Originally Posted by hopi watcher

The majority of workers are not taking any hit at all, this is just spin. The public sector has shed workers and will shed workers. We are in a recession caused by laisse-fare reagonomnics, not by workers in the public sector and what has to be pointed put to you is that when the celtic tiger was roaring and workers in private companies where sharing large bonus's etc, the workers in the public sector were not posting here crying about it.

Originally Posted by Hana

no the majority in the private sector are not the professional classes, they're the guys on the building sites & factory floors, shop tills etc. Go into a hospital and between the nurses/docs/social services/admin etc they make up something like 90% of the staff, that's 90% with 3rd level + qualifications.
Within a private company like - dell about 10 managers for every 500 staff. the managers will have some degree of college education but the 500 plus will be made up of mostly shop floor trained staff.

Originally Posted by hopi watcher

The public sector has shed workers and will shed workers.

Originally Posted by hopi watcher

I repeat, the majority of workers are not taking any hit at all at present

Originally Posted by Schuhart

I think there’s an element of truth on both sides of the discussion, but might it benefit from some data?

CSO data on earnings can be found here. The best paid public sector workers seem to be Garda and Prison Officers. I take it they don’t require third level qualifications but, in principle, you can see why it would be necessary to pay a lot to attract the kind of people you need to be locked up all day and night with criminals.

The next group down seem to be teachers, who presumably are largely qualified people. (I’m dimly aware of some issue regarding unqualified primary teachers, but I don’t know chapter and verse on that).

Taking what’s left, the pay of administrative civil servants seems to be of the same order as bank staff – which would seem to be a roughly equivalent type of job – in out of the cold, and shuffling papers in front of a computer.

Thought occurs – the real cost of the public service isn’t salary, but the cost of unfunded defined benefit pensions which will surely balloon in some predictable timescale.

Originally Posted by adamirer

Well said. Don't get ahead of yourselves thinking the private sector is so wonderful and public sector contributes nothing. Remember the private sector includes cleaners, people working in hmv, cothes shops, dunnes etc, so its not by any means all high end skills and mentally stimulating work. Forgive the classist nature of that comment, but the fact is it is not exactly high value adding. Any junior cert students, as one poster put it, could do a HELL of a lot of private sector job. and hey, in fact are!!!!

If the public service is so well paid compared to the private sector then quit and join the public service...

Garda & Prison staff get so well paid due to overtime and the fact that they are basically understaffed for the amount of time work that is required. If there were 4,000 more garda etc you'd find the overtime bill come down a lot.

Civil servants, teachers etc, don't really get paid overtime. I've got it for one day in 5 years. Similarly as an EO I was responsible for a €10m cross border infrastructure plan, a media campaign, construction projects, amongst others. How many people in the private sector do that level of work. or that responsibility for under €35k a year... exactly. It took me 4 years in the civil service to earn the same as my last private sector job (in IT), and I guarantee you i wouldn't have left that job if i had known decentralisation was going to happen.

Public service is too broad to be so handily labelled. Exactly what professions should be paid less? The doctors? nurses? teachers? garda?

Remember, virtually all teachers had a 3rd level degree, and most post primary have a hdip in Ed, the entry level for EO, AO and higher in the civil service is a primary degree and the average graduate salary is around 28-32k.

While there are many benefits, and thats not disputed, there are also many difficulties that are rarely mentioned. The entire civil service promotional system has been almost frozen since Dec 2003, there's bee a huge brain drain from key areas to facilitate decentralisation, our jobs are used as political footballs (bye bye Parlon if there is any justice).

Promotions are ridgid and we are not assigned to where we are interested. Wages are set, regardless of ability. You can't leave and come back or else you have to start again - hence we stay even when miserable.

Finally, consultants are hired because Ministers like them, its seen as 'independent' and because they have the time (and often experience) to do work that stretched civil servants don't - especially when you're moved to a new section every 3 years.

Originally Posted by patslatt

Qualifications in the public sector are inflated unnecessarily (eg the four year degree in nursing,a profession largely taught on the job previously),so this is not necessarily a good argument for higher pay than in the private sector. Given the near impossibility of sacking PS workers protected by the jobs for life culture and given the gold plated pensions worth up to 30% of pay in the highest paid categories,an argument could be made that PS pay should be lower than the private sector's.

Private sector pay is largely determined by the marketplace. If unionisation determined pay,poor countries like India could solve their economic problems overnight by legislating all workers into unions.

Originally Posted by anewbeginning

I have news for you, I and hundreds of thosuands other private sector workers won't be bearing the pain so idiots like you can continue to live the high life....

Originally Posted by anewbeginning

Working with boring farts like you in the PS? no thank you!