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17 April 2009 | In | Comments (7)Is anyone else getting really agitated by the attitude of the Public Sector
Over the last number of weeks, I have been listening to the back and forth of all sides on this argument. To be perfectly honest it makes my blood boil.
ExperienceXchange.ie and the reason for its existence is living proof of how much the private sector is currently struggling. The live register is swelling towards 400K. Extremely experienced and talented people are being forced the injustice of have to collect the dole once a week. And not one single person of the 400K is made up of any civil servants or public sector worker that have lost there job in the last 12 months. Where is the justice in this?
While this is all going on, the teachers are all on their "jollies" down at their national conferences in Kilkenny, giving the Minsiter for Education abuse over the Pensions Contribution. Let me ask this question. How do they get the time off to go to this conference? Oh yes, that’s right, they are on their 2 week Easter Break!! You have got to be kidding. In the public sector, salaries are being cut by 10 - 20% plus redundancies. yet the public sector have an issue with an average pension levy of 7.5 %.
I do agree with them on one point, that Education spend in the area of class sizes and special needs teachers should not be affected as this will cripple our economy far beyond the current economic crisis.
I feel that this is creating such a division in Irish society between the Private and Public sector. I don’t think I need to go as deep into this as discuss benchmarking, as I feel it is so blatantly obvious that salaries have been dramatically cut in the private sector. One would have to consider, do our civil servants live in the real world or in the clouds?
I came across this blog today which I think makes a huge amount of sense and carries a lot of weight.
@Steven Grant
I’d have to agree with you 100% Steven, living in the clouds. My sister in law is a public servant who was previously a teacher and she’s a well education, intelligent woman but it dismays me how much in denial she is of her privileged lot in life.
BTW, do you have any RSS feed for this blog? When I tried subscribing through my Google Reader I got the error message that it couldn’t find a feed.
James, Thanks for the comments. No RSS feed currently. I will get on to it this straight away.
To be very honest. a lot of the banks are no different to the public sector and may even become an extension of the public sector if the 20 economists writing in today’s Irish Times get there way!! I worked in one of the large banks for a time and the level of complacency and waste of time and resources in extraordinary.
In some ways, thank God for the recession and the wake up call that is hopefully coming down the line in the public sector.
Here hoping that FF have what it takes to right all of this or else that the Greens have the bottle to pull out.
Somehow that seems less and less likely now that they are getting bought off with Green jobs in the ESB!!
have been hopping mad on this issue for the last 10 years-I could see this coming then and its going to get a lot worse. The example I used was when I was in IT recruitment, i used to get calls from IT engineers in public service jobs. The one that stood out was a guy who was on 45kbase salary v’s market rate of 35k for 4 years network engineer exp. he worked 35 hours a week flexitime 10-5 but as his girlfriend worked at 9 am - he started early and got paid overtime even though there was 10 in the team, hence his reason for ringining me every 4 months - totally bored, said 3 could do hte job. he had every training cert known to man, also
arghhhh
Thanks for the link. As it happens, I’ve posted another article on a related topic - teachers’ pay in Ireland - here: http://ronanlyons.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/tackling-the-thorny-issue-of-teachers-pay/
All comments welcome… as you can probably see from the lengthening comments list!
Ronan, that article is equally as intralling. Any chance you could do one on the HSE!!
Steven is right. It is so blatant. As an expat from Africa, i can testify to the similarities with the “African” problem. Too many hands in the cookie jar, too much greed and plenty arrogance to go with it all. Ireland needs honest, hardworking politicians that will shake up the service and introduce a similar culture. The only other option is really, truly and very imminently; become a banana republic.
I have worked in the private sector all my life and while I agree with some of what you are saying I have offer a voice of reason also. Cutting pay of a teacher who after 9-10 year on the job from 57K is not the answer to our woes in this country and taken in isolation is useless. While the comment made are slightly emotionally charges they do not offer a fair or balanced view. Would any of you who have submitted a comment after working for 10 years (due to government mismanagement I might add) accept a pay cut? At that stage of your career I presume you would all consider 57K not to be an excellent salary. Then take a level (aim only at you) from it and which one of you would do the Job?? I wouldn’t!! Teachers, Nurses & Garda positions are called vocations for a reason. Not many of us would do the work and frankly I think 57K for a person with 10 years experience is not a fantastic salary.
Changes have to be made but we will all at some stage need or use the service of a nurse, Garda or teacher. Fine investigate the HSC, the layers of bureaucrats in our system and make it so that people in these professions who are not doing the job are cut. But I would not target teachers regardless of how much our European counterparts are being paid.
PS. I lived in France for a while and French teachers are making more money that the survey suggests so I would also question the validity of the data.
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