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On Mon, 9 Feb 2009 00:40:15 +0000, Ste <...@hotmail.com
On 8 Feb, 20:50, Old Codger <...@anyoldwhere.net
I'm reading the Times today. As it says, if we exclude the Sir
Humphreys, the average civil servant over the long term has been on a
substantially lower wage than they would have received in the private
sector for equivalent employment. That is in accordance with my
understanding.
In that most people do not change jobs yearly. While the "average"
wage in the private sector may go up and down with the economy, Civil
Service pay will remain constant because it is not subject to the
variations in the market. The level of remuneration that Civil
Servants receive must be compared to the private sector over the long
term, not just over the past 5 or 10 years. It is meaningless to
compare pay at a time when the economy is in the shitter and therefore
private sector wages are lower, when during the boom times in various
industries private sector workers will have been earning 4 times what
Civil Servants were earning for the same work.
I think what really motivates these attacks against the public sector
is that old chestnut of the Right: envy. The problem is, instead of
private sector workers fighting to secure reasonable pay and
conditions for themselves, they have extolled the virtues of the
market and now it has hurt them they complain about the relative job
security and "high wages" of the public sector, when those in the
public sector have for many years (of their whole working lives)
tolerated wages far below that in the private sector.
No, I mean benefits increase with long service, which was the promise
made to Civil Servants at the outset. And again, I simply reject this
statistical comparison of "average" pay. To most people, the "average"
worker is not Sir Humphrey, it is for example the frontline workers in
a Jobcentre, and most making an objective assessment would say such
public sector workers today are overworked and underpaid.
That is only true if you accept the need for a private sector. I
don't. The bosses are not "wealth creators doing a public service",
they are leeches lining their own pockets at everyone else's expense.
This fundamental tendency has been shown with the bankers who have not
only gone some way to making whole nations bankrupt, but are
continuing to collect huge salaries and bonuses even now because they
believe themselves to be "talented" people.
There can be jobs, salaries, and taxes without profits. Ancient
society did rather well without bosses who "invested" capital and took
"profits".
You mean mean average, or median average, or modal average? Unlike you
some of us actually know something about statistics. It is true that
you can prove anything with statistics, provided the audience are not
statisticians.
And what I will also say is that by "average", most people mean
instinctively think you refer to the "mean". When one starts using the
median and modal as "averages" in political debate, it is almost
always to deceive the listener.
Let's face it Old Codger, you're a twister. So far we've already
established that you're excluding those private sector workers for
whom "the sky is the limit", and now you're not even clear what
average you are using. And to boot, you're making the comparison in
wages only in terms of the last 5 or 10 years, not the last 30 or 40.
Honestly, it's like something out of Blackadder.
It's completely disingenuous to suggest the origin of all wealth is
the private sector. The private sector doesn't lay any golden eggs. It
is the workers who create wealth whether they be in the public or
private sector; but from your perspective it may be more helpful to
see the state as the "parent company" of all others, and tax-money
passes up to the state the same way as profits pass up the ownership
chain in ordinary companies.
For you planning of the economy is "dictatorship". For most people,
the statement that "we're going to build you a hospital, and we're
going to build it well" is not dictatorship, it is giving the public
the very thing it wants and needs. And by the same token, the
statement "we're going to clean this hospital, and we're going to pay
good workers to clean it well" is also not dictatorship, it is giving
the public the very thing it wants and needs.
Let's face it Old Codger, the free market is never shown to work over
the short term or the long term, except for a minority of people who
get rich while caring not for the people they hurt in the process.
Every time "rational self-interest" is put at the wheel, the results
are akin to putting a small child at the wheel of an automobile:
you'll get so far if you start off straight, but you're sure to leave
the road at the first corner.
And there is a logical explanation to this. The drive for "efficiency"
means, in practice, the honing of the business process to the specific
circumstances and task at hand, and the removal of any costly
redundancy and robustness inherent in the system - that is what
"efficiency" is. The problem is, such a system is fragile, and when
the "system" is our whole economic system on which people rely for
survival, it looks short-sighted in retrospect to have made the system
so "efficient".
And to go back to the hopsital analogy, all the private sector
enterpreneur sees is an opportunity to use half-strength bleach, and
pay a Filipino immigrant tuppence-happeny, and take a cut of the
"efficiency savings" for himself, while in reality we are all now
shouldering the increased risk of death by infection in dirty
hospitals. And of course, the same enterpreneur will say "our cleaning
services have 99.9% satisfaction", while 0.1% of patients die of MRSA.
When we apply these "efficiency savings" system-wide in the economy,
you're constantly taking a 0.1% cut out of the health and satisfaction
of the population, and people must constantly respond to these
failures of the system, like repairing a rusty hull that is constantly
springing leaks.
I think that's called "confirmation bias". And the point I'm making is
that wages in the public sector can appear higher, if indeed they do
appear higher on close inspection of these statistics, for all kinds
of reasons other than that the public sector worker is being paid more
than a private sector employee for the same work.
That's the whole point! How can you constantly manage a person who is
trying every possible way to swindle you? That is *why* the Civil
Service prefer long-term commitment and loyalty, because they don't
want people constantly trying to swindle the most money for the least
work, they want people who act *morally* in the interests of the Civil
Service and therefore the public at large.
But that is anathema to the whole concept of having *private
enterprise* run the operation and derive a profit. If the public purse
has to support the thing because it cannot make a profit, then what
the hell have you got shareholders for, and more to the point, why did
you privatise it in the first place?
This is what I mean about private enterprise being like a child at the
wheel. Ideological free-market capitalists are constantly having to
react to painful experience by making sure the vehicle "hits the
ground running" as it were, and that there are ruts in the road that
naturally guide the wheels, and that there are buffers and crash
barriers to keep the vehicle on the roadway, and such like. But the
real question again is why are you putting a *child* at the wheel, who
doesn't know what's good for himself, and certainly doesn't care about
what's good for other people.
Ultimately, a "contract" with a private company is designed to act as
a railroad so the "child" driver does not really need to drive the
operation at all. The problem is that anywhere the tracks are weak or
missing, the train naturally comes right off the tracks. Or, if the
tracks are laid to somewhere other than it's intended destination, the
train simply speeds past in the distance, and you don't achieve the
goals of the operation.
What year are we talking about here?
Any pension fund is reliant on future employees! If you do not realise
this, then you honestly know nothing about the matters in which you
clearly think yourself expert. Let me ask you, where do you think the
return on investment comes from, and the goods and services that it
buys? Do you think "investment returns" come about by sexual
reproduction?
Och!
This is obtuse. The taxman can just as easily make "investments". That
he does not currently tend to do so in any significant way (at least
if you ignore the banking bailouts) is a function of the present
administration's ideology.
A mistake on Gordon's part, then. Still, if he wishes to raise
taxation, he is constrained politically in how he can achieve it - I
expect he would have preferred to simply put up income taxes. Anyway,
I've said I'm not here as an apologist for Brown - he is fundamentally
continuing the liberal economic policies of the previous Conservative
administration, and by claiming responsibility for the economy he is,
like the Tories before him, exposing himself to criticism when the
economic contradictions cause mayhem.
The private sector may pay the bills at this present time. The public
sector always has the option to make its own investments, however.
I never said I was a public sector employee. And as you recognise,
even a "good" boss is forced to extract some profit, and unfortunately
competitive market forces tend to favour the "bad" bosses who extract
maximum profit.
Indeed.
The company doesn't have to be small, it merely has to be weak. And
you must surely concede my point, then, that the pensions failed
because the businesses behind them staked their pension pots on the
continued success of the business (either by investing the pots
directly in the business, or underfunding the pots and instead "making
up the deficit" day-to-day).
All I know is many pension funds have gone bust because the employer
company was the main or significant investment of the pot. I think
this was generally done with the worker's consent, but then what does
the man on the street know about pensions and economics.
The private sector, "largely the financial services industry", has
gone some way already to destroying itself. The public sector may, for
ideological reasons, spend far in excess of its own returns on
investment, the shortfall made up by taxation. Fundamentally, though,
the public sector is not dependent on the private sector, any more
than a mobster is dependent on a protection racket as opposed to
investing in his own businesses.
Well, that was a marathon post.
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