ISME warns: Public Sector Overpaid- diasaster in offing

[ibis]

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.

No, they were crying in front of the benchmarking committee - much more profitable.

[patslatt]

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.

Some occupations requiring modest academic education are paid highly to compensate for career disadvantages such as job insecurity, lack of social prestige,physical demands,accident rates and the inability to perform the work beyond a certain age. Heavy manual construction work such as shuttering carpentry is an example.

But even if many low paid occupations in the private sector are paid a fair market wage as dictated by the market,that is no excuse for the public sector to extract high indirect taxes such as VAT from these people to contribute towards the excessive public sector pay and gold plated pensions.

[bormotello]

The public sector has shed workers and will shed workers.

How many permanent public workers has been made redundant so far?

[bormotello]

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

Why collected income taxes are declining so fast?

[patslatt]

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.

A study of English civil servants revealed a rapid growth in male life expectancy that will soon close the big gap with female life expectancy. THe typical 40 year old male is now expected to live to 89 compared to 91 for the female.

With Irish PS pensions uniquely rising in line with wages of the department,the compounding of unfunded pensions from retirement in the early 60s to age 90 will bankrupt the state. Two generations hence,there will be only 2 workers per pensioner,and those workers will be expected to pay maybe over 80% of their earnings in tax to keep the system going. How long would they stay around?

[wexfordman]

Income tax receipts down 7.4% on last year. Unemployment up to what aroudn 10% now, and predicted to go to 14%. Thanks 1 in 7 workers out of work!!

[patslatt]

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.

THe prison guards are well known for manipulating overtime. For instance,it takes them hours to release a prisoner.

THe shortage of guards is artificial as until a few years ago they reserved most of the admin posts including HR and IT for guards,unlike in Britain where half the admin jobs are civilian. Why did politicians tolerate this nonsense for so long?

All or most of the public service occupations are paid at the top in the EU and should be cut back in pay to the levels of small countries with similar GNPs per capita (not the misleadingly high GDP figure unions love to quote dishonestly).

[politicaldonations]

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.

Correct.
Also , tribe claims the Public sector's high skill/education levels justifies higher salaries than private sector but in every other Eurozone country private sector average pay is significantly higher than public sector but here in Ireland it's the opposite. Presumably the public sectors in other Eurozone countries are equally skilled/educated?

[Leftfemme22]

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....

What high life? Just what obn earth are you babbling about? This kindof red top sensationalism reduces your arguements to the the level of the schoolyard.

And I have news for you pal, you WILL pay more taxes, as we all will, irrelevant of which sector we work in.

[Leftfemme22]

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

Is that it?

Is that all you have? Stop whinging about something that is none of your business.