Public Sector Strike 30/11

Yeh Ok whatever son. If you’re going to carry condescending the rest of us don’t go whining when you get flamed.

TJ – that’s “aaghmuuurphhphphphllgmph”, surely?

People read the Daily Express? Blimey! You live and learn

mcboo – Member
Yeh Ok whatever son. If you’re going to carry condescending the rest of us don’t go whining when you get flamed.

😆

Binners – no one needs to read teh express or mail – this sort of thing does just as well- a mail headline generator

IS THE BBC MAKING YOUR PENSION IMPOTENT?[/url]

Are there any ‘Medium-Sized Hitters’?

😕

I think we should be told….

ARE FERAL CHILDREN MAKING BRITAIN’S SWANS OBESE?

Quality! 😆

All QTWTAIN. John Rentoul at the Indy blogs is clearing out the use of cliche and slapping the Mail. Is very good.

This is great too:

”Last week, I met a white working-class postman, who told me that the unions went to Eton.”

Can someone take some Smints round to TJ to sort out his constipation so he can join in properly.

frankly Ps workers have had a good crack form pensions and the day of reckoning had to come.. simply put there not saving enough for the reward thier taking.

i can only quote the chap whose house ive just left 82 yr old ex PS worker bin retired 26 years worked in PS for 25..
draws just under 600 a week pension.. never earnt more than 450 whilst working. has a new car every 18 months and 3 foreign holidays a yr ( just back from 3 wk in tenerife).. ”cant spend the money as quick as they give it to me”

dont begrudge old folks a comfortable retirement.. but if he takes that for shovelling how much are the dr’s bosses accountants etc taking..

Live longer = Contribute more OR for longer to your pension.
SIMPLE

So you’re saying that public sector schemes should be affordable, yes? For example, like the Local Government and NHS schemes, both of which are healthy?

Before swallowing government propoganda, please note that the word “unaffordable” does not appear in the Hutton report, and no actuarial study has been performed on the LGPS since it was last renegotiated 3 years ago.

If the government wants to show that we need to contribute more, then it should present evidence rather than rhetoric.

“Last week, I met a working-class cabin boy, who told me that Gordon Brown’s Death Tax had been shouting at buses on the high street.”

😆

Are there any ‘Medium-Sized Hitters’?

Well I’m led to believe that you aren’t that tall, are you? 😉

I’m led to believe that you’re not all that aesthetically pleasing. 🙁

I actually transcend any categorisation by the lumpenproletariat of STW, as I am superior to them all, and indeed it is I what decides what class you’re in. 😀

’tis true… 😥

ransos – Member

If the government wants to show that we need to contribute more, then it should present evidence rather than rhetoric.

It was all going so well, totalshell’s anecdote, frodo’s ‘rebalancing the economy’ then this.

You know where you can go with your facts.

i can only quote the chap whose house ive just left 82 yr old ex PS worker bin retired 26 years worked in PS for 25..
draws just under 600 a week pension.. never earnt more than 450 whilst working.

i’m sorry but that’s impossible just on Public Sector pension, I wish it was because I’d retire in 3 years if it was. Having seen my predicted forecast it’s not that after 49 years service and earning more than £450 week.

if a private sector director invested 50 million and lost it, he’d be gone

Or; bailed out to the tune of billions with PUBLIC money, then given a healthy bonus for negotiating such a cracking deal for the shareholders… hmmm.

thegreatape – Member

Can someone take some Smints round to TJ to sort out his constipation so he can join in properly.

I’m not allowed to.

WILL LESBIANS TAX THE COUNTRYSIDE?

COULD THE INTERNET STEAL THE IDENTITY OF BRITAIN’S SWANS?

100?

please note that the word “unaffordable” does not appear in the Hutton report

No its more insidious than that Ransos, and you know that!

But this is what Hutton says:

1.22 Public service pension expenditure must be affordable. To be sustainable, it must
remain affordable over time. The affordable level of pension cost is a decision for the
Government within the context of a wide range of priorities. But it cannot be assessed in the
short term alone since the effects of pension decisions build up and persist over decades.

Box 1.B: How do current final salary schemes measure up to the
Commission’s principles?

• Affordable and sustainable: Due to the link between pension benefits and final earnings,
the majority of salary risk (the risk that higher than expected salary rises increase the cost
of providing pensions) in current schemes is borne by the Government. Members receive a
substantial increase in pension rights from salary rises as they approach retirement, with the
costs falling on public service employers.

Does this seem correct?

• Adequate and fair: Any pension design is capable of delivering adequate pensions. The
available evidence suggests that current final salary schemes in the public sector do achieve
this. However, high flyers typically derive more value from final salary schemes than low
flyers, leading to unfairness between scheme members. A high-flying employee could
receive almost twice as much in pension payments per £100 of contributions than a low
flyer. In addition, the balance of risks between the government and the member is one-
sided, leading to unfairness between the taxpayer and scheme members.

Does this seem correct? As I have said before, I hope that the strikers understand who they are really fighting for here – somehow I doubt it!

• Supporting productivity: Final salary schemes restrict labour market mobility. Depending
on the Government’s underlying objectives for the scheme this may be desirable for the
retention of skilled higher earners. However, at the macroeconomic level a more flexible
labour market should increase efficiency across the economy as a whole.

Ditto?

• Transparent and simple: The current schemes are reasonably well understood and simple
to administer. However, transparency is an issue since it can be difficult to ascertain the
benefit derived from the scheme, relative to contributions paid in, for higher and lower
earners, and high and low flyers. For the taxpayer, there is little transparency of expected
cost, since this depends on future pay developments.

Ditto?

I think we should be told….

TJ and I are right

the royal ‘We’?

have you thought about combining logins?

TandemSafety?

ElfinJeremy?

Ant n Dec would be a suitable moniker. or laurel & Hardy?

That was a sneaky one that, Bruneep. 🙂

Beautifully claimed. Poetry in motion. I’m proud of you.

(Weeps)

😥

i can only quote the chap whose house ive just left 82 yr old ex PS worker bin retired 26 years worked in PS for 25..
draws just under 600 a week pension.. never earnt more than 450 whilst working. has a new car every 18 months and 3 foreign holidays a yr ( just back from 3 wk in tenerife).. ”cant spend the money as quick as they give it to me”

I reckon you’ve been played, mate, lol

gsp1984 – Member

To support our mainly incompetent and lazy public sector… When the whole private sector has already severly suffered.

No, I’ll stay at home thanks.
Please do. I assume that is your normal routine anyway, as someone displaying your level of intelligence would not exactly be sought after by any employer, private or otherwise

and a cracker from the dailymail-o-matic

HAVE CYCLISTS MADE YOUR MORTGAGE IMPOTENT?

totalshell – Member
frankly Ps workers have had a good crack form pensions and the day of reckoning had to come.. simply put there not saving enough for the reward thier taking.

i can only quote the chap whose house ive just left 82 yr old ex PS worker bin retired 26 years worked in PS for 25..
draws just under 600 a week pension.. never earnt more than 450 whilst working. has a new car every 18 months and 3 foreign holidays a yr ( just back from 3 wk in tenerife).. ”cant spend the money as quick as they give it to me”

dont begrudge old folks a comfortable retirement.. but if he takes that for shovelling how much are the dr’s bosses accountants etc taking..

Posted 12 minutes ago # Report-Post

Totallshell,greetings in the lord.
I need to move £300,000,000 from my father account in Nigeria after his untimely death in a year ago. Please to give me your bank details and I will pay the money into your account. You will then return it to mwe and be paid a fee for handling it.

Well,if you believe the tosh you typed out about Public Sector pensions, the above has gotta be worth a try….

PS; Frodo…I don’t want your sympathy, I want my strike to be as inconvenient as possible….However, I have a better idea; why doesn’t everybody in the public sector just work to contract? Would that be better,as it would seem we are all so lazy nobody would notice. I mean, surely that would win public support?

No its more insidious than that Ransos, and you know that!

The government said that the Hutton report says public sector pensions are unaffordable. This is untrue.

majority of salary risk (the risk that higher than expected salary rises increase the cost of providing pensions) in current schemes is borne by the Government

Public sector pensions are not a single entity. The LGPS is very different from the Civil Service scheme, yet they are being lumped in together.

A high-flying employee could receive almost twice as much in pension payments per £100 of contributions than a low flyer.

Not an argument for increasing contributions.

Final salary schemes restrict labour market mobility

Funny how the Tories weren’t saying that about private sector final salary schemes. And using the finding as a reason for moving to career average earnings, thus reducing average pension payout for most, is a non-sequitur.

For the taxpayer, there is little transparency of expected
cost, since this depends on future pay developments.

Pay developments are pretty well understood, and don’t change dramatically over time.

Anyway, it’s funny how things come full circle:

1. Private sector screws up.
2. Rescue provided by public sector.
3. Government claims it cannot afford public sector because it’s propping up the private sector.
4. Government cuts public sector.

All the free-marketeers on here might remember that the next time they’re complaining about “supporting” the public sector.

why can’t that pension example be realistic? I believe (might be wrong) that the pension payments are index linked. If he’s been retired for 25 years then his £600/week would have been £250 in 1985, or approx 55% of his pre-retirement income?

ransos – To be fair, it was a very specific part of the private sector that royally ****ed up. And I don’t think anyone, in the private or public sector, is in any doubt about the fact that they’ve got off scot -free and the rest of us are picking up the (mahoooosive) tab.

In that respect, as Dave used to say (remember that?), we really are all in this together

No.

Most of my caseload consists of paedophiles and other sex offenders, I can’t really dash off to London for a day out.

1. Private sector screws up.
2. Rescue provided by public sector.
3. Government claims it cannot afford public sector because it’s propping up the private sector.
4. Government cuts public sector.

Eh you forgot about this…..thanks Gordon.

General government total outlays, per cent of nominal GDP, UK and Total OECD, 2000-2010

ransos – Member

2. Rescue provided by public sector.

Wrong.

Rescue provided by the taxpayer…public and private sector alike.

Oh graph time 😀

Osborne set to borrow billions more than Darling[/url]

To support our mainly incompetent and lazy public sector… When the whole private sector has already severly suffered.

Oh how well the Tories and their friends in the media have done in selling their myths to a gullible public.

The private sector did far far better during the global recession precisely because of the public sector. The government of the day made certain that whilst they couldn’t stop a recession in the private sector, they could minimise its effect by insuring that there would be no contraction in the public sector.

It is quite frankly astonishing that despite the worst global recession since the 1930s, and Britain’s fairly unique exposure due to its huge over dependency on the finance sector, unemployment only reached two and a half million. You can thank the public sector for that.

But whether you support the pointless token one day public sector strike next week makes not an iota of difference. Globalised free-market fundamentalism is finished. The British economy, in common with other economies in simular dire circumstances, will not emerge from the present situation and just carry on with “business as usual”.

This is not a temporary economic crises. It is a systematic failure of neo-liberal free-market fundamentalism. It affects all the economies which have bought into neo-liberal theory. It has nothing to do with “budgetary deficits”……look at Spain.

None of the neo-liberal economists saw this coming – including in all of the countries which have been severely affected. And none of the neo-liberal economists know what the solution is. They know that austerity doesn’t work, but they persist with it anyway because they have no other solution.

The problems with overproduction and the need for maximum profit are irreconcilable. The “efficient market” is an unattainable myth. It is not a “British problem”. Wake up.

Change will come, whether governments and/or voters want it or not. Because the neo-liberal free-market experiment is dying and nothing, just nothing, can save it – not even ‘pension reform’. Anything our government does, or the governments of Greece, Italy, Germany, Spain, whatever, do, will amount to no more than pissing in the wind.

Change, as always, will only come because it will be forced upon us, not because we want. But the neo-liberal experiment is finished. Social democracy/government intervention will provide a quick temporary solution, as it did during the postwar consensus period, and as it does today in countries such as Argentina.

But however many times capitalism reinvents itself it will never reconcile its contradictions. And considering the global interdependency characteristic it now has, I have my doubts whether this time it can pull it off.

‘Left Foot Forwards’ Please … can we have some credible evidence!

The Banking and Financial sector go hand in hand with the bloody Government and are generally Public Companies which are quite different to the private sector that is expected to rescue us from the mess that they created between them.

Without borrowing any money because for the most part they (banks) are constrained by the various Basle agreements put in place to shut the stable door now the horse bolted and still restrict even Government supported borrowing. So we out here are expected to invest our own money, quite where we’re going to get it from since we’ve been living on it for the past four years we don’t know, then we need to take on more staff, staff that they haven’t exactly educated the way we might wish for, but never mind there are plenty of Eastern Europeans hungry for work, so we can turn over more money and collect and pay more tax and Bank charges that frankly make your eyes water, so they (Bankers & Politicos) can continue to waste it by employing outreach consultants and more dog wardens whilst the upper levels of their management earn more in a year than we will profit in ten.

Er, actually I don’t think a lot of us are going to bother frankly and the black (cash)economy looks increasingly tempting.