:rolleyes:
:rolleyes:
This is how this government has been operating for the past 18 months - leak, assess public reaction, proceed.
[quote=“Rocko”]Mullach - I don’t understand the distinction you’re making between redundancies and fewer hours worked by the existing employees. Surely it all boils down to less hours worked by the labour force. Productivity won’t be affected any more or less than it would under redundancy.
It doesn’t fit well with teachers, I accept that, but that’s the folly of the government imposing blanket-wide solutions to problems by lumping all the public sector in one basket. That was their choice (propelled by IBEC) and it’s obvious that the solution that works for the Dept of Transport won’t apply effectively to teachers. The jobs and employment conditions are too different.[/quote]
A company employing 50 people working full-time would require less middle-management, have less overheads, administration and operating costs than a company employing 100 people job-sharing, yet both would probably have the same productivity.
The short-term outlay of redundancy payments would be of benefit in the long term. I am not saying that public servants don’t work hard, I’m saying there are just too many of them, their own union has in effect admitted as much by trying to do that deal.
It was ludicrous to suggest that all Gardai, Firemen, Nurses, Teachers, Doctors etc could work 12 days a year less to provide the necessary savings for the government and not affect the provision of their services.
It is the unions that are imposing the blanket wide solutions that are not sustainable. The pay-cut proposal, while not platable, would not differentiate and more importantly would not affect staffing levels.
I think it is the terms of the pension Rocko, not the pension itself. The registered agreement in the construction industry makes it compulsory for all companies to have their employees in a contributary pension scheme.
The government has a guaranteed pension scheme, whereby they are in effect insuring the pension fund for everyone in the public service.
My own pension fund is now worth 2/3 of what I paid into it, if it is similar with most pension funds then the government has alot of dough to come up with to make up any shortfall.
[quote=“Rocko”]
The thing that I’m most astonished at in all this mess is the notion that a pension is now being marketed as a luxury! In every other country in Europe (including the UK) the trend is towards making pensions more widely available, some make them compulsory and the UK are making them semi-compulsory by forcing employers to set them up and then allowing them to opt out afterwards, in the expectation that the vast majority of them won’t. But of course we have IBEC and faux-economists in our ears all day proclaiming pensions as a crazy dreamland entitlement that public service workers get. It’s the fucking absolute minimum you’d expect in a developed economy. Even the notion that it could be bandied about as some sort of inefficiency or bloated BIK is absurd. Do we want to move back to the 19th Century?[/quote]
What is most disappointing is how easily the public have been led by the nose into blaming everything on one section of the workforce. It was a shock six months ago when Brian Lenihan said that public spending had created the crisis, now it’s the consensus. People who curse Maggie Thatcher and Tony O’Reilly are completely in step with their agendas. The government are giving billions to the banks and they can’t even get basic levels of compliance from them. Even a superficial level of comparative analysis demonstrates that we don’t have a ‘bloated’ public sector, and in fact, we are significantly behind the levels of public sector investment of the nations that are best surviving the crisis. The corporate agenda has and always will be the race to the bottom, but it’s not everywhere you see the workforce join in the chorus.
well said
Smashing post. I’ve posted statistics from the OECD on Irish public spending about a dozen times on here but it makes no views to the entrenched views of otherwise-rational people who seem wedded to the propaganda being doled out daily in the national media. We don’t just spend conservatively or moderately. We are way, way below the average spend for a developed country. And that is why we have such appalling public services.
The point about Thatcher is very well made. She is rightly despised for what she did in the eighties in Britain. I think people in Ireland hate her (reasonably enough) for her actions in Ireland but probably most of the younger people have little knowledge of the absolute devestation she caused for her own people. We’re way down that track now and astonishingly the track is lined with cheerleaders.
A word on the unions too - they’ve been generally very poor in terms of debate and policy ideas in this crisis. Partly because their voice isn’t getting much of an airing but you have to say they haven’t presented themselves very well.
No one in Ireland likes to be seen as right wing but that’s exactly the agenda an awful lot of people are spouting these days.
Biggest joke of all is the bias on radio stations like Newstalk. Cunts like Ivan Yates couldn’t be more obvious in pushing their agenda. When he interviews people who feel public sector pay needs to be cut he completely forgets he’s meant to be an objective broadcaster.
He should be taking the opposing view to everyone he interviews like, in fairness, they do on RTE, i.e when he’s interviewing a union guy argue against his points and vice versa when he’s interviewing someone from IBEC or wherever.
[quote=“The Runt”][/quote]
Ha ha
I always knew Liam Doran’s gob would land him in it.
a very articulate & salient post - well done that man
The very notion then that the public service unions suggested unpaid leave of 5% of the working year as a means of saving money defies all logic.
They have sold their members down the river, I’d say when they gave their latest proposal Cowen et al were rubbing their hands with glee.
The solution is simple.
Go Deeper.
I’d say the reasoning behind it was fairly straightforward. They were trying to protect members basic pay and pension entitlements while making the necessary savings. Much easier to see the unpaid leave thing being temporary till the country gets back on its feet than a paycut which will never be reversed.
Can’t blame them for trying in fairness.
Still I reckon they should just cut the pay to fuck and be done with it. I wonder if they agreed could they get a guarantee that this will be the final pay cut. If so surely it would be worth it for not having to listen to all this shite and let the focus move to proper reform in every sector of government.
[quote=“tipptops*”]The solution is simple.
Go Deeper.[/quote]
Do you know if dandruff is edible?
I know everything, except what happened to GSH on the night of the 27th.
Is dandruff edible?
[quote=“gola”]I’d say the reasoning behind it was fairly straightforward. They were trying to protect members basic pay and pension entitlements while making the necessary savings. Much easier to see the unpaid leave thing being temporary till the country gets back on its feet than a paycut which will never be reversed.
Can’t blame them for trying in fairness.
Still I reckon they should just cut the pay to fuck and be done with it. I wonder if they agreed could they get a guarantee that this will be the final pay cut. If so surely it would be worth it for not having to listen to all this shite and let the focus move to proper reform in every sector of government.[/quote]
That’s the problem though, once they get the unions on the back foot there will be no stopping them. It’s fairly easy for unions to be holding guns to heads in prosperous times. Let them earn their corn now.
It depends on many random variables.
What does it taste like?
Yer probably right but I wonder is there ever a point when even the media would think is enough is enough on the pay cuts. I mean, how low do they think nurses, teachers or other repsonsible well trained jobs pay actually should be? 25k a year? 20k?
Fellas like Ivan Yates ‘flabbergasted’ by exchequer figures and suggesting that the upcoming pay cuts will only have to be the start. What a cunt on probably 100k a year from Newstalk…