johnnyone

That is complete nonsense.

The public sector not only enjoy at least as good remuneration as the private sector but also pensions that are unaffordable to most in the private sector. To get a pension equivalent to a LA worker you would need to invest around 25% of your income to achieve this and that is without the vagaries of the fund you are invested in. Add to that the longer holiday entitlement, amount of sick leave (?) taken, shorter working hours and despite the current job cuts is still more secure, then the cost of employing a public sector worker doing the same job as a private sector worker is much greater.
Its not just about headline salary but the full cost of employment divided by the total number of hours worked per year.

Domino

Must agree with Johnny on this - you are being very naive.
Yes we all know the fairy tale about public sector workers having poor wages and poor conditions and have a need to retire early......
my local authority pays higher wages than any private company locally, is it small wonder they have people queueing at the door for every job. Also some of the shortest hours locally as well.

to make the phrase "gold plated pension" would not be incorrect and it is subsidised, supported and bolstered from the public purse.
those in the private sector can not get the same sort of payback from their pension, which have been chopped about over the past 10 years.

then there is TUPE protection - when a job is outsourced the company pension is frozen as the new employer has closed his, but the public worker's pension has to be carried on even under exactly the same public sector conditions - a strain that has proven too much for at least one company.

Public pensions have a Chinese wall around them, they cannot be raided by the employer (tell that to people who have lost all their pension rights when the company went bust) the terms cannot be changed but I have one used to be based on 60ths but 4 years later it was changed to 80ths.

Just what is it about public sector work that gives an entitlement to retire at 55 or 60 ? ?. This isnt the 1800's, it really is the 2000's now ! You never hear about public workers who have to stay on until they are 70 or take a pt job at B&Q to suplement their income.


no more can be said other than Karma sent

Arco-Iris

Many thanks to Johhnyone and Domino for their points of view. Maybe I am out of date, rather than naive. After all, I haven't worked for local government since 1995.

I think it depends also on which newspapers are read for this information. I see that the Times and Telegraph have been negative about public sector wages whereas, before the 2010 election, the Guardian had an article here http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...e-ben-goldacre. Note the paragraph "But there is a deeper problem with the analysis in the Sunday Times and the Telegraph. The long-standing difference in median wage for all jobs in each sector is hardly informative on the question of whether someone is paid more or less than their peer in the other sector. It's hard to decide what the comparison job is for a policeman, a firefighter, a teacher, and so on, and to make that comparison between medians meaningful you'd need data showing the breakdown of what kinds of jobs are done in each sector. Because it's possible, after all, that the state employs more people in more senior or middling roles, and fewer people in the kinds of jobs you find at the absolute bottom of the employment ladder."

Not as cut and dried as it seems, to my mind, but as I've strayed off the topic of WFA, I'll shut up now!

PS So sorry cannot get the link to work, so you can 't go direct to it.

agoreira

This talks specifically about teachers, but all public service pensions are similar. The members are moaning like mad that their contributions are going up, but seemingly they have no problem with the government pumping in more than twice their contributions.

Domino

whilst private sector employers are reducing their share and employees are having to double their contributions.
With no guarantee they will actually get a pension at the end of the tunnel.

I don't remember the Govt raiding the public sector pensions like they did the private sector.
I don't remember any public pension having to be supported by the Pension Indemnity Fund.

Yes, ok public employees pay taxes, but ....they don't contribute to the pensions of the private sector.

Now there's an idea, one single pension scheme, for both private and public sector employees, with both govt and private employers funding.
With everyone getting out of it the same as everyone else
So what shall we call it ?
Why not The Retirement Pension ! !! ? ? ?

Agnes

Policeman contribute 11% of their pay into their pension, much, much more than civil servants, which is why they are able to retire after 30 years service.

johnnyone

I think you will find that to fund a police pension it costs around 35% of salary.

Agnes

How much does it cost to fund a civil servant pension?, who pay 4% of their salary? Considerably more. a contribution of 30 years paying 11% is a lot more than 40 years at 4%, so police officers are entitled to retire after 30 years service in my opinion, after all they do pay more for their benefits. By the way I am a retired ciivl servant and feel that police officers deserve their pension after 30 years.

Domino

so you join at 20, retire at 50, and all you have wrong with you is flat feet from hitting the accelorator and brake pedals too hard.
sorry, far more ordinary people have gone out to work and not come home due to an accident at work than in the police force.
far more ordinary people have had to work until 65 and beyond because scumbag employers have used the pension fund for a piggy bank. That cannot happen to anyone in the public service.
many people coming up for retirement right now are seeing a 30% drop in their pension funding because of the current financial situation. That cannot happen to anyone in the public service.

funny how people are so forgetful that they are and have been servants of the people who paid their wages and are funding their retirement as well as trying to scrape by on their own miserly pension that has been raided by government due to "excess profits". That cannot happen to anyone in the public service.
anyone who is TUPED has their pension frozen - unless they are in the public sector where it is ring fenced. One rule for the public and another for the public's servants.

Sorry, no one who has been my servant will get a tear from me about the worries they may have about their gold plated, ring fenced, pension that I have contributed towards.

jonboy

Much unhappiness has been expressed at the good fortune of those people receiving Winter Fuel Allowance and those in receipt of a public sector pension.

It is, as was said by Fred James "because that's the deal they were on".

Things have changed enormously over the years. What is a desirable job now was undesirable then. We had to tout for staff all-over the Common
wealth countries to allow us to keep the NHS supplied with low cost labour, who were prepared to work in pretty lousy conditions for long hours for little money. Do exactly as they were told or lose their job and thus their right to remain in the country. Bear in mind that many student nurses who started training never qualified and a student nurse earned very little, this was seen as natural wastage. When more nurses were needed the pass mark was lowered and when fewer were required it was raised! No real justice in that as far as the individual was concerned. Some staff were so married to the institution that on retirement they ceased to function themselves and did not draw a full years pension before they died. Now the job is seen as desirable at least from the outsiders point of view, yet why are so many of the staff from overseas? Because in reality it is tough work and not well thought of by the locals! The same is true of the police force. All appear to envy the pay and pension, not so many wished to do the job. So one of the carrots to attract applicants to the more challenging jobs was to offer them a better retirement package than would be available in the private sector. So those of us with that package take it and go. It was the agreement, however now it is being whittled away at by the government.

jonboy

As someone said previously, the working classes are their own worst enemy!

Domino

well that appears to rule out a large swathe of people from the public sector, without the ordinary working man to pay taxes where would your pension be.
whilst you have never contributed to his.

and most civil servants I have met have never been civil, too much up their own a***s to even know the general public are the ones paying for it all

JLFS

Am I reading that correctly, that they sort of died of a "broken heart".

And of course some people will die withing a year of retiring, from public and private sector, and the really unlucky ones will die before retirement age.

I dont get it, what you are saying,but I think that is what you mean.

bil

That is simply so true.

Add to that your other excellent point

" We had to tout for staff all-over the Common
wealth countries to allow us to keep the NHS supplied with low cost labour, who were prepared to work in pretty lousy conditions for long hours for little money."

I remember back when the MPs voted that nurses got 6% spread over 3 years, while they voted themselves a 30% increase effective immediately.

As long as we pay nurses a pittance, we will continue to have problems sourcing them.

Lynn R

Why do you feel that public servants must pay the price for "scumbag employers " having raided the piggy bank of private schemes, or for the drop in pension incomes being experienced by many due to the financial situation? They weren't responsible for either!

In fact, the latter point simply serves to illustrate why private pension schemes are a totally inadequate way for people to save for their retirement. If your retirement date happens to co-incide with a period of huge stock market losses, you are sc**wed forever. Might as well put your money on a dead cert in the 3.00 pm at Cheltenham, IMO. Not to mention the fact that 'administration charges' and commission to financial advisers can account for the whole of your first year's contributions - what a con. The actual costs involved would be exactly the same whether someone was paying £50 per month or £500 per month, but the charges don't reflect that.

Yes, maybe we should have one pension fund for everybody which both Government and private employers pay into. The current members of the final salary scheme that I will get the bulk of my retirement income from are now paying 10% of pensionable pay in order to receive the same amount of benefits that I paid 6% per annum for. If you told all private sector employees that they would have to pay another 10% of their salary in NI contributions to fund a decent retirement income, do you think they would be happy about it? I don't! And I certainly don't think private sector employers would be happy to increase their contributions to an adequate level, either. They have spent the last 30-odd years wriggling out of whatever responsibilities towards their employees they could, after all.