can they do it.. get to your local tesco where they do it every week to one group of employees or another.. i know i used to ‘manage’ the process

the key is ‘your’ not redundant your ‘role’ is, we want you, we need you but the best we can offer is this similar sounding job that in practice is much like your old job so much so you might struggle to find a difference except in your pay pension etc etc..

Given the company I work for makes some of it’s money from private sector outsourcing I can certainly say there’s an incredible amount of wastage out there in the private sector (bloated salaries, people employed but not actually doing anything productive, poorly negotiated supplier contracts) etc. Probably no better than the public sector in that regard – the different being though that wastage isn’t funded by taxes. My admittedly very limited experience in the public sector is the front-line staff are pretty varied (some very dedicated, some it’s just another job etc.) but the middle management are piss-poor.

Would anyone like to know the truth of what the letter said? It’s sat in my kitchen as Mrs Tthew received it today. Luckily for us, she doesn’t get the extra parts of the wage that are getting cut but some of these are pretty draconian. The worst one to my mind is no shift/overnight pay for care workers.

It seems to me that eventually councils will be staffed very low quality staff who can’t get employments elsewhere as that’s all the wages will attract.

Now i realise you didnt mean anything by it, the daddy comment was just a bit of a troll :~)

It’s very clear what I meant ……. nepotism is, as I said, “less likely” to occur in a local council than in the private sector – I don’t think many people would argue with that.

And I am surprised that I apparently need to elaborate, I’ll give you an example anyway…….the site agent on the site I’m working on at the moment is the managing director’s son. He left university 2 years ago he has no qualifications in construction (he did economics at university) not even a trade background, and no experience. He is in fact clueless.

He’s a nice enough lad – impressively sharp, and I get on well with him, but he is understandably completely unable to make decisions which you would expect someone in his position to make. The job would run far better and more efficiently if someone with appropriate qualifications and experience was looking after it.

There is pretty much zero chance of a simular situation occurring in a local authority – the Borough Engineer can’t decide that he will make his unqualified and inexperienced son manager of some department simply because he needs a job. If such a situation did occur, it would be a costly scandal which would attract the attention of the national media. HTH

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One thing that’s being missed here is that public bodies can’t go bust so there’s no incentive to work hard. If a private firm is rubbish they go bust or really struggle.

I’m amazed how some people keep hammering this myth that public sector simply equates to poor value for money and services, whilst private sector means good value for money and services.

Yes there are of course examples of competition in the private sector providing excellent value for money and service, for me one of the best examples is Tesco. But there is no evidence that a democratically accountable public body doesn’t feel the need to provide value for money and a high level of service. The fact that the very survival of those who make executive decisions is dependant on satisfying their customers puts enormous pressure in them – they are constantly threaten by competition from political rivals. And their performance is assessed by their customers regularly – they can in effect go “bankrupt/bust” every four years.

There are plenty of examples of the public sector providing far better value for money than the private sector – Britain’s “socialised” healthcare is an excellent example of this.

And as it so happens, this afternoon I was obliged to phone my local council due to refuse collection problems concerning a new recycling scheme (private contractor) it took just a few minutes for the council to deal with my call – that in itself was impressive considering they are having council wide problems with their new scheme, and the geezer at the other end quickly resolved the issues to my satisfaction.

Contrast that with when I recently lost internet connection for 4 weeks. In that situation despite a multitude of phone calls to everyone and his dog, including countless ones to Mumbai, what I received was an endless stream of lies and information, before privately owned Orange and BT eventually got their act together and reconnected me …… they couldn’t have cared less, despite their constant “apologies”.

“If a private firm is rubbish they go bust or really struggle.”

Nonsense – there is no guarantee of that. There are plenty of private firms which rip-off their customers and provide crap services and still stay in business. Often making huge profits and not “really struggling” at all.

And I’m not just talking about the big boys either – you only have watch Rogue Traders for the more extreme examples of small firms ripping off their customers.

Securing a ‘sale’ is often all that motivates a private firm, with no consideration at all to the long-term consequences for the customer. In the construction industry houses built to be sold on the open market is a good example of that, specially when compared to houses built for a local council. I could elaborate and waffle on, but I reckon that’s enough for now.

All it would take is for the workforce to call their bluff and refuse to accept the change in contracts

tbh Individual employees could do this too, especially the ones near pensionable age and/or who want out.

And £3.9m divided by 9000 employees averages out at over £4k each…

Not an inconsiderable amount.