Ive said what I have to say on this post Losty and wont be posting on it again. It is amazing though how many messages I have got saying fair play to me and how they agree with me since I posted that post. Says a lot.
Yeah rents down. That can only be good news except if your a landlord. But landlords, like so many other business's ( pubs, restaurants to name few ) had it great in the boom but now having to lower there prices or go out of business.
No mate what I said was that low paid public and private sector workers shouldnt be touched by the Governemnt. Its unfortunate that a lot of private sector workers have been hit with pay cuts, but the answwer to that is not to hit low paid public sector workers pay either. Im against the strike next week just for the record also.
Funny you should say that as I cant access this site from work. I do be too busy anyway as I work in one of the busier sections of the Civil Service. Im not going to go into the whole debate of "Civil Servents" do nothing as thats just pure ignorance if anyone thinks that.
It was not the public service, nor anyone in the public service, who precipitated this crisis in the first place. And when we’re not busy sneering at public servants, we totally depend on them. Take away our public service in Ireland and you drive a huge hole into our quality of life.
This is a very valid point. Now there was a time when no one would dream of taking a civil servent job as the pay was btutal and still is but now that we have that bit of stability we are taking the brunt of the cuts.
I know I was moaning about Civil Servents earlier on but the same applies to the paid Private Sector aswell. No one under €35,000 should be touched with more cuts I reckon.
Losty, you never answered my last question, just repeated your previous mails.
Miles off the mark with your first and last points there Losty. I dont know how much Taxi men pay in tax each year but supposed the Government saud all taxi men must pay 7-10% more tax...How would you feel. God knows you kick up a fuss about the slighest thing.
Fair enough point Losty..But to be honest the author of that article makes a brilliant point in relation to the Public Sector taking the hit for the recession. I know the Private Sector have it hard aswell and the whole job security and pension debate is a valid one, but it genuinely is border line for a lot of low paid Civil Servents between weekly pay and Social Welfare entitlements everyweek.
It was not the public service, nor anyone in the public service, who precipitated this crisis in the first place. And when we’re not busy sneering at public servants, we totally depend on them. Take away our public service in Ireland and you drive a huge hole into our quality of life.
So why, I wonder, are public servants being told, day after day, that they have to bear the brunt of the public expenditure cuts? In addition to that, why are public servants being constantly attacked and derided as if they had suddenly become the fat cats in our society?
Why is there such division, and it seems such jealousy, between the public and the private sector? When public servants, quite rightly, point out that their pay has been hit by the pension levy, the commentators immediately snap that it’s only a modest contribution to the real cost of their pensions.
But for years and years public service pay in Ireland was calculated on the basis that the value of the pension had to be taken into account when making comparisons. In other words, public service salaries tended to be lower than those in the private sector because there was more security in the public service and the pensions were related to income rather than to the contribution made.
I’ve always argued (and I see the OECD is doing it too) that some government has to bite the bullet on the pension issue by closing down the "defined benefit" scheme (which relates pension to salary) for new entrants to the public service, and by placing all new entrants on a defined contribution scheme (which relates pension to the amount you pay into the scheme).
Such a change would bring the cost of funding public service pensions down dramatically over time. It would also mean that everyone in the economy who was working towards a pension, whether in the private or the public sector, would be on the same footing.
But you know what? The pensions entitlements of public servants haven’t actually changed at all. What has changed is that many pension schemes in the private sector have lost huge value partly because of mismanagement and also because the equities and stocks and shares they have been invested in have been damaged by greed and incompetence. More than a few pension funds, for instance, invested heavily in Irish bank shares. Need I say more?
And we’re being told every day that public service pay is at the heart of the whole public expenditure problem because it accounts for a massive proportion of public spending.
When they’re talking about public spending, commentators seem to use whatever figure comes into their heads. I’ve heard it solemnly reported on the radio that public service pay accounts for proportions of spending ranging from 50% to 75%. There’s a mantra about it - "it’s simply impossible to cut public spending (and thereby save the economy is the inference) without cutting pay because pay simply accounts for too much".
The actual figure is about one-third. Public service pay is about one-third of public spending. So every €3 you take off a public servant should give you about €1 in public spending cuts.
There’s a couple of problems with this. First, every time you take €3 off a public servant, you lose anything up to €1 in tax revenue because (unlike a lot of people in the private sector) public servants are all PAYE workers - cut their pay and you immediately lose the income tax they give you. So actually, if you want to get a cut of €1 in overall public spending from public service pay, you have to take around €4.
The Government has said it wants to take €1.3 billion from public servants as their contribution to resolving our financial crisis. If it means that as a net figure (taking account of the loss in tax revenue), it’s going to have to cut pay by around €1.7bn in fact. That’s 10% of the public pay bill from January 1 next.
BUT IF it wants to apply that kind of a cut so that lower paid public servants have to take a hit of, say, 5%, it’s going to have to cut middle income public servants by around 15%.
I hate to bring this up again but here is an article that explains it as it is..And yes I am a Public Sector Worker. I think this is very interesting.
I THINK if I were a public servant today, I’d be mad as hell.
With a few well documented political exceptions, I’ve never known anyone who went into the public service to make money.
In fact if you wanted to make money, the last place you’d go for a career is into the public service.
Some people choose a public service career for security and many choose it because it offers the chance to do something or to be something they’ve always wanted to be. A nurse, a doctor, a teacher, a fireman. To work at healing the sick, catching the baddies, teaching the kids - I’ve known people who grew up from childhood wanting to do just that, and who have found tremendous fulfilment from following a chosen career as a public servant.
And I’ve known public servants who maybe ended up in places they never expected to find themselves, and nevertheless did the state more than a little service. It is public servants who run our libraries (and if you haven’t visited a library lately, go and take a look - it will knock your socks off).
It is public servants who help Irish manufacturers to market their goods and to export them. It is public servants who, behind the scenes, probably did as much and more to bring peace to this island than any of the higher profile politicians who routinely claim their place in history.
I could go on. But you’re going to have to take my word for this, if you haven’t had direct experience of the public service. As I said, I’ve never met a public servant who was in it for the money. And I’ve never met a public servant who wanted to let his or her country down.
Sure, they’re not all equally able. They’re not even all equally pleasant. We’ve all, I’m guessing, had both good and bad experiences at the hands of public servants. But I’m guessing we’ve all had mixed experiences at the hands of business people, bankers, priests, shopkeepers, mechanics, car salesmen, dentists, doctors, and the thousands and thousands of other people who make their living in the private sector in Ireland.
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