Be Excellent To Each Other

So, according to the BBC, there are plans for many strikes by public sector workers in November, over plans requiring workers to pay more into their pensions.

What are the thoughts of board members on this?

I don't have a massive amount of sympathy. Over the past few years I've had at most a 1% per year pay rise in the private sector, and have had company contributions to my pension slashed as the country wakes up to realise that most of our pension models are currently unsustainable.

I'm not really sure why public sector workers should be immune to a) the cutbacks everyone else is feeling, and b) the massively shifting pensions market.

And I'm not sure that striking en masse will get them a great deal of public support in a period of massively rising unemployment.

Thoughts?

Having worked inside a few public sector places, and seen the insides of many more, I have one thing to say.

Welcome to the real world.

Politics is pretty much the only subject you and I almost completely agree on.

Didn't I read somewhere that currently civil servants pay between 1.5 and 3.5% salary to get a half final salary pension after 40 years?! Ha, yeah, the party's over folks, welcome to the real world.

I heard the TUC leader (or some rep at least) stating they were expecting massive public support for this. Really? I couldn't give two hoots if their pension is a bit shitter than it was a year ago, it is still better than mine. I haven't had a payrise in 3 years, and my keyboard is a shit, it has taken me about 10 minutes to type this out.

While I am in theory a public sector worker, I am not a member of a union and fucking greedy bollocks like this pisses me off. My pay has been frozen for more than 18 months and you don't see me lining up to strike. If a union has a purpose, its to prevent workers getting fucked over due to a lack of representation. In recent years it's been more like 'We demand more benefits and above-inflation payrises', and not for any good reason either. BA staff can get fucked as well.

I dunno. I deeply like the idea of final salary pensions. When you've done your 40 years or whatever, I like the idea that you can be guaranteed a decent pension for however long you choose to live. It's a much better idea than paying into a pension that turns out to be worthless because of whatever nonsense the market or inflation has done that's utterly out of your control.

Having said that, I appreciate that economic realities and ageing populations make this a massive, massive money sink that can be ill afforded, and that it just inflates the 'bah, bloody cushy public sector jobs' attitude.

I really do wish we could start the world's fiscal policy with a totally clean slate.

Lest we forget that the average working man (that's you lot) only enjoys the workplace rights he does thanks to the struggle by organised unionised labour over the decades.

And anyway, what do you want these people to do? Just roll over and let the government fuck them in the ass?

They signed up to their jobs with a set of terms and conditions that the employer is now trying to retrospectively break, it's lunacy to expect them to simply say 'Oh yeah OK then, you can take all that away.'

Moreover, this is a government that's actively stealing from the poor to give to the rich, so they can get doubly fucked.

It could easily be afforded if we taxed the super rich and the banks and tax-dodging mega-corporations at anything like realistic levels. It makes no sense for anyone, including society at large, to knowingly impoverish the pensioners of tomorrow.

Admittedly the UK situation isn't as extreme as in the USA, but the figures are fucking jaw-dropping. And you're seriously suggesting that the world's developed economies can't afford to look after its pensioners?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ss-poverty



What did they reckon that 'Robin Hood' bank tax would need to be set at? 0.05% per transaction to raise hundreds of billions per year across the world?

Quoted for extreme pertinence. Union demands are utterly and absolutely unrealistic with the current state of the world.

If this looks like its going to turn into another AE mega-rant thread I might just switch over now.

I'm just going to say that AE, I fundamentally disagree with you on this and leave it at that

I did start to write a longer post, but then realised we would only wind each other up and never agree!

Would you prefer me to just join in the standard circle-jerk and say how 'ridiculous' it is that working people wish to fight to retain the working conditions their employer promised them when they signed up for the job then?

If your employer decided he wanted to take paid holidays off you, presumably you'd have no problem with that either? After all, there are lots of people out there who'd do the job without paid holidays, and probably for less money too!

It's amazing how the media and government have managed to frame this debate so that the working class sets about tearing its own throat out, whilst the real villains of the piece quite literally escape off into the sunset with billions.

That's fine, but nothing at all to do with the debate. This isn't an anti-union thread at all (though Bob Crow can go jump off a cliff).



If the alternative is losing their jobs, then, yes, I would expect them to move to slightly worse terms and conditions. If they don't, then the pensions can simply not afford to be paid. The people negotiating with the unions are (I believe) not the same people who could cut defence spending or turn the UK into an uncompetitive tax pit. Do you think the 80,000 extra unemployed over the past three months would mind a final salary pension that they have to contribute a small amount towards?



Every government in history, dude. Every government in history.

Just to make clear - I think in an ideal world it'd be lovely to have final salary pensions, and for the rich to pay the pensions of the poor and all that.

Unfortunately, failing to recognise the political and economic realities present at the moment just make people look bad.

What I'm saying is that when these people started work, 25 years ago, they expected that a reasonable investment in pensions would be sufficient to pay a final-salary level pension for the entire retired life of those people. That has clearly turned out not to be the case. Poor investment management, an expectation of early retirement, inflation, and increasing life expectancy has meant that the original budgeted amounts intended to pay these pensions is inadequete to the tune of billions.

Yes, you could afford to pay it by means of taxation. Even by enforcing the taxation you do have. But the same is true of a lot of things. Are final salary pensions more important than disability benefits? Libraries?

Your point about impoverising pensioners and not looking after pensioners is emotive and irrelevant. Nobody is talking about cutting the state pension. This is about removing a policy of guaranteed pension income for a defined group of public sector workers that has outstripped the amount budgeted to pay for it by an order of magnitude. It was done away with in the private sector (not that I take that to be an indicator of great policy) decades ago, on the basis that it is just fiscally irresponsible.

Having defined contribution pensions is a sensible way to pay for people's retirement. Because it means that you're not faced with sudden unexpected bills that have to be filled out of public funds. The problem is not getting rid of these pensions, because that has to be done. The problem is that they didn't start phasing them out 20 years ago when they could have let the people with final salary pensions in their contracts naturally retire out of the workforce, rather than forcing people to accept changes to their contracts when they're just a few years short of retirement. And that is the fault of the unions.

I agree with unions, I agree with the right to strike, I agree with the right to representation to defend an employee against unfair employment practices. I don't agree with the use of union power as a special interest group to insist on the best for their workers at the expense of everyone else.

And what is that reality?

That the working class is being systematically weakened and impoverished at the behest of and for the convenience of the super-rich, and it's been normalised and enacted by some of the most corrupt governments the world has ever seen along with a shockingly compliant mass-media. (And yes I do include New Labour's reign in that.)

(And let's be clear here, you're not 'middle class' if you've got a mortgage and a car loan or can't afford a house at all, working in an office instead of a factory does not make you middle class. That's another of the great con-jobs of the last thirty or forty years, make as many people as possible feel that they're middle class - like they somehow won't notice they're getting fucked as hard as ever. If you go out and do the 9-5, you're working class, end of.)

There is plenty of money to pay for everything, it just doesn't suit the fantastically wealthy to do anything that makes them anything other than even more fantastically wealthy. So you end up with this perverse 'debate' where one working man says 'I haven't had a pay rise for three years and my pension's been fucked, therefore I demand that the working man over there gets equally fucked in all the same ways that I have, it's just economic reality!'

It's a truly bizarre race to the bottom, because you'll always find someone somewhere who'll do the job you're doing for less money and for less rights, the ultimate conclusion of this approach is that we all end up back in the fucking workhouse with half a Sunday off per week to go to church and have the fear of God struck into us. You want to know how most capitalist employers would really like to behave given the chance? Look no further than the Foxconn factories.

Seriously, did none of you people study history? Do you know how long it took, how violent the struggle was, how many lives were lost to get to where we are now? Basic rights we all take for granted were won from the blood and sweat and struggle of people who lived not that long ago, the great reform acts of the last couple of hundred years that lifted the working man and woman out of penury, abuse and exploitation, and into the ranks of proper society.

And George Osborne is trying to say that the strikes are 'deeply irresponsible'? This is the millionaire heir to a massive fortune who's trying to tell people earning £20K a year that they're 'risking the stability of the British economy' because they want to hang on to a pension of £10K per year after forty years service?

He really can fuck off.

And this 'rant' is relevant to this debate, because this is the thin end of the wedge, they'll start with the pensions, and then they'll start on everything else. Conservatives make no secret of how they crave for a 'less regulated' workplace, and we all know full well what that really means.

Some fair points in there Craster but ultimately I call foul, there's plenty enough money in our economy to pay for everyone to live decently, no one should have to go without, and we shouldn't have to cut libraries or disability benefits or anything else to honour the promises made to people when they started in their employment, we just need to squeeze some of the tens of billions worth of ill-gotten gains out of the usual suspects.

The real elephant in the room here is the massive, almost incalculable inequality in society. That working class people on modest incomes, wanting to protect their modest pensions that they've been relying on for years, if not decades, are the 'top targets' in all of this, is absolutely unacceptable to my mind.

Let's start at the top, with the billionaires and the mega-corporations and the banks, if we're still a few quid short when we get to the teachers, nurses, fire fighters and care workers who've given forty years service to their country, maybe then we'll start fucking with their pensions, eh?

I don't disagree. The problem is though, that you've got a government that needs to rein in a deficit and try to pay down debt. Public sector salaries and pensions sit on the budget sheet, and altering the terms under which they're paid is valid within employment law. Going after the billiionaires, megacorporations, and banks involves two things - it involves creating laws and policy not only in the UK but globally, and it involves going directly against the wishes of the government's voting and funding base.

Does it? Does it really?

Debt is running at about 65% of GDP, certainly not the worst it has ever been. In the late 1940s, it was 200% of GDP and guess what, we built the fucking NHS. We're meeting our payments, we don't have a suicidal political class like the USA. However, we've just dumped 110,000 people on the dole, so the future looks bleak.

Gideon is carrying on with his austerity plan aka smashing everything good this country has built in the public sector and selling it off cheap - despite being told to stop by the IMF. Yep, even the damned IMF is telling him he is wrecking the economy. You might have noticed that austerity measures in Greece led to a 7.2% decline in GDP, with the inevitable result on their debt repayments. You might have noticed that countries with strong public sectors and unions, like Canada and Germany seem to have got off pretty well in the downturn.

David Frost (not that one), British Chambers of Commerce


Reacting to the news that average public sector pay was £23,660 a year. Out of control. Or lets put it another way, 1/676th of Fred Goodwins pension pot. 1/64th the salary of the editor of the Daily Mail (before bonuses and shares). Or 1/274th of Bob Diamonds - the Chairman of Barclays - bonus last year (not salary, bonus). Barclays paid out £554m to just 231 people last year.

(I tried finding out was Frosts salary was - the advert said it was simply "Competitive".)

Yet, as AE pointed out, people seem to think just because their job is shit, then the bloke next to thems job should be shit. Well, you are welcome to cut off your nose to spite your face if you like.

Kept offshore, to avoid tax, natch.

Also the heir to two Baronetcys (sp?) in Ireland. Which came as a bit of a shock to my Irish friends over there.

I've not said anything about public sector pay. I don't think it's too high. I don't think the jobs are cushie, and I don't think we spend too much on public services. I think that final salary pensions have proved to be far too risky and impossible to budget for, so I think they need to be done away with.

And yes, the Government needs to reduce the deficit and pay down the debt. Not necessarily because financially the country needs them to, but because they've told us that's what has to be done to turn the economy around. There's no way a majority conservative government is going to suddenly wake up one morning and decide to give Keynes a try.

But the point is, they are fucking wrong. Not just in the eyes of people like me, but according to economists, history, the EU and the IMF. The amount of people telling Osborne to stop what he is doing is staggering.

As a public sector worker I'm torn.

As to private sector pensions vs public ones I do feel we have to make sacrifices, I also genuinely suspect that it will all be academic as a major pandemic will hit before I'm sixty.

What I would be willing to strike on is the increasing cynical reliance on stop-gap disposable temps over scale 3's and 4's, making promotion difficult, and various chicken-shit that goes on with the council. But that's less catchy. I'm more concerned about the belm-world we live in regarding the average price of rent and the housing market to be honest.

Also, I found the Conservative mouthpiece's bit on radio about teachers having higher wages and so shouldn't have cushy pensions disingenous. For the stress and agro they get it isn't that much at all, and teachers need a good safety net if they're not to become burnt out twisted things still teaching at age 67. If this pension push was married with a strong, concerted effort to stop this offshore tax avoidence I'd shrug and take my lumps, but they're completely trying to throw a rug over how the upper few percent have kind of fucked us over.

I'm just waiting for them starting to say 'trickle down' again.

Welcome to the real world Pete. You've heard it here and you've heard it on the news, you've got it too damn good.

You educated, intelligent, caring, thoughtful, empathic human being providing a useful and meaningful service to society for a living wage earned under reasonable conditions with the expectation of a pension that should provide you with a decent standard of living in your old age.

You parasitic cunt! You utter fucking bastard! We need more ruthless capitalist marauders in this country, not people who just, y'know, want to help other people out. We don't need librarians, we need more coke-head prostitute-addicted psychopaths who'll destroy businesses, industries, people, even entire fucking countries if they think there's a few quid in it.

We don't need knowledge and compassion and understanding, we just need ruthless evil lunatics, and plenty of them!

In tomorrow's news, why all nurses and teachers are conspiring to destroy the major western economies with their subversive teaching and caring ways, and particularly their wish to be paid the pension they were promised when they signed up.

Next week we have a special broadcast entitled, 'Firemen, the sponging public sector bastards you wouldn't want saving your children, not with their fucking pension arrangements.'

So, because we recovered then we'll recover now. Hell, why not aim for 200% then? Pointing out economic figures based on when the country was a) coming out of the biggest war ever, b) set up completely differently, c) far more important globally than it is now, and d) in a completely different global economic environment is more than a little disingenuous.

Not to mention that with the current budget deficit, we're increasing that number by more than 5% per year. So, in less than a decade it'll be over 100% of GDP, and rising. That is, unquestionably, unhealthy (and doesn't include the figures for the bank bailouts, after which it is already at about 150%). It's also a worse deficit than in 1976, when we had to be bailed out by the IMF before our currency was devalued.




I don't disagree that they are, in places, cutting the wrong things, but what I mostly want to know is why the deficit quintupled in size between 2007-2009, leaving us in this mess? We went from losing 30billion a year to losing 150billion a year. 150billion quid a year, and that's just the deficit! Each year we're racking up more and more debt. The interest alone is staggering, and comparable to what we spend on education for the entire country. At some point it has to stop. The debt, and the interest payments cannot just keep on going up forever.



True, those salaries are staggering (though you'll find that the bonuses of the banking types are far, far larger than their salary). There are a hell of a lot more public service workers, and it is tax from the Bob Diamonds of the world that are paying for their pensions.



It's not at all like that. Anyone outside of the protected walls of the public sector has experienced the recession. Another 70 jobs were lost at my firm in the past couple of months. As Craster has explained very clearly, final salary pensions are simply untenable now.

To turn your phrase around... just because public sector pay is shit, you want private sector pay to be shit too, so no nasty people can earn a million quid a year trading in imaginary pork futures or whatever. Well, that's just cutting of the economy's nose to spite its face.

You forgot this:

AE, what the hell are you going on about? Do you have any experience of the public sector?

The vast majority of public sector workers are not teachers/nurses/librarians etc... If they were then everyone would be happy.
The vast majority of public sector workers are pen pushing council staff, or the rank and file of the government offices, or generic middle management etc...

Having met and worked with a fair number personally, I can say with my hand on my heart, that 99% of them are completely worthless, hypocritical, wastes of space.
But what can you do with them? Fire them and they won't be able to get a job as the private sector can't support that many out of work idiots. Keep paying them more and more to do worse than nothing? Reward them for their incompetence?

That's what people are quite rightly annoyed over, that and the unions protection of the incompetent, for their own political gains.

Part of the problem is that in among the incompetent idiots, there are a handful of people doing 80% of the real work, and they're going to get shafted because of said idiots.

I should probably change the resolution of this monitor. This thread has nothing to do with unicorns at all.

Because we are pursuing entirely the wrong course - I'm all for paying off debt, but slashing income and increasing costs seems to be a pretty weird way of going about it.



Did you notice that Bob Diamond is a non-dom for tax purposes? Oh, and so are those 231 people who shared half a billion quid each - or four times the amount Barclays paid in corporation tax last year.



So you didn't notice that 110,000 public sector jobs disappeared in the last three months. Record job losses, plus pensions cut, retirement age lifted, plus salaries frozen. They've never had it so good!



Absolutely missed the point - public sector pay is alright, so I want private sector to match it. You can't level a playing field downwards. After all, that is what competition is about, right?



Those people who have created a large part of this problem and have not paid for it (figuratively and literally) at all. In fact, they are making more and got better off!

A major problem I have with this whole issue is, more generally: Where's the argument about levelling-up pensions of private sector workers? What about working towards the creation of a whole new universal occupational pension scheme for all, as enjoyed in comparable European countries? Nowhere. Our pension system in the UK is basically as broken as the health insurance "market" is in the United States. Yet the public is being programmed into believing that the only "realistic" course of action available is the levelling-down if not elimination of the few existing decent occupational schemes remaining for working people in Britain. It's pure spiteful politics of envy. It's also depressing how much of the general public are merely ideological chatbots for the current range of right-wing hegemonic ideas of the day, completely uncritical and oblivious.

May I refer the Hon. Members to The Civil Service Mythbusters page for interesting facts about civil service numbers, pensions, pay, etc. many of which have been discussed above. (Saves me cuttin'n'pastin' it all.)



Which is why I am now a freelance interviewer and not a civil servant. (Actually, I was kicked out at the end of January, as part of a different round of cuts.)

Up and down isn't relevant. It's the type of pension that's the problem. With a contributory pension you know that you pay x% of your employee's salary each year to their pension. Done. Budget for it, pay it, sorted. With a final salary pension you will be paying....some amount at....some point for....some amount of time. It's impossible to reasonably allocate funds to final salary pension schemes without some level of super-psychic brilliance. And it means that when a department ends up inevitably being asked to cut its budget (as they always are) one of the first things to be cut is provisions against future pension payments. And that means that jump forward twenty years, and something else ends up getting cut to pay for it.

Final salary pension schemes are an unreasonable amount of gambling. That's not to say that a given public sector employee should get a lower pension, not at all. But a contributory pension is a much saner scheme, and the sheer scale of funding gap currently sitting in public sector pensions really does demonstrate that quite ably.

Is that 99% of those you worked with or 99% of the whole public sector workforce? I'm sorry, I'm being a smart ass, but having worked in the public sector for 38 years I can say with my hand on MY heart that, like the private sector, a much smaller percentage that I worked with were worthless wastes of space.

The interest payments are eye-watering, but if you look at them in context of %GDP, we're actually paying out less in interest than we did under the Tories for much of the 80s. Some of the reasons that the deficit ballooned so much in 2007-9 were because of the reduction of tax receipts as the economy contracted, plus the automatic stabilisers that kicked in as people where laid off (unemployment benefits, etc). The actual stimulus that the UK government added was one of the smallest in the Western world. The pro-growth stance says that contracting further in the face of this is not necessarily the right way to go, as you're in danger of just making things worse. Even the IMF is starting to suggest that budget cuts should be staged to begin once the recovery begins in earnest...

(also, there's the Curious Case of Belgium, in which it seems that having no government is better than a government, at least at the moment: http://www.cnbc.com/id/44449759 )

99% of those that I worked with obviously, I can't say for the rest without working with them

Didn't the States give the biggest stimulus package, by some distance, and that didn't work either?

It's impossible to try and have a reasoned debate with you, because all of your posts basically say that everyone who doesn't want to give every worker, irrespective of anything, a final salary pension, is an evil person who hates nurses that save peoples lives, and are puppets at the hands of the Evil Tories.

Which is just making shit up.

But you said that our debt level was fine? And in what way is reducing costs and increasing income (raised VAT and income tax) slashing income and increasing costs?



That's the fault of an overly complicated tax regime rather than of banks. My current company redomiciled to Holland to massively reduce its tax burden, after several years of pleading with the Chancellor that we'd rather pay tax here at a reasonable rate. Ultimately, companies have a legal obligation to shareholders to maximise profits, so many redomicile themselves abroad. The problem is not people taking advantage of the existing rules, it is the rules themselves. I read an article somewhere saying that if we reduced corporation tax rates significantly but simplified the system, we'd actually get more money. But I'm not the expert on this, APOD is.



Fair enough, but the rest of the market is experiencing the exact same thing. Making out that it's not universal is incorrect.

And raising the retirement age is an eminently sensible thing to do. In fact, I'd argue it's complete insanity to do otherwise, and runs completely contrary to the whole concept of pensions.



But you're complaining about private sector people earning too much. How can you match it to public sector without levelling it downwards? I understand pensions and that final salary ones, as Craster has pointed out numerous times, are simply not possible to pay and budget for correctly.




I'm still not sure how everything is their fault. I recognise the bailout, but all the figures discussed both here and in the media ignore the bailout monies. If the increased deficit and the recession were caused by the banks then all our prosperity in the previous years were caused by them, and our proposed economic recovery is completely reliant on them.

Loads of bankers lost their jobs (Lehmann Brothers were not a small company, and that's just one example), not to mention IT support, back office, secretarial and all the other things that make a company work. Not everyone 'got away with it'. Sure, some high profile people did, and people still making massive amounts of money for the banks will still get paid massive amounts of money.

But, to be honest, that makes me less annoyed than Habib Beye getting paid 2 million quid a year for literally doing nothing.

So please stop quoting him.

Yeah, then what? Surely in the country where the company was threatening to fuck off to there would then be calls for lower taxes to attract more foreign companies. Countries would be in competition over who has the lowest taxes. I don't know an answer to this or have any suggestions about what should be done but it seems to me that line of reasoning will only ever see taxes go downwards for companies.

I don't know the solution. I'm leaving that to APOD.

We've not had one of those since 1997, though.

A majority conservative government, not a conservative majority government.

Or a conservatively Major government. Or a MAJORITY Conservative governmently.

Onions should be Unions. Onions looks like it should sound like ownions.

pwnions.

I'm keeping out of contributing an opinion until the debating style moves on from a combination of sixth form reactionary politics, suggestions with no consideration of macroeconomic consequences beyond the immediately suggested change, and daily mail soundbites.

Drop me a line on my telepathic head implant when that happens.

Double bitch