Teachers' & other public servants' strike

[cmonstanley]

Originally Posted by DaveinGermany

You can't let it lie can you ? Any platform to get your petulant opinions across ! The issue is about striking teachers (although the title mentions other public servant) TJ's, Jane Norman (whoever they are ?), Habitat, Curries & Thorntons, remind me again just when they began teaching or failing that when they became part of the Public sector ?

Make your mind up will you lad ! The despised private sector with it's evil managers employing thousands (but exploiting the masses) or the benificient public sector ousting thousands of poor workers, cutting services but maintaining the extravagant levels of pay to managers & ne'er do wells !

Careful you don't bruise your plums as you straddle that fence.

when the civil servants that have been paid off and the more that are being paid off plus stealing pensions is going to lessen the spending power of the british public as i say an economy needs money to be successfull take money out and you get recession

[DaveinGermany]

Originally Posted by cmonstanley

well as i am in position to see it all happening yous havent got a clue where i work 16 people have left and no ones been replaced (making savings without forcing redundancies .... I thought that'd appeal to your way of thinking) the top company who have been awarded contracts are australian (So ? Are they going to be bringing in only Aussies & Abbo's to work for them or more likely employ local workers) who have already failed in holland one is a security firm who paid the tories thousands in donations at the elections and another one started as an employment agency (here we go, immaterial & blatant bashing !) think what you want but i know what i think (It's probably best that way)

Originally Posted by cmonstanley

when the civil servants that have been paid off and the more that are being paid off plus stealing pensions is going to lessen the spending power of the british public (how so ? Are they going to leave the Country & spend their cash elsewhere ? And how does the actions of these people effect the British public ? where they secret millionaires giving away their pennies to the poor & needy ?) as i say an economy needs money to be successfull (agreeed, but when that money is borrowed to maintain said spending ..... not really a viable business model as some day the heavies will come knocking looking for their pound of flesh) take money out and you get recession

Strike !!!! And not one of your militant ones either !

[Gordon Booth]

Originally Posted by cmonstanley

an economy needs money to be successfull take money out and you get recession

You still haven't got it, have you? We HAVEN'T any money! We're broke, bust, bankrupt. Any money we spend we've borrowed and will have to pay back.
The private sector has lost jobs, accepted reduced wages and pensions( or lost them altogether).Why does the public sector feel they should be immune to the problems this country has and be able to carry on with their guaranteed jobs, early retirement, inflation proof pensions etc.? Even their salaries are now better, on average, than the private sector.
What caused this mess is history but we're all in it together. There's a lot of pain to be felt and no one should feel they have a right to be immune to it. Especially when someone else will have to fund it.

[cmonstanley]

so were bust where did we find the billion pound for overseas aid we are not as broke as they tell you pakistan ireland the full of africa where did we get that money a conjuring trick this is ideology they are still going to be paying out more money in benefits for the ever growing dole queue plus less tax revenue, nobody using the service industries+ more on dole queue. less money on corporation tax etc

[dusty mears]

if you believe press & govt the country's broke but if you've listened to several presentstions by proffessional economists as i have recently, then it's no way as bad as protrayed. No the country cant sustain certain pensions and that's the govts fault, oh and by the way when cameron miliband & the other clown stand there spouting dont forget they're part of the public pension pot too - no one's reporting that. Fact - pension contributions paid in by most public sector staff isnt ring fenced it disapaites back into the treasury. Govt created prob not employee. Fact - non contribution pensions were/ are paid out & it's wrong. Fact - local govt pension is a fund. Contributions are paid unto a fund pot, it's invested, pays in more than is paid out, is sustainable, collectively worth billions & govt have been trying to get their hands on it for years. Dont see that in press!
Good luck for the stike it's not an easy decision to take but enough's enough & point of order, when you're in a union you take the rough with the smooth and fight the fight for the free loaders aka non union members

[DaveinGermany]

Originally Posted by cmonstanley

so were bust where did we find the billion pound for overseas aid

Don't you bother reading what folk say ? I believe Gordon did mention it, to save you looking I've included it below.

Originally Posted by Gordon Booth

We HAVEN'T any money! We're broke, bust, bankrupt. Any money we spend we've borrowed and will have to pay back.

I even mentioned it in post 32 (included in the response), but so you're clear, we've borrowed it & some day the Piper will need paying. So to that end cuts are being made & savings enforced on the public at large. I don't even assume to understand the logic behind certain procedures, but if it's what's seen as beneficial in the long term well so be it.

Whenever something is introduced & someone is going to be inconvenienced or out of pocket the howling & yammering is unrelenting, but if x years down the line things get better, the screams & shouts of outrage are quietly stuffed in the corner & forgotten about, normally, but there'll always be a hardcore of gripers who are never satisfied. If the cap fits & all that.

[cmonstanley]

Few people understand how pensions work. The government is relying on this in their attacks on public sector pensions. Ministers claim that they are gold-plated, unreformed and unsustainable. The right-wing press join in by saying that it is unfair that private sector workers’ tax should pay for public sector pensions.
Yet what the government is doing is simple. It is asking public sector workers – already facing a two-year pay freeze, job losses and inflation running higher than it has for more than a decade – to make a further, and even more unfair, contribution to reducing the deficit.
They are doing this by trying to impose an arbitrary extra pension contribution of three per cent of pay on the public sector. This is not a pension reform – it is simply a pay cut.
This comes on top of significant reductions in the value of public sector pensions that blow away the claims that they are unreformed or unsustainable.
Changes negotiated with the previous government reduced the value of public sector pensions by 10 per cent through a range of changes. In particular, under so-called “cap and share”, members agreed to first share – and then fully bear – the costs of any unexpected increase in longevity. This is due to add a billion pounds of extra member contributions.
The National Audit Office closely examined this package and concluded:

“In addition to saving significant sums of money, the changes are projected to stabilise costs in the long-term around their current level as a proportion of GDP.”

So even before anything done by the coalition government or recommended in the Hutton Report, public sector pensions had been both reformed and made sustainable. This is not union assertion, but the hard-headed view of the National Audit Office.
On top of these negotiated changes, the coalition has made a further attack on the value of public service pensions by replacing the Retail Prices Index that has always been used to uprate pensions with the lower Consumer Prices Index. This will further reduce the value of public service pensions by 15 per cent – so we have a cut of 25p in the pound if you combine this with the negotiated changes.
Changing indexation breached the commitments of both coalition parties to protect accrued rights. This is pensions jargon for the pension you have built up in the past. Scheme members made contributions to what they thought was an RPI-linked pension; now they have had its value reduced by 15p in the pound at a stroke.
Yet ministers persist in saying that public sector pensions are unaffordable. The Prime Minister said on Tuesday that the system was in danger of going broke. But this chart in the Hutton Report shows that public service pensions payments will decline as a share of GDP – even before any of the changes proposed in Hutton bite.

Treasury Minister Justine Greening was completely unable to argue that pensions were unaffordable when this was put to her on the Today programme.
No doubt this is exactly the kind of assertion that the Public Accounts Committee had in mind when it said: "Officials appeared to define affordability on the basis of public perception rather than judgement on the cost in relation to either GDP or total public spending."
So public sector pensions are sustainable. They have changed.
That leaves the assertion that they are gold-plated. John Hutton was clear that this is untrue:

“The Commission firmly rejected the claim that current public service pensions are ‘gold plated’.”

The figures bear him out. In the big four national schemes the majority of pensions paid are less than £5,600 a year. In the Local Government Scheme half get less than £3,000.
Of course a few very well-paid public servants get considerably more than this. But there are not many of them. And unlike the private sector, where top boardroom pensions are solid gold, not just gold-plated, top public servants are in the same scheme as their staff.
Here is the distribution of civil service pensions. As can be seen the vast majority are well-short of even being modest.

What is true is that many in the private sector get a raw deal – the private sector is now a pensions disaster area. Two out of three private sector workers get no employer help in building up a pension. Even the better employers have not only closed salary related pensions, but significantly cut their contributions to the riskier replacements.
But the answer is not to level down by removing pensions altogether from two-thirds of nurses; it is to improve pensions in the private sector. And it is telling that those so keen on attacking this unfairness never talk about the costs of pension tax relief, currently running at £35 billion a year – more than the cost of public sector pensions and heavily skewed towards the rich.
It is no wonder that public sector workers are angry. One union on strike has never taken such action in its history before. Unions know that pensions are long-term arrangements that do change over time. Negotiations are common in private and public sector. But the government's agenda seems to have little to do with pension reform. This is simply making public sector workers – most of whom are modestly paid – take on an ever greater part of the burden of closing a deficit they did not cause.

[Gordon Booth]

Overseas aid should have been cut,in my opinion. However, one billion pounds is a drop in the ocean compared with what we owe and what we are borrowing.
We're borrowing £10 billion/month, we owe about £1 trillion( put twelve '0's after that 1) and the estimates are that we will owe £10 trillion by 2015. If you include Public Sector net debt we ALREADY owe £2.25 trillion. We simply can't afford to live, as a country, as we have been doing.
If every pound pension paid to every ex public sector employee requires 28 pence of unfunded taxpayers money, something HAS to change.

[cashman]

most people seem too blind to see were the pension fund money went n it sure as hell wasn't in the ordinary guys pocket, so why should the ordinary person have to fund it? still if it aint plastered all oer the press some will never take the trouble will they?

[cashman]

all yeh hear in the media is- Life expectancy is longer.........any fool is aware of that fact! perhaps its also fools that think this is the reason fer the shortfall,

[Gordon Booth]

Cashman, we(ordinary working people) have been ripped off by Governments, banks, pension administrators and the companies we worked for. But that is history, we have to look where we are now and HOPE this Government can sort it. If it doesn't Heaven help us and our children and their children! No-one should expect(or feel they have a right) to be excluded from the actions needed.

[cashman]

Originally Posted by Gordon Booth

Cashman, we(ordinary working people) have been ripped off by Governments, banks, pension administrators and the companies we worked for. But that is history, we have to look where we are now and HOPE this Government can sort it. If it doesn't Heaven help us and our children and their children! No-one should expect(or feel they have a right) to be excluded from the actions needed.

complete crap IMHO, any government could have sorted it since at least the 80s, everyone who has paid into funds fer years should be excluded, they didn't cause the shortfall by living longer.

[cmonstanley]

thats why theyve raised the age in hope people will just die off while they are in work

[Gordon Booth]

Originally Posted by cashman

complete crap IMHO, any government could have sorted it since at least the 80s,

But they didn't, did they? We were let down by Governments of both parties and now we have a mess to sort.

[cashman]

Originally Posted by Gordon Booth

But they didn't, did they? We were let down by Governments of both parties and now we have a mess to sort.

well aware of that, but why do you think the workers should pay? there were massive surpluses in pension funds in the 80s Fact. what happened to those? answer that truthfully n tell me no-one should be excluded.