Thursday 1 December 2011

The Public Sector

I have an ongoing dialogue with a guy called 'Bewick' who lives in Northumberland and at one time worked in the public sector. For whatever reason he has honed into this blog and comments quite often. He is clearly well educated, literate and concerned.

When he 'comments' he guides me with the benefit of his considerable experience and he doesn't always agree with me. That is good and I respect his views. Recently however, he actually summed up the problems that we have in modern society. As ever the public are being conned by the Labour party. You remember the Labour party; born out of a desire to represent the working class and now the enemy of anything sensible.

Ed Miliband, an absolute loser on all aspects stood up in Westmonster yesterday and pretended to be the representative of the dinner ladies, the cleaners and the lower paid! He really has no idea how to relate to the lower paid because he probably has never, ever met any of them!

So what is missing? The problem with the pensions in the public sector is that, when 'Bewick' and I worked in the public sector then we had relatively modest salaries. Even the Chief Officers had a reasonable salary and their pensions were measured accordingly.

In the meantime the salaries of the public sector have gone through the roof! Now their greed has exceeded our income! The Union chiefs for example have accelerated the grasp for public money. They have awarded themselves huge salaries and nobody seems capable of moderating their avarice.  The Town Hall fat cats are at the top of the pyramid but underneath them are countless public sector employees who expect and demand that we fund their gold plated pensions.

It really is not about 'dinner ladies' (can Miliband descend any lower?) it is all about affordability. We cannot afford pensions on the scale that the public sector have awarded themselves. The unions are conning the public. Their greed is coming home to roost. They had their day of action and frankly the only people who suffered were their own low paid single mothers. 

Personally I only noticed an increase of traffic on the road and more people in Tesco's! Is it not time that that the Labour party and their sole sponsors, the trade unions, cared a little more for the pathetic, ignorant, uneducated individuals who continue to vote for them! Yeah Right! 

6 comments:

GrumpyRN said...

Following on from your post "National Debt is 1.47 trillion pounds!! All out brothers!" can I put it as simply as I see it? I have worked for the NHS for 30 years, I have another 7-10 years until retirement during which time I have paid in evey month to my superannuation. I have had low pay since I became a nurse - I left the building trade to do so. Even on Wednesday people on TV were talking about "the vocation" of public service - a euphemism for low wages.
When people are complaining that the public sector(PS) pensions are unfair it is the politics of envy, no-one was complaining a few years ago when pay and pensions in the private sector were good but due to poor management (and I will agree government interference and downright theft) suddenly it is the PS's fault that everything is going wrong. David Cameron is trying to get the PS to pay for the mess by giving us a minimum 3% increase in our tax and describing it as an increase in funding is pure doubletalk, it is a penalty on the PS. If you notice, the government no longer call the PS pensions unaffordable as they are affordable. The figures they used were if every single member of the PS retired next month - obvious nonsense. Why are the MPs pensions not unaffordable or unfair? They are hugely better than anything about for us mere mortals.
No, I think we need to look further into this, why has it come up at a time when the government is trying to sell the NHS to the highest bidder, why has the focus of attention moved from thieving politicians or bankers or international firms who won't pay their tax bills. Why has the NHS been starved of funding for front line staff? You yourself have commented on the decline of the NHS - perhaps because the staff are working short and trying to do too many things to actually care for patients. I have been told by ny boss that "the accountant says it is OK for the wards to work shorthanded".

Sorry, starting to rant, but to finish simply; I and many others have worked long and hard for low pay and felt that at least we could look forward to a better retirement only to have this snatched away through no fault of ours. And of course as pensioners who do not get benefits we still pay tax.

bewick said...

struggling to say much after GrumpyRN posted.What s/he says is so true.
What I CAN say bryboy is that I am flattered by your references to me.
I am indeed well educated, beyond graduate level; I didn't think of myself as particularly literate because my life has been devoted to investigating and writing down to earth , Mirror language (there is a "readability index"), reports which can be understood by anyone. Even Councillors and Trades Union reps - and of course Board Directors. I KNOW management speak totally but never use it. No "stakeholders" for me. I say it as it is. Better literacy isn't in my "skillset".
You are totally right that I am concerned. Sometimes I think that "Hell what does it matter - I'll be gone soon". Then again I might just last another 30 years so it DOES matter.

My alias? Mmmmm. Chose that 15 or so years ago. Refers to a once famous person who happens to be buried in the local graveyard.
I'd guess that many in my village are disappointed that it is no longer available on many sites.

Once upon a time I used "peverilofthepeak" because I am a Derbyshire man still and I so love Castleton. Took too long to type though and I was a Management Consultant - inside and outside Public Service- so always looking for efficiency.

bewick said...

By the way. "Management speak" is much like "newspeak" in Orwell's 1984. Designed to confuse and gain an unfair advantage.
As a management consultant even I have often been confused by new terms. Only to find that in fact the "new" term referred to a well established principle or technique normally known by another name.
A "re-invention" in other words - except that those advancing this rarely understood the real technique or principle.
One Tom Peters made a fortune out of re-invention and managements fell for it and paid massively. He also invented some expensive false corruptions.
Passengers are certainly "customers" but are prisoners "clients"? You get the picture I'm sure.

bryboy said...

Sorry guys I have been absent for a couple of days. GRN tks for your return and I do enjoy our joust. I have a PS pension which serves me well and I do not and will not ever attack your well earned pension. However the fatcats have ruined the system. They want far more than they are entitled to and that is my point. You guys are on the march while they sit in their ivory towers.

I will always accept that the nursing profession do a great job. They saved my life 10 years ago! But and it is a big BUT, despite your diatribe about poor management, long hours, government cuts which I will accept because you are correct... nothing can explain the attitude of some of the nurses that I have personally witnessed. The attitude of 'some' of the nurses at Leicester Royal and Leicester General frankly is appalling. So, so many of you do a great job for which we are all eternally grateful but somehow a culture of 'I don't give a shit' has entered the NHS which betrays all those brilliant nurses who care.

I have suffered at the hands of a nurse who took 5 hours to insert a cannula and that negated all the wonderful attention that I received from so many others.

The NHS must address the problem of poor nursing which is becoming a really major problem. GRN I would welcome your response to that and I would welcome it as a 'friend' of the blog and not an 'enemy'

bryboy said...

Bewick my friend let me return at another time... it is late!!!

GrumpyRN said...

Hi Bryan, I look upon this as a couple of guys having a beer (or three) in the pub and putting the world to rights. We each have our own opinions and sometimes we agree with each other and sometimes we have to set each other straight. No malice and no nastiness, just good honest debate.

I talk about the NHS because a) it is my area of expertise and b) I think it is a wonderful thing that we have and I am very passionate about it.

Your experience with the cannula; you say that she took 5 hours to insert it, I am assuming that you mean from time of ordering to actually getting around to inserting it took 5 hours, not that she spent 5 hours struggling to inseret one. However, although this does seem excessive, did you find out what else she was doing in that 5 hours? There would be other patients on the ward, there may have been sick patients, admissions, all number of things that delay treatment. Not an excuse but perhaps something to think about.
In my early days as a nurse I once worked on a very busy medical ward. We had much more staff then than we do now. We had a patient who was for discharge, he wanted to get dressed right there and then, we on the other hand were trying to deal with the rest of the patients in the ward and he was quite frankly a low priority - he could not go home until later in the day, all he wanted were his clothes from the locker but we could not spare anyone to go and get them for him at that point. He made his displeasure known by wandering round the ward and telling every patient very loudly that we were unhelpful and lazy and he actually stated "it's not as if they are doing anything else". He had completely misunderstood the situation and expected us to jump for him when he wanted it rather than us prioritising patient care.

Rude nurses? Always going to happen, nurses are people too and we do have bad days and some people are just downright nasty. You should see/hear how we deal with each other. I have had many a shouting match with some staff nurse who I thought was being rude or deliberately obstructive. I once had to be physically restrained from running to a ward to punch a (male) staff nurse because he criticised me. In my defence it was nightshift and I was tired but I had done nothing wrong, he was just being an arse.

"The NHS must address the problem of poor nursing which is becoming a really major problem."

How true is this? It is easy to say that nurses are becoming poor but, if you have a bad experience you are going to have different attitude and are perhaps more critical than if you have had a good experience. I am not saying that every nurse is good, that is most patently not true, but I still think that the vast majority of us care and are trying our best under difficult circumstances.
Our managers certainly don't appreciate us (but then they never have) and more and more our patients do not appreciate us (too much television and too much expectation about what medicine can and can't do). We seem to spend our time doing cleaning (not a job for a trained nurse) because the cleaners will not clean properly or ticking boxes, filling in forms or chasing up other people to do their jobs that is it any wonder that we can sometimes appear not to care.