Will anyone notice,along with Btitish Airways, and all the rest of the unionised peoples out there,isnt it about time this old fashioned union thing,the withdrawl of labour stopped and we go to Moderation and arbitration.

Going to be plenty more strikes in the near future when public spending is cut after the election. Not necessarily less services, I temped at a Tax Office once and they didn't know the meaning of hard work. It was just a social club, and if you were selective you could have got rid of half the staff with no effect on output at all.

Civil Service= Cushy job for life.

no one will notice

Power cuts next…is it the 70's…ahhh no Labour are in power!

Y'see, this is why we need TJ here…! 😉

Civil Service= Cushy job for life.

In that case, doesn't it seem odd to you that the strike's over changes to their redundancy terms?

No? Oh well.

*Panics*

Edit: Phew! My driving (re)test is in March and examiners are striking as well. Luckily i have missed the strike dates by a couple of days. Now that would have pee'd me off.

it used to be a job (not all civil service jobs are cushy!) for life, but not so now. But, dont think the strikes will make any difference, whatever government we have, they'll all want to make cuts.

Having been a Civil Servant, I can echo the comments made by Barelyincontrol…

Don't understand why the ex civil servants keep coming on saying 'it was a piss easy job with great pay, massive pension,job security and loads of perks so i had to leave and get another job'.

dangerousbeans – Member

Don't understand why the ex civil servants keep coming on saying 'it was a piss easy job with great pay, massive pension,job security and loads of perks so i had to leave and get another job'.

Because, unless you're at the top or London based, it isn't. It's a sh*te job with sh*te pay, sh*te pension and no perks. MrsG has been in the civil service for the last 17 years and is desperate to leave.

I'm an ex civil servant (DWP – benefit fraud). It wasn't an easy job, the pay was crap, the pension was going to be nice if I'd stuck it out for the next 25 years, loads of jobs being down graded and shuffled around, people leaving in droves and not being replaced. The queens birthday and one extra days holiday per year at Christmas, flexi work outside of core hours (Mon-Fri, 9:30 – 4:30 BIG WOW!).
It hardly fits in with the model being suggested above. Local authority is much better.

A srike will be of zero benefit but there's no doubting this Govts bullying approach by simply changing contracted terms because they now want to make 1000s redundant at significantly less cost. It's ok knocking civil servants but the majority earn less than £20k pa and work a decent day. At some point soon this Govts obsession with spending as little as possible and massaging the figures to support a positive view will become transparent though they'll probably be out of power by then. Such short term bottom line thinking is what got us into the banking mess and it's gonna take a lot to repair the damage caused to infrastructure/services in years to come….. £1billion defrauded in tax benefits but it'll cost £10m to fix? There's no budget heading for that I'm afraid!

Don't understand why the ex civil servants keep coming on saying 'it was a piss easy job with great pay, massive pension,job security and loads of perks so i had to leave and get another job'.

You never know the full story, but maybe they wouldn't have left their job if they knew how cushie it was!!!! Who knows!

Er 2 yrs into civil service now….8 yrs banking before that. Yes there is a massive cultural issue, most of the people do bugger all, it's the mgmt that makes that not the people themselves…

Today I was discussing a training budget with my senior mgr (we don't have any…) and was basically told if they train people, there are no opportunities and people will leave, so they don't train.

What a ridiculous position to be in. And for every crapply paid civil servant that leaves I see a new shiny £500-1000 per day contractor turn up.

I'm newly inducted into the civil service and I'm astounded at just how smart some of these people are. I've worked in many private sector businesses and they're filled with complete bell ends who think they're clever (especially those in marketing and sales) but the really sharp people drive to a grey government building in their grey car in their grey suit and sit at a computer typing away, thinking about their allotment and waiting for their retirement.

And someone will be talking about how there's too many wars and one of these people will pop up and say [insert solution to world peace here] and then go all quiet because they know the insanely tedious bureaucracy will just drag their magnificent idea down so they just sit down and the genius is lost. It's completely bonkers.

I'll add that if the government want to save money then the biggest drain that I can see is the high proportion of IT providers who are ripping them off left, right and centre. The costs I see these companies put in are three, four times what they'd put in for an identical private company bid (who would laugh their asses off if they tried the same thing there).

Ex civi (DWP) who was outsourced to a private company and didn't really notice a lot of difference!

Just as in all walks of life, it isn't black and white. The civil service is viewed as inefficient mostly because it is large but moving over to a large private company, I wouldn't say I noticed a huge leap in productivity.
The tangible benefits like flexi, some extra holidays, a half-decent pension (well, it used to be!)and relative job security have mostly been matched by the larger private sector employers but usually better salary.

I'd hazard a guess that most of the problems with the Civil Service is caused by their political masters who change policies at a whim (and this applies to all political persuasions).

Now, if you're comparing the civil service to the tiny [private] company I work for now, there's no comparison…and no benefits 🙁