Public Sector Jobs - Redundancies are not the answer

FT Lex column on strikes in France:

"....As with these big catch-all strikes in France, the aims are confused. Most of those taking part hail from the heavily unionised and cosseted public sector, the people least likely to be in the front line of recession. Unsurprisingly, there is little evidence that the largely non-unionised private sector has shown any interest in posturing for an “end to job cuts”, a reversal of the government’s reform programme and higher, taxpayer-funded welfare payments...."

If you cut masses of public sector jobs, the economy will suffer in several ways:

a) no spending money - which will crucify business
b) repayment of loans and mortgages will stop - putting the banks into further difficulties
c) benefits and welfare bills will shoot up

Point 'b' above is moot: - it seems the government have possibly already anticipated this and given the banks a leg up so they will escape out of this recession more or less scot free in comparison to the rest of us. 'a' and 'c' will cause enormous problems for both the public and the private sector. The private sector needs customers for goodness sake. All this baying for the blood of the public sector is like a bunch of turkeys wishing for christmas.

Jobs should be kept where possible.

Pay should be cut where necessary.

Attacking existing pensions is robbing people who are being paid for work already done. That is fundamentally unfair imho.

Public sector workers keep saying everybody has to share the pain.

I have the height of respect for civil servants generally but when are they going to start sharing the pain themselves?

Zhou_Enlai wrote:

Jobs should be kept where possible.

Pay should be cut where necessary.

Attacking existing pensions is robbing people who are being paid for work already done. That is fundamentally unfair imho.

Public sector workers keep saying everybody has to share the pain.

I have the height of respect for civil servants generally but when are they going to start sharing the pain themselves?

Imo government does a canny job in using public employment to keep us divided and in vote management. Public pay increases have been used recklessly as a vote-buying exercise in the last ten years. When competitivity started to decline and job creation slowed in 2002, Government began took the easy option of ratcheting up public sector job numbers and wages instead of trying to deal with the threats we were facing to our economy.

Government has created a gilded bureacracy, working in glittering post modern palaces. The internal culture combines a feeling of being "special people" and with imagined victim status, worried paper pushers on €50,000 a year fantasising about blocklayers on €50,000 a year in order to rationalise their own salaries. In many cases, staff flung into pressurised and rapidly expanding departments are barely competent. In other areas of work, real progress and improvement has been made and there has been growing effectiveness and professionalism. Irish public service is teenage and undergoing transformation and was becoming over the last few years at one and the same time spotty, hormonal, sulky, competent, resentful, aspirational, anal retentive and adventurous, in parts.

Half of the money being used to feed this interesting morphing monster is gone. Ideally, we should be taking a careful look at it, to see how much we can save, nurture and develop and improve the Irish public services, within which there is sensible, productive and useful employment and secure, reasonable remuneration. Numbers employed should not be reduced, as they would be going straight on the dole. Redeployment and retraining, and wage reductions, would be much more advantage to the public as users of services, to having hollowed-out skeleton services staffed by a few overpaid and overworked survivors of slash and burn job cuts.