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Asp-Z
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28 Nov 2011, 10:55 am

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Real cost of public sector workers' strike is having to speak to them

THE psychological cost of being forced to verbally interact with striking council workers far outweighs any financial loss, experts have claimed.

As thousands of public sector types prepare to take to the streets, people with real jobs are making contingency arrangements to avoid listening to a social worker harangue them about pensions.

Carlisle factory worker Wayne Hayes said: "Ordinarily they’re safely contained inside their offices, drinking tea and posting peevish comments on the Guardian website."

"But my trip to work takes me right past a housing office and I know one of the strikers is going to corner me and try to compare themselves with the demonstrators in Egypt.

He added: "God knows how drunk I’m going to have to get to obscure the irritation but it’ll probably mean I have to take a couple of days off work with a hangover, thus costing me the moral high ground."

Businesses also fear that if public sector workers’ demands aren’t met, they may look for jobs in the private sector, costing billions in incompetence-related mistakes.

Employment lawyers are now frantically searching the Human Rights Act to see if it's legal to burn the CV of anyone who's ever been to an encounter group, or been paid to raise awareness of anything.

Julian Cook, chief economist at Donnelly-McPartlin said: “Like buying a child a PS3, agreeing to pension demands will be an expensive but effective way of ensuring council workers won’t get under anybody’s feet for a while.”

“You know deep in your heart that the little devils don’t deserve it, but you just want to avoid a full-blown screamy tantrum.”


Via the Daily Mash (satire site) :wink:



DreamSofa
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28 Nov 2011, 12:44 pm

Excellent! I work for the public sector and there is no way in hell I am going on strike.



Asp-Z
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28 Nov 2011, 12:45 pm

DreamSofa wrote:
Excellent! I work for the public sector and there is no way in hell I am going on strike.


Good on ya! :)



Nier
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28 Nov 2011, 2:06 pm

And there are plenty of people who will, good on them.



Asp-Z
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28 Nov 2011, 2:14 pm

Nier wrote:
And there are plenty of people who will, good on them.


Not at all good on them. They're striking because they don't like their pensions, but they're already a lot more than anyone in the private sector gets, and they're at the expense of the tax payer. Ungrateful sods.



Mummy_of_Peanut
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09 Dec 2011, 9:31 am

Asp-Z wrote:
Nier wrote:
And there are plenty of people who will, good on them.


Not at all good on them. They're striking because they don't like their pensions, but they're already a lot more than anyone in the private sector gets, and they're at the expense of the tax payer. Ungrateful sods.

There's a lot of propaganda about this - people need to wise up. We've read absolute lies about public sector workers in the press, which the majority of people have probably taken as truth. According to a newspaper one year, we received a Christmas bonus, when it was in fact our back-pay, which had been awaiting for 8 months. If you write to complain, your letter doesn't get published.

My husband used to work for the private sector and paid into a pension there. He now works for the public sector, as did I, and I can assure you his old pension deal was much better. He took a pay cut, in effect, when he joined local government, because of his pension contribution - he chose to move for personal development reasons, definitely not a better pension/pay. The public sector pensions are not at the expense of the taxpayer, why do people think that? There's an employee contribution and an employer contribution and this is all factored in when a job is created. It just so happens that the employer is the government. And public sector workers are taxpayers too.

Anyway, the workers are complaining because the extra they'll be paying will not be going towards the pension fund, it will be going towards paying off the huge debts, that's a fact. Why should the public sector worker be the ones to shoulder the blame?

Maybe the problem is actually with some of the private sector employers not looking after their employees properly. We shouldn't be complaining that some people are getting a decent deal, we should be complaining about the ones getting a poor deal. But that's what the government wants us to do - divide and conquer.


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Asp-Z
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09 Dec 2011, 9:39 am

Mummy_of_Peanut wrote:
Asp-Z wrote:
Nier wrote:
And there are plenty of people who will, good on them.


Not at all good on them. They're striking because they don't like their pensions, but they're already a lot more than anyone in the private sector gets, and they're at the expense of the tax payer. Ungrateful sods.

There's a lot of propaganda about this - people need to wise up. We've read absolute lies about public sector workers in the press, which the majority of people have probably taken as truth. According to a newspaper one year, we received a Christmas bonus, when it was in fact our back-pay, which had been awaiting for 8 months. If you write to complain, your letter doesn't get published.

My husband used to work for the private sector and paid into a pension there. He now works for the public sector, as did I, and I can assure you his old pension deal was much better. He took a pay cut, in effect, when he joined local government, because of his pension contribution - he chose to move for personal development reasons, definitely not a better pension/pay. The public sector pensions are not at the expense of the taxpayer, why do people think that? There's an employee contribution and an employer contribution and this is all factored in when a job is created. It just so happens that the employer is the government. And public sector workers are taxpayers too.

Anyway, the workers are complaining because the extra they'll be paying will not be going towards the pension fund, it will be going towards paying off the huge debts, that's a fact. Why should the public sector worker be the ones to shoulder the blame?

Maybe the problem is actually with some of the private sector employers not looking after their employees properly. We shouldn't be complaining that some people are getting a decent deal, we should be complaining about the ones getting a poor deal. But that's what the government wants us to do - divide and conquer.


Whether or not the higher pension payouts are from employee contribution is irrelevant since that money also comes out of the pockets of the taxpayer. People in the public sector don't pay tax or contributions on any money that wasn't already taken in the form of taxes from the private sector in the first place. It's more like recycling than paying tax.

Now I have nothing against public sector workers as a whole, many of them do a brilliant job. But I do have a problem with those who want the taxpayer to fund their massive pension schemes.

More money should be going to pay off the deficit. Private businesses shoulder some of this effort (and make their own pay cuts) through higher taxes, so why shouldn't employees of the government do the same? The deficit needs to be paid off more than some bureaucrat needs a £50k a year pension taken from taxpayers' pockets.