Compulsory job-sharing?

[DeGaulle 2.0]

Clearly one of the biggest problems we have (budget-wise) is the public sector pay bill. Tens of thousands of permanent public-sector jobs were added based on the temporary receipts from the property boom. It is now very difficult to sustain this.

There have been a lot of suggestions about voluntary redundancy, but would a compulsory job-sharing scheme be more cost-effective?

For example, if there are 1000 surplus HSE managers, why not have 2000 people job-sharing? It would save money and no-one would need to be paid off with redundancy payments.

I am not suggesting this to get at civil servants, just as a possible alternative method of cutting the public service pay bill without excessive hardship or cost. It could be a temporary scheme until the economy recovered.

[Auditor #9]

An excellent suggestion DeGaulle - head over to the Pin, they're recruiting for revolutionary ideas there.

Your idea would serve a myriad of purposes - the public service bill could drop by a huge fraction - Frank Fitzgibbon (?) on Prime Time just said that if the Civil Service took a 10% pay cut then 2 billion would be saved right there. Your suggestion is more radical and more culturally in tune for other reasons...

We have to cut down on the public service bill, we need to keep people employed in order that the National Mortgage and Credit Card Debt can get serviced by those people who took out those mortgages on the strength of having a permanent public sector job forever. People need to be able to keep their dignity but the debt must be repaid too obviously. Now that we've nationalised the banks, there could be noises about MABSing the mortgage money i.e. bringing it in slowly at reduced interest rates so the part-timers that your policy would create can pay for their dwellings and still be able to go to Tescos once in a while as a break from shopping at Aldi/Lidl.

There would be a lot less assh0le Chiefs around to break your balls unnecessarily as they do in those kinds of jobs - what a relief that would be.

The whole idea would be a stepping stone to wiping a lot of the crumbling edifice out eventually or at least set it on a path of radical reform.

Not only that but production on the planet will eventually stabilise or fall and we'll need to invent alternative activities for ourselves and come to terms with alternative job definitions.

Again, great idea but would it be considered? I really hope it comes to it that it will have to be.