like the above to every reasonable request.
If he can use anecdotes to make a case then I can use them to refute his claims.
We were at son and DiL’s last night. Their neighbours, a teacher and his wife, who works part time in a school, and their 3 boys are heading off to Bilbao for four weeks next week. (Son and DiL doing the neighbourly house watching).
Furthermore, DiL has decided she’s had enough of working in the private sector and starts teach training in September and she knows what she’s getting in to because she spent 12 months teaching as part of her French degree.
I used to knock around with a teacher at one time & she she used to tell me how hard it was. Of course she still had the time, energy & money for her very extensive social life. And at least two foreign holidays a year.
Point being, ask anyone & they’re likely to tell you how hard their job is. But of course it’s absolute not relative. They’re not doing a different job. Like my teacher friend couldn’t understand why I couldn’t drop everything & go to Italy for three weeks with her.
Working in the public sector is tough? Then move to Bonny Scotland:
“It turns out in 2022-2023 1,414 Scottish public sector employees reeled in over £100,000 in salary, bonuses and perks, according to the Taxpayers’ Alliance”
https://order-order.com/2024/07/22/over-1400-scottish-public-sector-workers-rake-in-100000-in-one-year/
There’s tough aspects to working in parts of the Public Sector, both in health and education but a lot of that is due to the Spanish practices that are endemic among both workforces. I could write a thesis on anecdotes relating to NHS inefficiencies.
Isn’t Spud always telling his followers how hard he works? Some from a different perspective might regard him as a lazy fat idle cvnt.
There are plenty of government employees who believe in their job, and are diligent and hard-working. The trouble is that there’s a very substantial minority (~25% in my limited experience) that just want to swing the lead as far as they can. The fundamentals aren’t that different from the private sector, but businesses are strongly incentivised to get rid of the lead-swingers, and that’s where the difference arises.
BIS,
“I used to knock around with a teacher at one time & she she used to tell me how hard it was. Of course she still had the time, energy & money for her very extensive social life. And at least two foreign holidays a year.
Point being, ask anyone & they’re likely to tell you how hard their job is. But of course it’s absolute not relative.”
I’ve always found an inverse correlation between people who say how hard they work and how hard they actually work. Some of the most inadequate people I’ve worked with talked about how hard they worked. They were the people who would find any excuse to get out of work.
People who work hard just get on with it. If they don’t like the deal, they quit and go elsewhere.
It’s perfectly possible to work very hard and to be entirely unproductive.
In the public sector it is entirely acceptable to be unproductive so to work hard shows a woeful lack of respect for colleagues.
Government does have an awful habit of making things harder than they need to be. Maybe that’s what Spud meant. But that small step towards less government is one he cannot make.
It’s clearly rough down South. Heartening to see that our overworked public servants are on the job and that appropriate to the seriousness of this they’ve resourced it with a Team:
The Metropolitan Police is appealing for witnesses after three Pride flags were vandalised in a “hate crime” incident. The flags painted on the pavement outside Forest Gate railway station in east London were vandalised in the early hours of Friday morning.
‘Disgusting, inexcusable hate crimes’
Detective Inspector James Rush of the north east public protection unit, who is leading efforts to identify the offender, appealed to the public for information.
“We stand with the local LGBTQ+ community and will not tolerate these disgusting, inexcusable hate crimes in Forest Gate,” he said. “We are committed to continuing our thorough investigation and attempting to identify the offender, who we believe is the same person who committed the damage in June at the same location.
“The Met is clear that there is no place for hate in London, and my team are already working at pace to complete all lines of inquiry.
Plod is taking one hell of a risk by making such a fuss. What will they do if the perpetrator turns out to be not precisely your traditional pie ‘n mash loving cor blimey guvnor East Londoner?
My physiotherapist left the NHS for a harder life in the private sector because he couldn’t stand the poor quality of the service provided to his patients by the NHS.
Public Sector pay rises are not the solution because ONS (a public sector organisation) says that publc sector workers are, on average, already paid more (using a like-for-like comparison) than equivalent private sector workers.
Is there no limit to Myrphy’s ignorance?
There are plenty of government employees who believe in their job, and are diligent and hard-working. The trouble is that there’s a very substantial minority (~25% in my limited experience) that just want to swing the lead as far as they can.
You think only 25% are useless? Hard working, yes, in the sense of putting in lots of hours. Value for money, not in my experience. I’ve had a quite a few meetings with our state roads counterparts, and it is usually 10 of them to 2 of us. They’ve all blocked out time and travelled to a meeting that has very little return other than they can claim travel allowances and schedule another one.
There are a very small number that I can back channel with and ask favours of (obviously some quid pro quo happens there, next time they need a favour then I get a call, and I go out of my way to help). Basically, if Pablo calls me, I pick up. His boss – not so much.
My piece of anecdata: my friend works for the Probation Service and is utterly frank about it, she reckons its does absolutely no good whatsoever and if it was closed down entirely there would be zero impact on crime rates. The stories she tells me about the utter dysfunctional nature of it beggar belief – my favourite was one of her colleagues who took several months off work sick because she was depressed about a death. Not of her partner, or one of her children or other immediate family, nor any relation by blood or marriage, just the partner of a friend of hers. And when my friend rang her after a couple of months to enquire how she was, and if she’d be coming back any time soon, she was told ‘I think I’ll have a couple more weeks off, I need to get the lounge redecorated’.
There’s really not much you can say to that…..
I saw that about the Forest Gate rainbow pavement. I also know Forest Gate pretty well. Every flat surface capable of being graffited is graffited. You paint a wall & it’ll be tagged by the next day. If you saw & photographed the piece of shite with the spray can, the police don’t want to know. That’s from experience.
In the public sector it is entirely acceptable to be unproductive so to work hard shows a woeful lack of respect for colleagues.
Might have told this story before:
A friend’s a welder on the rigs. But he needed to spend a spell ashore so he got a job as a welder with the local authority. First day he was given a plan of a pair of gates required making. So he chalked it on the floor, measured up, went to the store with his requisition for the stock, cut it up, laid it out & sparked it up. Finished at lunchtime, so he went to go find the foreman get the next job. Foreman threw a pink-un. It was supposed to be at least a week’s work. He was told to cut it up, lose the bits & lose himself for the rest of the day. And never do that again.
I recall seeing a documentary about an understaffed, overworked, bed full hopsital.
They were proud that the day always started will all the managers and ward sisters (?) in an hour long planning meeting working out how beds could be freed up. Every single day! 20 odd people sat round a table for an hour.
4 man days wasted every single day on what could be a planning app.
Finished at lunchtime, so he went to go find the foreman get the next job. Foreman threw a pink-un.
Friend of mine had that at the Valuation Agency. Every week there’s a print run of valuation statements, that then have to be sorted into postcode sectors to get discount postage. That was taking three days each week. Friend noticed he could make a temporary copy of the print job, sort it by postcode, and then print that. Bingo. 30 minute print job, all sorted ready for dispatch.
Big Boss blew a valve. “We’re billing for three days work! If it just takes us 30 minutes we won’t get paid!”