"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
2 things,
teachers pension was 40 years max for 1/2 a final salary, and we paid for that, it wasn't free.
Most teachers don't reach 40 years. I retired at 32 years, which works out at 0.4
I have now returned to a school in a Non-Teaching role so am not inactive.
As an aside, yes a buffet at the Bellagio ($60) or the Wynn ($65) will set you back more than $50, they are hardly average for Las Vegas.
At last, a serious topic worth in depth discussion - far more than politics, AI or Cornish housing.
I don't rate either Bellagio or the Wynn though at the latter the Terrace Pointe Cafe remains one of my favourite breakfast stops on the Strip.
In terms of the buffets, Aria does a very nice buffet - we went there one Christmas Eve after I'd relieved Mr Wynn of $420 at the Encore Casino. The two buffets were $120 and were really good value.
Planet Hollywood is also very good as is the Mirage but the top buffet on the Strip has to be Bacchanal at Caesar's Palace. I gather it's been overhauled of late but it still looks absolutely wonderful.
To be fair, I've not been to a buffet Downtown so there are no doubt some gems - in terms of places to eat beyond the buffets, Peppermill for breakfast, Maggiano's for anything Italian and Yardbird if you want something southern and chicken related. For steak, you are spoilt for choice - you have to win seriously to head for Capital Grille or Vic & Anthony's. There are more value options Downtown. We went to Oscar's in the Plaza Hotel last time - very good.
Vegas is a tacky dump.
Spent a night there as a kid in the early 70s, and determined never to go back. Grossest place I’ve ever visited.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
As an aside, yes a buffet at the Bellagio ($60) or the Wynn ($65) will set you back more than $50, they are hardly average for Las Vegas.
At last, a serious topic worth in depth discussion - far more than politics, AI or Cornish housing.
I don't rate either Bellagio or the Wynn though at the latter the Terrace Pointe Cafe remains one of my favourite breakfast stops on the Strip.
In terms of the buffets, Aria does a very nice buffet - we went there one Christmas Eve after I'd relieved Mr Wynn of $420 at the Encore Casino. The two buffets were $120 and were really good value.
Planet Hollywood is also very good as is the Mirage but the top buffet on the Strip has to be Bacchanal at Caesar's Palace. I gather it's been overhauled of late but it still looks absolutely wonderful.
To be fair, I've not been to a buffet Downtown so there are no doubt some gems - in terms of places to eat beyond the buffets, Peppermill for breakfast, Maggiano's for anything Italian and Yardbird if you want something southern and chicken related. For steak, you are spoilt for choice - you have to win seriously to head for Capital Grille or Vic & Anthony's. There are more value options Downtown. We went to Oscar's in the Plaza Hotel last time - very good.
Vegas is a tacky dump.
Spent a night there as a kid in the early 70s, and determined never to go back. Grossest place I’ve ever visited.
Went to Vegas in November. My god - never again. Full of shanty towns, really horrible homeless problem (really sad to see) and super expensive. Stinks of drugs everywhere
I had a nice time there 10 years or so ago, simply playing lots of poker with people who seemed to be enjoying themselves too - the rakes are higher than online, but you're paying for the atmosphere. If that's your scene, there's unlimited amounts of it - no idea about prostitutes or mafia, but unless you're looking for either it doesn't matter much. Obviously silly to go there for beauty and high culture.
Went to Vegas in November. My god - never again. Full of shanty towns, really horrible homeless problem (really sad to see) and super expensive. Stinks of drugs everywhere
An erstwhile colleague of mine worked there until quite recently.
As is so often the case, I find myself in the minority here it would seem.
I love Las Vegas - it's one of the most relaxing places I've ever encountered. Doesn't matter if you do or don't gamble - it's all about doing more or less what you want more or less when you want it.
Granted, the exchange rate makes a difference - first time we went, it was $2.05 so we could enjoy it. Last time it was $1.40 so not quite so good and we've not been since 2015 so a lot has changed but we did catch the High Roller on our last visit.
Turn up at a restaurant at 3am and be offered BOTH the breakfast and dinner menus - that's the best of it.
I haven't been, but would like to go at least once to experience it.
If you've ever been to Glasgow then it is just like Las Vegas.
Glasgow and Las Vegas are the only places in the world you can pay for sex with chips.
My late brother said that also applied to Stoke-on-Trent, where the dogs were not discerning about it. Allegedly. And not from personal experience he added.
As an aside, yes a buffet at the Bellagio ($60) or the Wynn ($65) will set you back more than $50, they are hardly average for Las Vegas.
At last, a serious topic worth in depth discussion - far more than politics, AI or Cornish housing.
I don't rate either Bellagio or the Wynn though at the latter the Terrace Pointe Cafe remains one of my favourite breakfast stops on the Strip.
In terms of the buffets, Aria does a very nice buffet - we went there one Christmas Eve after I'd relieved Mr Wynn of $420 at the Encore Casino. The two buffets were $120 and were really good value.
Planet Hollywood is also very good as is the Mirage but the top buffet on the Strip has to be Bacchanal at Caesar's Palace. I gather it's been overhauled of late but it still looks absolutely wonderful.
To be fair, I've not been to a buffet Downtown so there are no doubt some gems - in terms of places to eat beyond the buffets, Peppermill for breakfast, Maggiano's for anything Italian and Yardbird if you want something southern and chicken related. For steak, you are spoilt for choice - you have to win seriously to head for Capital Grille or Vic & Anthony's. There are more value options Downtown. We went to Oscar's in the Plaza Hotel last time - very good.
Vegas is a tacky dump.
Spent a night there as a kid in the early 70s, and determined never to go back. Grossest place I’ve ever visited.
Went to Vegas in November. My god - never again. Full of shanty towns, really horrible homeless problem (really sad to see) and super expensive. Stinks of drugs everywhere
Really weird. The only place I’ve ever been that gave off the vibe of total moral desert - and that to a ten year old.
Anyone fancy a little prediction competition for 2023?
To keep it simple how about gathering PB predictions on the following five measures?:
1. Parliament: Number of MPs taking the Conservative whip on 31 December 2023. 2. UK Polling: Average LAB lead (or deficit) in polls published during December 2023. 3. UK Inflation: November CPI inflation rate. 4. Exchange rate: GPB/USD rate. 5. Stock exchange: 31 December 2023 FSTE100 closing price.
Happy to take other suggestions. Or to make it global rather than UK-centric.
If we can agree a set of measures we could take predictions via posts up until say mid-January and see who really insightful and/or lucky.
As an aside, yes a buffet at the Bellagio ($60) or the Wynn ($65) will set you back more than $50, they are hardly average for Las Vegas.
At last, a serious topic worth in depth discussion - far more than politics, AI or Cornish housing.
I don't rate either Bellagio or the Wynn though at the latter the Terrace Pointe Cafe remains one of my favourite breakfast stops on the Strip.
In terms of the buffets, Aria does a very nice buffet - we went there one Christmas Eve after I'd relieved Mr Wynn of $420 at the Encore Casino. The two buffets were $120 and were really good value.
Planet Hollywood is also very good as is the Mirage but the top buffet on the Strip has to be Bacchanal at Caesar's Palace. I gather it's been overhauled of late but it still looks absolutely wonderful.
To be fair, I've not been to a buffet Downtown so there are no doubt some gems - in terms of places to eat beyond the buffets, Peppermill for breakfast, Maggiano's for anything Italian and Yardbird if you want something southern and chicken related. For steak, you are spoilt for choice - you have to win seriously to head for Capital Grille or Vic & Anthony's. There are more value options Downtown. We went to Oscar's in the Plaza Hotel last time - very good.
Vegas is a tacky dump.
Spent a night there as a kid in the early 70s, and determined never to go back. Grossest place I’ve ever visited.
Went to Vegas in November. My god - never again. Full of shanty towns, really horrible homeless problem (really sad to see) and super expensive. Stinks of drugs everywhere
As an aside, yes a buffet at the Bellagio ($60) or the Wynn ($65) will set you back more than $50, they are hardly average for Las Vegas.
At last, a serious topic worth in depth discussion - far more than politics, AI or Cornish housing.
I don't rate either Bellagio or the Wynn though at the latter the Terrace Pointe Cafe remains one of my favourite breakfast stops on the Strip.
In terms of the buffets, Aria does a very nice buffet - we went there one Christmas Eve after I'd relieved Mr Wynn of $420 at the Encore Casino. The two buffets were $120 and were really good value.
Planet Hollywood is also very good as is the Mirage but the top buffet on the Strip has to be Bacchanal at Caesar's Palace. I gather it's been overhauled of late but it still looks absolutely wonderful.
To be fair, I've not been to a buffet Downtown so there are no doubt some gems - in terms of places to eat beyond the buffets, Peppermill for breakfast, Maggiano's for anything Italian and Yardbird if you want something southern and chicken related. For steak, you are spoilt for choice - you have to win seriously to head for Capital Grille or Vic & Anthony's. There are more value options Downtown. We went to Oscar's in the Plaza Hotel last time - very good.
Vegas is a tacky dump.
Spent a night there as a kid in the early 70s, and determined never to go back. Grossest place I’ve ever visited.
Went to Vegas in November. My god - never again. Full of shanty towns, really horrible homeless problem (really sad to see) and super expensive. Stinks of drugs everywhere
As an aside, yes a buffet at the Bellagio ($60) or the Wynn ($65) will set you back more than $50, they are hardly average for Las Vegas.
At last, a serious topic worth in depth discussion - far more than politics, AI or Cornish housing.
I don't rate either Bellagio or the Wynn though at the latter the Terrace Pointe Cafe remains one of my favourite breakfast stops on the Strip.
In terms of the buffets, Aria does a very nice buffet - we went there one Christmas Eve after I'd relieved Mr Wynn of $420 at the Encore Casino. The two buffets were $120 and were really good value.
Planet Hollywood is also very good as is the Mirage but the top buffet on the Strip has to be Bacchanal at Caesar's Palace. I gather it's been overhauled of late but it still looks absolutely wonderful.
To be fair, I've not been to a buffet Downtown so there are no doubt some gems - in terms of places to eat beyond the buffets, Peppermill for breakfast, Maggiano's for anything Italian and Yardbird if you want something southern and chicken related. For steak, you are spoilt for choice - you have to win seriously to head for Capital Grille or Vic & Anthony's. There are more value options Downtown. We went to Oscar's in the Plaza Hotel last time - very good.
Vegas is a tacky dump.
Spent a night there as a kid in the early 70s, and determined never to go back. Grossest place I’ve ever visited.
Went to Vegas in November. My god - never again. Full of shanty towns, really horrible homeless problem (really sad to see) and super expensive. Stinks of drugs everywhere
Why is that so common in American cities now?
Had the same impression in Seattle.
I do love visiting America - but the one vibe I get is if you’re on low income, you are pretty much buggered. Absolutely no step up, and the “American dream” mantra means it is far easier to blame lack of drive or work ethic
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
As is so often the case, I find myself in the minority here it would seem.
I love Las Vegas - it's one of the most relaxing places I've ever encountered. Doesn't matter if you do or don't gamble - it's all about doing more or less what you want more or less when you want it.
Granted, the exchange rate makes a difference - first time we went, it was $2.05 so we could enjoy it. Last time it was $1.40 so not quite so good and we've not been since 2015 so a lot has changed but we did catch the High Roller on our last visit.
Turn up at a restaurant at 3am and be offered BOTH the breakfast and dinner menus - that's the best of it.
I haven't been, but would like to go at least once to experience it.
If you've ever been to Glasgow then it is just like Las Vegas.
Glasgow and Las Vegas are the only places in the world you can pay for sex with chips.
Last time I was in Cardiff I saw a girl being ... 'pleasured' over the back of a bench while continuing to munch on her bag of chips. I was impressed, in a way.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
The number of such people is tiny.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
The number of such people is tiny.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
Ah, the old Silver Bullet Fallacy: because this measure will only have a small impact, we shouldn't bother doing it.
As things stand the Tories cannot look the voters in the eye and ask to be trusted for another five years. The fundamentals are appalling.
There is no hiding. If Sunak does miraculously dig us out of the economic and political hole the nation finds itself in, the Tories were still the ones who dug it in the first place.
We need fresh ideas, fresh faces and a democracy that punishes negligence.
So a new party then. ....We won't get that from Labour.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
There are staff shortages throughout the economy - in all sectors - because about half a million have left the workforce and these are mostly older people at all levels though I suspect it's more likely professional people or middle/senior management.
The small insight I have in this are some from the public sector are moving over to comparable and better paid jobs in the private sector because they need more money now, not in 20 years. Their often specialised and professional jobs are not easy to fill as the public sector can't offer what the private sector can.
The pension was and has always been understood to me the main method of recruitment and retention in the public sector. If you work hard for 35-40 years and have paid in to your pension (along with your employer), why shouldn't you be entitled to the benefits? There may be some questions asked about the benefits accrued to some very senior public sector figures such as Council CEOs but most lower-level workers have worked hard and whether their loyalty is down to the pension or to their sense of public duty, they should be entitled to that to which they are entitled.
The solution to this is not to 'take back the pensions' of the beneficiaries of final salary pension schemes, but to tax those with significant incomes in retirement, be it accrued through public or private sector pension schemes. The problem is, as I have pointed out many times before, that you can realistically find yourself recieving a double income of 100k in retirement against which you only pay about 15k tax. That works out about 7k per month. These people should be paying something like National Insurance, at least.
The number of such people is tiny.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
Ah, the old Silver Bullet Fallacy: because this measure will only have a small impact, we shouldn't bother doing it.
No, among other things I support merging NI and income tax, which would deal with this.
But pretending it will even begin to fix public finances is deluded.
You’d need dozens of measures on the same scale to make a start on that.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
Well, in my area. the cost of a very expensive road has just been made more expensive by a legal challenge that is, in my inexpert legal view, a load of horsecr@p.
This will cost a lot of money; not just in terms of legal fees, but also in the fact that men and machinery will be left idle. There's been a robust planning process; just build the blooming thing.
And likewise, almost all of Jolyon Maugham's tw@ttery.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
The incomers aren’t getting those pensions, now.
The ones on the pensions had a defined contract. Not sure the government defaulting is going to help…
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
In other news, Southwest Airlines is in utter meltdown due to the snow in the US - yet other airlines are not as badly affected. The reason might be under-investment in software:
So many companies rely on software, yet don't invest in it because it's not their core business. And sometimes they don't invest in it despite it being their core business...
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
Well indeed. Just about every full-time TA is on Universal Credit. The government should not be paying full time wages that another arm of government declares to be inadequate to live on and has to top it up.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
The incomers aren’t getting those pensions, now.
The ones on the pensions had a defined contract. Not sure the government defaulting is going to help…
There are many thousands of jobs in the civil service being advertised now with this type of pension as standard, many in paying in excess of 40k.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
Wages which enable vacancies to be filled. We've a full time level 4 position vacant for several months now. Pay is £22k. There have been no qualified applicants in one of the poorest parts of the country.
Anyone fancy a little prediction competition for 2023?
To keep it simple how about gathering PB predictions on the following five measures?:
1. Parliament: Number of MPs taking the Conservative whip on 31 December 2023. 2. UK Polling: Average LAB lead (or deficit) in polls published during December 2023. 3. UK Inflation: November CPI inflation rate. 4. Exchange rate: GPB/USD rate. 5. Stock exchange: 31 December 2023 FSTE100 closing price.
Happy to take other suggestions. Or to make it global rather than UK-centric.
If we can agree a set of measures we could take predictions via posts up until say mid-January and see who really insightful and/or lucky.
In this game, is there no limit on ambition in the prediction? So I predict MoonRabbit to tip a winning horse. Sometime in 2023.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
Currently 108 cents today. Just over a year ago it was above 400.
Whilst it might be a good buy opportunity, Musk does appear to have rather Ratnered his brands.
I have always thought Tesla was overpriced. It's difficult to see them as either a successful luxury brand or a true mass market car. And their resale value is pretty much zero so you wonder how much profit they make on their leases even at the prices they charge.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
Wages which enable vacancies to be filled. We've a full time level 4 position vacant for several months now. Pay is £22k. There have been no qualified applicants in one of the poorest parts of the country.
Assume 250 working days a year. 28 days holiday. Say 230 days, ultimately.
8 hours a day
1840 working hours per year.
22k / 2400 = £11.96 / hour
Minimum wage this year - £9.50 Minimum wage next year - £10.42
I think the answer is that your qualified candidates are getting paid more money for a different job.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Currently 108 cents today. Just over a year ago it was above 400.
Whilst it might be a good buy opportunity, Musk does appear to have rather Ratnered his brands.
I have always thought Tesla was overpriced. It's difficult to see them as either a successful luxury brand or a true mass market car. And their resale value is pretty much zero so you wonder how much profit they make on their leases even at the prices they charge.
I think quite a few people would be interested in where they can find Teslas with zero resale value.....
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
Wages which enable vacancies to be filled. We've a full time level 4 position vacant for several months now. Pay is £22k. There have been no qualified applicants in one of the poorest parts of the country.
Assume 250 working days a year. 28 days holiday. Say 230 days, ultimately.
8 hours a day
1840 working hours per year.
22k / 2400 = £11.96 / hour
Minimum wage this year - £9.50 Minimum wage next year - £10.42
I think the answer is that your qualified candidates are getting paid more money for a different job.
Indeed. That's a level 4 too. Level 1 is £18.3k. Aldi pays £11 ph minimum. Much less responsibility, being sworn at, threats, or assault too.
- whether @Lee10's IP address shows up in a list of compromised IPs and - whether he has a gmx email address
Don't understand the compromised IP point, why not spam from a burner phone with a squillion gb Giffgaff SIM card at 5 quid a month? Even landline IPs are mostly dynamically allocated these days.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
Wages which enable vacancies to be filled. We've a full time level 4 position vacant for several months now. Pay is £22k. There have been no qualified applicants in one of the poorest parts of the country.
Assume 250 working days a year. 28 days holiday. Say 230 days, ultimately.
8 hours a day
1840 working hours per year.
22k / 2400 = £11.96 / hour
Minimum wage this year - £9.50 Minimum wage next year - £10.42
I think the answer is that your qualified candidates are getting paid more money for a different job.
Indeed. That's a level 4 too. Level 1 is £18.3k. Aldi pays £11 ph minimum. Much less responsibility, being sworn at threats or assault too.
Is the threat of assault, at Aldi, considered a benefit in kind? If so, at what rate?
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
Wages which enable vacancies to be filled. We've a full time level 4 position vacant for several months now. Pay is £22k. There have been no qualified applicants in one of the poorest parts of the country.
So where is the £1tn being spent productively?
Based on an average wage of £30k the government could employ 35m people for their budget
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
A large part of the problem, is that the public sector is addicted to cheap, low value labour.
So they can't afford to fill all the posts at market rates.
If I got control of the DVLA, for example, I would spend several billion over several years. At the end of it, the head count would be massively down, much of the system would be automated, and the jobs that remained would probably be closer to £80K.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
See. One person's "wasted" is another person's "cost of providing statutory services." So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified? So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
I’m explicitly not identifying waste. I’m asking you to say how much you need. Different question.
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
Wages which enable vacancies to be filled. We've a full time level 4 position vacant for several months now. Pay is £22k. There have been no qualified applicants in one of the poorest parts of the country.
So where is the £1tn being spent productively?
Based on an average wage of £30k the government could employ 35m people for their budget
Government isn't about spending productively. It's about spending to appease various groups.
For example, my idea of automating (modern style) government depts. isn't some new, crazy wonderful idea. It's just that every time someone tries it, it runs into an iron triangle of special interests who hate the idea. They like the fact that government has zillions of low paid, ow value jobs.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
Wasn't it an episode of Miami Vice where a lunatic, murderous drug lord lures one of them to a Caribbean Island where they miss said murderous drug lord for the money he used to spend there?
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
LOL looking at your £260 for tacos for 4 post.
One thing about being a first World country with the rule of law in place is, the state stands by its contractual obligations same as anyone else. You happy for someone to take a very big axe to whoever your employer happens to be?
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
In London maybe but north of Watford where few can earn £40k plus in the private sector
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
A lot goes on the State Pension & Pension Credit (£160bn), about £120bn goes on UC and other benefits which effectively subsidise low pay. Disability benefits are £45bn, Health is about £210bn.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Burning plasma: How 2022’s biggest fusion milestone impacts our research https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/natural-sciences/2022/12/27/burning-plasma/#more-804 … However, our analysis of the neutron energy spectra indicates the ions are far from the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. This is surprising, since our standard theories suggest that the burning plasma should have sufficient time to relax to equilibrium – the burning plasma only exists for one-tenth of one-billionth of a second (100 picoseconds), but it should relax to equilibrium in approximately 0.01 picoseconds.
This discrepancy may seem like a somewhat obscure theoretical point but many of the computer models used to design and analyse ICF experiments are based on the assumption that ions obey a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. Therefore, explaining the discrepancy is necessary to ensure our confidence in these models which will be used to design experiments aiming for a larger energy gain factor.
… if the burning plasma is in a state that is far from the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, then this could open up new strategies for increasing the energy output from ICF experiments. This is because the number of fusion reactions that occur is highly sensitive to the distribution of ion velocities…
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
A lot goes on the State Pension & Pension Credit (£160bn), about £120bn goes on UC and other benefits which effectively subsidise low pay. Disability benefits are £45bn, Health is about £210bn.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
A lot goes on the State Pension & Pension Credit (£160bn), about £120bn goes on UC and other benefits which effectively subsidise low pay. Disability benefits are £45bn, Health is about £210bn.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents high, what is the practical alternative?
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
A lot goes on the State Pension & Pension Credit (£160bn), about £120bn goes on UC and other benefits which effectively subsidise low pay. Disability benefits are £45bn, Health is about £210bn.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents high, what is the practical alternative?
Vote for a different government.
I doubt that a Labour government would really fund a massive productivity drive to reduce the number of government employees, while raising the salaries of those who remained.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
A lot goes on the State Pension & Pension Credit (£160bn), about £120bn goes on UC and other benefits which effectively subsidise low pay. Disability benefits are £45bn, Health is about £210bn.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents high, what is the practical alternative?
Vote for a different government.
To which the response will be we can't afford those wages. Increasingly, I am of the view we can't afford not to.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
And £50k is still well above the average salary even in London.
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
And £50k is still well above the average salary even in London.
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
The alternative is simply having no public sector though.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Some of that differential might make sense- more professional stability, better pension, less Musk-like working conditions.
But that only gets you so far. And the changes in the public sector over the last decade (on all three levers) have meant a change from "understandably less" to "taking the piss". To the extent that even people not that money-driven have noticed.
A couple of other things have crept in. One is that the gaps in staffing have grown, so the work has become more continuous firefighting. It's not fun, it's not professionally satisfying. The other is that private sector employers have become increasingly tolerant of the sort of flexible work practices that the public sector has used as a carrot for ages. Jobs like TAs, teachers and so on have historically had a lower going rate because having school holidays off is damn convenient as a parent. If you can do other things flexibly, then it makes more sense to do those other things. Wishing that weren't so won't stop it being so.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
You don't need a 6 figure pay for that - but expecting to find people on the minimum wage + 50p an hour is a joke.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Some of that differential might make sense- more professional stability, better pension, less Musk-like working conditions.
But that only gets you so far. And the changes in the public sector over the last decade (on all three levers) have meant a change from "understandably less" to "taking the piss". To the extent that even people not that money-driven have noticed.
A couple of other things have crept in. One is that the gaps in staffing have grown, so the work has become more continuous firefighting. It's not fun, it's not professionally satisfying. The other is that private sector employers have become increasingly tolerant of the sort of flexible work practices that the public sector has used as a carrot for ages. Jobs like TAs, teachers and so on have historically had a lower going rate because having school holidays off is damn convenient as a parent. If you can do other things flexibly, then it makes more sense to do those other things. Wishing that weren't so won't stop it being so.
In general, the employment practises in the public sector seem decades out of date.
The way medical staff are employed is simply bizarre by the standards of a competently run private company.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
And £50k is still well above the average salary even in London.
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
The alternative is simply having no public sector though.
Taxpayers already pay for the average public sector salary to be £28 a week higher than the average private sector salary excluding bonuses. £605 in the public sector a week to £577 a week in the private sector.
Not even considering better pensions in the public sector too
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
A lot goes on the State Pension & Pension Credit (£160bn), about £120bn goes on UC and other benefits which effectively subsidise low pay. Disability benefits are £45bn, Health is about £210bn.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents high, what is the practical alternative?
Vote for a different government.
I doubt that a Labour government would really fund a massive productivity drive to reduce the number of government employees, while raising the salaries of those who remained.
I'm not so sure. Attitudes are changing and hardening rapidly. Market forces are reducing the number of government employees at the bottom end anyways. Solutions are being found. The current situation in schools isn't sustainable. I hear it is the same in other sectors. Simply having reliable working IT daily would be a huge efficiency. The fear has always been putting folk on the dole. But they are leaving organically for other jobs anyways. Meanwhile. This government is stuck in the oldthink of an unlimited pool of unemployed labour ready to step in. (See their idea of using "agency staff" to cover strikes. The strikes being partly driven by a lack of available agency staff in the first place).
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
You don't need a 6 figure pay for that - but expecting to find people on the minimum wage + 50p an hour is a joke.
Which gets to the two bits of thinking that we need to change, I reckon.
First, the idea "frontline good, admin bad". It leads to nurses, doctors, teachers and the like spending time doing things badly because we don't want to spend money on support that frees people up to do their main job.
Second, the refusal to spend money now to unlock long term savings.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
A lot goes on the State Pension & Pension Credit (£160bn), about £120bn goes on UC and other benefits which effectively subsidise low pay. Disability benefits are £45bn, Health is about £210bn.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents high, what is the practical alternative?
Vote for a different government.
I doubt that a Labour government would really fund a massive productivity drive to reduce the number of government employees, while raising the salaries of those who remained.
I'm not so sure. Attitudes are changing and hardening rapidly. Market forces are reducing the number of government employees at the bottom end anyways. Solutions are being found. The current situation in schools isn't sustainable. I hear it is the same in other sectors. Simply having reliable working IT daily would be a huge efficiency. The fear has always been putting folk on the dole. But they are leaving organically for other jobs anyways. Meanwhile. This government is stuck in the oldthink of an unlimited pool of unemployed labour ready to step in. (See their idea of using "agency staff" to cover strikes. The strikes are partly driven by a lack of available agency staff in the first place).
One of the IT teachers at my youngest daughters school is paid to do charity work (by the school) in the local state schools. He does something like 5 hours a week on this. And keeps 2 schools running in day to day IT terms. Because he is highly skilled.
His comments on the support provided by the system in the state schools is sulphurous. He would lock them out of their own system, apart from they are trying their best and it would be illegal.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
You don't need a 6 figure pay for that - but expecting to find people on the minimum wage + 50p an hour is a joke.
See. You get the problem. More and more are. It is fundamentally about frustration at not having the basic tools to do the job. Which is a function of pay. If we had an IT team who were paid more than your average computer repair shop technician it would be OK. But we don't. Simply taking on an IT apprentice on the minimum wage of a 16 year old, and not giving them a budget to order parts next day on Amazon Prime doesn't cut it.
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
Yes but. We have a labour shortage. There are unskilled posts across the northeast at minimum wage and quite a bit above unfilled. Very few are paid to do nothing. Even fewer would be if wages weren't so low.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
You don't need a 6 figure pay for that - but expecting to find people on the minimum wage + 50p an hour is a joke.
See. You get the problem. More and more are. It is fundamentally about frustration at not having the basic tools to do the job. Which is a function of pay. If we had an IT team who were paid more than your average computer repair shop technician it would be OK. But we don't. Simply taking on an IT apprentice on the minimum wage of a 16 year old, and not giving them a budget to order parts next day on Amazon Prime doesn't cut it.
Looking at the issue - nearly all companies of any size have realised that having any unique data/configuration on an employee's actual computer on the their desk is a fail.
The bank where I work (for example), uses VDIs - that is, the local machine is just for logging into the a remote system which provides a virtual computer to work on.
So if the local machine dies, log in from any other machine. On the planet. Nothing is lost - the VDI is in the same state as the moment the connection went down.
All support is then remote and centralised, apart from pulling another local machine out of the box if it dies, and keeping the local network running.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
And £50k is still well above the average salary even in London.
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
The alternative is simply having no public sector though.
Taxpayers already pay for the average public sector salary to be £28 a week higher than the average private sector salary excluding bonuses. £605 in the public sector a week to £577 a week in the private sector.
Not even considering better pensions in the public sector too
But as.usual that is one of your spurious metrics. You are not comparing like for like jobs. Most of the unskilled gig economy jobs are in the private sector which would more likely bump the average down.
Your general point may well be correct but you are using misleading data to make your point.
Perhaps you ought to be comparing the same job in the private sector with the same job in the state system. For example a teacher at a state school and a teacher at a private school.
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
I don't have definete statistics but just see from personal experience people bowing out of local government / the civil service on pensions at 2/3rds final salary around age 60. If you are on 60k, then that is 40k, then you have your state pension topping this up to 50k. I personally know a lot of people in this position; IE many hundreds every year. I'd guess there are quite a few people on here that fall in this category. Many more quit earlier at 55 because they concluded that they just don't need the money. Sometimes they get a redundancy deal, no doubt these will come back on the table again soon. This then helps to create the labour shortage issue, and is a known phenomenon regularly discussed on here.
I'm not sure where people get these numbers from. In the old Civil Service pension scheme, if you retired on £40k after working for 40 years, your pension was £20k (40x40/80). The newer schemes are less generous.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
That is a career average earnings pension scheme, not a final salary scheme, so would include starting salary.. It would also require 40 years service so not really early retirement. It was introduced in 2015, so no one can have accrued 40 years yet.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
That's all correct. I was on the old CS scheme, so got my years service multiplied by my final salary divided by 80. My pension was about a third of my final salary, although I'd only done 30 years in the public sector. Under the new career average earnings scheme, my 'career average' after 40 years would have probably been around £20k (given in 1982 I'd have been on around £8k), so although it would only have been divided by 60, it would be pretty low.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
You don't need a 6 figure pay for that - but expecting to find people on the minimum wage + 50p an hour is a joke.
See. You get the problem. More and more are. It is fundamentally about frustration at not having the basic tools to do the job. Which is a function of pay. If we had an IT team who were paid more than your average computer repair shop technician it would be OK. But we don't. Simply taking on an IT apprentice on the minimum wage of a 16 year old, and not giving them a budget to order parts next day on Amazon Prime doesn't cut it.
Looking at the issue - nearly all companies of any size have realised that having any unique data/configuration on an employee's actual computer on the their desk is a fail.
The bank where I work (for example), uses VDIs - that is, the local machine is just for logging into the a remote system which provides a virtual computer to work on.
So if the local machine dies, log in from any other machine. On the planet. Nothing is lost - the VDI is in the same state as the moment the connection went down.
All support is then remote and centralised, apart from pulling another local machine out of the box if it dies, and keeping the local network running.
True. But it's the "any other machine" which is the problem. There simply aren't enough working laptops. And each one takes weeks to repair. We aren't allowed to bring in our own. Nor indeed can we login from home. There is a reform agenda here for the public sector. But it isn't "maintaining Frontline Services."
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
Yep. That'll be why we have 2 working printers in our school, and spend inordinate amounts of time wasted every day finding a laptop which works.
You don't need a 6 figure pay for that - but expecting to find people on the minimum wage + 50p an hour is a joke.
See. You get the problem. More and more are. It is fundamentally about frustration at not having the basic tools to do the job. Which is a function of pay. If we had an IT team who were paid more than your average computer repair shop technician it would be OK. But we don't. Simply taking on an IT apprentice on the minimum wage of a 16 year old, and not giving them a budget to order parts next day on Amazon Prime doesn't cut it.
Looking at the issue - nearly all companies of any size have realised that having any unique data/configuration on an employee's actual computer on the their desk is a fail.
The bank where I work (for example), uses VDIs - that is, the local machine is just for logging into the a remote system which provides a virtual computer to work on.
So if the local machine dies, log in from any other machine. On the planet. Nothing is lost - the VDI is in the same state as the moment the connection went down.
All support is then remote and centralised, apart from pulling another local machine out of the box if it dies, and keeping the local network running.
True. But it's the "any other machine" which is the problem. There simply aren't enough working laptops. And each one takes weeks to repair. We aren't allowed to bring in our own.
The other part of the concept is that this means the local machine only needs to be capable of running the remote session. So you have a moderate spec machine, which means you can afford to have a pile of them waiting to go. Machine broken - Get another.
The ones that don't work are given a couple of hours of looking at (max) by the support guys (centralised), then junked.
There isn't a shortage of folk to do well renumerated public sector jobs with decent pensions. There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones. There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
In many areas there is actually a shortage of people to do well paid public sector jobs with decent pensions. Lots of vacant posts around the 40k mark.
Citation please.
Just research Council planning officer shortages and look in to the salaries they get.
You have selected one job title (from thousands) for which there might be a good reason for any shortage such as training. You can't take dogs off the street and install them as a Chief City Planner, although that may explain away Birmingham.
In general, technically skilled jobs, in government, seem to have WTF salaries. As in Why The Fuck would anyone with the qualifications work for that salary?
Thing about Planning Officers is their skills, contacts, and knowledge are hugely in demand from property developers out to make a fat buck. Not typical tbh.
Look at government IT jobs. It’s quite common to see demanded skills which are 6 figures in London, in private work, at £50k or less in government job ads.
And £50k is still well above the average salary even in London.
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
The alternative is simply having no public sector though.
Taxpayers already pay for the average public sector salary to be £28 a week higher than the average private sector salary excluding bonuses. £605 in the public sector a week to £577 a week in the private sector.
Not even considering better pensions in the public sector too
But as.usual that is one of your spurious metrics. You are not comparing like for like jobs. Most of the unskilled gig economy jobs are in the private sector which would more likely bump the average down.
Your general point may well be correct but you are using misleading data to make your point.
Perhaps you ought to be comparing the same job in the private sector with the same job in the state system. For example a teacher at a state school and a teacher at a private school.
Average private school teacher earns £34k. Average teacher overall earns £35k
"Dutch central bank president Klaas Knot has called on companies to increase wages, saying their profits are enough to merit a decent pay rise. A pay rise of between 5% and 7%, coupled with the government’s price ceiling on energy, would be enough to head off the impact of rising prices, Knot told television programme Nieuwsuur on Thursday evening.
‘We have done the calculations and we don’t want wages to decline further. If you want to keep wages at the same level, then you need a pay rise of between 5% and 7%. It is an average at a macro-economic level,’ he said."
Yes, because EU wage rises are 2.5-3.5% vs inflation at 11.1%, that compares to the UK with wage rises of 6.5% against inflation of 10.7% and the US with 5.9% wage rises against 7.5% inflation. EU workers are fucked, the biggest ever real terms wage contraction ever and a much higher bar for crossover into real terms wage rises than the US or UK where wages are on the up and inflation seems to have peaked.
Do public sector workers not count?
National average, so it includes them.
6.1%. 2.7 % for the public sector. No wonder there are no staff.
There are no staff because loads of public sector workers all took early retirement and are now inactive. Those lavish final salary pensions were always going to catch up eventually. People with 40 year contributions are retiring at 2/3rds of their high final salary because they've got no mortgage to pay and their kids have left home so there's no major expenses.
So while you all moan at the bottom it's your now ex colleagues who rinsed the state and are continuing to do so that are the reason there's no money left to give you lot pay rises that make sense. I'm all for axing all final salary pensions and not just for new entrants and giving public sector employees better pay tomorrow morning using the billions in savings. Are you?
Not sure how accepting the terms and conditions offered at the time is rinsing anyone? The pay is far below the market rate. Simple as. It's about understaffing making the job nigh on impossible for those that remain, and they are leaving in droves. Not for early retirement, but for Nando's and Aldi. It's understaffed because the pay sucks.
And the pay sucks because the state is paying final salary retirements for millions of people so there's no money left. Taxes are already growth destroyingly high which means you need to find cuts elsewhere for higher salaries. Once again, I'm happy to take a very big axe to the state, are you?
Where would your axe fall? Apart from robbing folk of their fairly and legally earned pensions? Presumably hospitals need staff, kids need teachers? Passports need issuing. There still is, apparently, enough money for some to pay utterly farcical sums for tacos.
Let me turn it around.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Duff PPE contracts for friends won't have helped.
True. But relatively small beer.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
A lot goes on the State Pension & Pension Credit (£160bn), about £120bn goes on UC and other benefits which effectively subsidise low pay. Disability benefits are £45bn, Health is about £210bn.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Indeed. State pension is not massively generous & I think pension credit is tightly targeted. Hence the need to target tax credits (not so much UC specifically).
But there must be savings that can be made inside the likes of the health budget. It’s implausible that £210bn is perfectly spent
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
It becomes a mechanism to suppress wages - effectively a transfer to the employer. Educate the individuals and train them to increase their value added
Subsidising low pay is bonkers. On this I am firmly with @StillWaters. However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Subsidising low pay is something I support (and indeed voted to introduce as income credit under Gordon Brown). If the Government is paying X £N in Job Seekers' Allowance, and X can't get a job because X's skills are limited and only worth say £6/hour to an employer, then it makes sense IMO to subsidise X with, say, half of N. The Government saves half the money, X gets back into the workforce, and the employer is able to get a marginally valuable job done. Obviously we hope that X's skills can be helped with training, or that after getting this job another one appears with better pay. But just paying X £N to do nothing doesn't seem sensible if they are close to being able to work.
It becomes a mechanism to suppress wages - effectively a transfer to the employer. Educate the individuals and train them to increase their value added
This. Not to mention the madness of demanding people don't work more than x hours a week. By removing benefits if they do at nearly the same rate they get extra money.
Hands up those who would work on a building site for £0.50 an hour, effective rate of pay?
Comments
Grossest place I’ve ever visited.
He moved to Dallas.
I am not sure that was an upgrade.
The only place I’ve ever been that gave off the vibe of total moral desert - and that to a ten year old.
To keep it simple how about gathering PB predictions on the following five measures?:
1. Parliament: Number of MPs taking the Conservative whip on 31 December 2023.
2. UK Polling: Average LAB lead (or deficit) in polls published during December 2023.
3. UK Inflation: November CPI inflation rate.
4. Exchange rate: GPB/USD rate.
5. Stock exchange: 31 December 2023 FSTE100 closing price.
Happy to take other suggestions. Or to make it global rather than UK-centric.
If we can agree a set of measures we could take predictions via posts up until say mid-January and see who really insightful and/or lucky.
Had the same impression in Seattle.
Government spending is just over £1 trillion. That works out as about £15k per head.
How can you not find decent public services with that budget? Where is there money that is being wasted?
Far too early to say IMO. As others have said 2 years is a long time in politics.
That makes as much sense as the old “Cancel Trident to fully fund the NHS” nonesense.
So, come on. What specifically is the waste you have identified?
So far. We have people's entirely legal pensions. Doubtless a diversity officer or two. What else?
But pretending it will even begin to fix public finances is deluded.
You’d need dozens of measures on the same scale to make a start on that.
https://www.huntspost.co.uk/news/23190190.construction-a428-upgrade-delayed-legal-challenge/
This will cost a lot of money; not just in terms of legal fees, but also in the fact that men and machinery will be left idle. There's been a robust planning process; just build the blooming thing.
And likewise, almost all of Jolyon Maugham's tw@ttery.
The ones on the pensions had a defined contract. Not sure the government defaulting is going to help…
(FWIW I’d start with tax credits and housing benefit).
https://twitter.com/JustAnother_Ben/status/1607707495509929985
So many companies rely on software, yet don't invest in it because it's not their core business. And sometimes they don't invest in it despite it being their core business...
The government should not be paying full time wages that another arm of government declares to be inadequate to live on and has to top it up.
https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+share+price
Currently 108 cents today. Just over a year ago it was above 400.
Whilst it might be a good buy opportunity, Musk does appear to have rather Ratnered his brands.
We've a full time level 4 position vacant for several months now. Pay is £22k.
There have been no qualified applicants in one of the poorest parts of the country.
There is a desperate shortage to do poorly paid ones.
There is a free market solution to that. The private sector knows what it is. The government appears not to care or acknowledge it.
8 hours a day
1840 working hours per year.
22k / 2400 = £11.96 / hour
Minimum wage this year - £9.50
Minimum wage next year - £10.42
I think the answer is that your qualified candidates are getting paid more money for a different job.
Your pension accrues at 1/60 for every year worked. So if you work for 40 years... you get 2/3rds of your career average earnings as a pension.
Am I wrong?
They seem to hold up better than ICE, IIRC.
I wouldn't buy one - service quality is shocking.
That's a level 4 too. Level 1 is £18.3k.
Aldi pays £11 ph minimum. Much less responsibility, being sworn at, threats, or assault too.
Based on an average wage of £30k the government could employ 35m people for their budget
So they can't afford to fill all the posts at market rates.
If I got control of the DVLA, for example, I would spend several billion over several years. At the end of it, the head count would be massively down, much of the system would be automated, and the jobs that remained would probably be closer to £80K.
Legacy PFI schemes are a big cost, as are tax credits (governments shouldn’t be subsidising wages).
This is not meant to be a right or left wing point. The government spends a shit load. And yet services are mediocre.
Where does it all go?
I shall banish myself to ConHome for the rest of the evening.
For example, my idea of automating (modern style) government depts. isn't some new, crazy wonderful idea. It's just that every time someone tries it, it runs into an iron triangle of special interests who hate the idea. They like the fact that government has zillions of low paid, ow value jobs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/business/sam-bankman-fried-bahamas.html
Wasn't it an episode of Miami Vice where a lunatic, murderous drug lord lures one of them to a Caribbean Island where they miss said murderous drug lord for the money he used to spend there?
One thing about being a first World country with the rule of law in place is, the state stands by its contractual obligations same as anyone else. You happy for someone to take a very big axe to whoever your employer happens to be?
Not on any form of state pension btw.
The Civil Service final salary scheme is closed to newcomers, and I think had an accrual rate of 1/80 for each year of service, so 2/3 of final salary wasn't possible.
There's half of it gone before we even look at Education, Defence, Policing, Transport, Debt(!), etc. etc.
Burning plasma: How 2022’s biggest fusion milestone impacts our research
https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/natural-sciences/2022/12/27/burning-plasma/#more-804
… However, our analysis of the neutron energy spectra indicates the ions are far from the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. This is surprising, since our standard theories suggest that the burning plasma should have sufficient time to relax to equilibrium – the burning plasma only exists for one-tenth of one-billionth of a second (100 picoseconds), but it should relax to equilibrium in approximately 0.01 picoseconds.
This discrepancy may seem like a somewhat obscure theoretical point but many of the computer models used to design and analyse ICF experiments are based on the assumption that ions obey a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. Therefore, explaining the discrepancy is necessary to ensure our confidence in these models which will be used to design experiments aiming for a larger energy gain factor.
… if the burning plasma is in a state that is far from the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, then this could open up new strategies for increasing the energy output from ICF experiments. This is because the number of fusion reactions that occur is highly sensitive to the distribution of ion velocities…
However. The government seems determined to keep wages down, and with rents and other living costs skyhigh, what is the practical alternative?
Increasingly, I am of the view we can't afford not to.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/12/27/us-congressman-admits-lied-resume-jewish-working-wall-street/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr
It is taxpayers who would be paying for big pay rises in the public sector
But that only gets you so far. And the changes in the public sector over the last decade (on all three levers) have meant a change from "understandably less" to "taking the piss". To the extent that even people not that money-driven have noticed.
A couple of other things have crept in. One is that the gaps in staffing have grown, so the work has become more continuous firefighting. It's not fun, it's not professionally satisfying. The other is that private sector employers have become increasingly tolerant of the sort of flexible work practices that the public sector has used as a carrot for ages. Jobs like TAs, teachers and so on have historically had a lower going rate because having school holidays off is damn convenient as a parent. If you can do other things flexibly, then it makes more sense to do those other things. Wishing that weren't so won't stop it being so.
The way medical staff are employed is simply bizarre by the standards of a competently run private company.
Not even considering better pensions in the public sector too
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/55089900.amp
Simply having reliable working IT daily would be a huge efficiency.
The fear has always been putting folk on the dole. But they are leaving organically for other jobs anyways.
Meanwhile. This government is stuck in the oldthink of an unlimited pool of unemployed labour ready to step in. (See their idea of using "agency staff" to cover strikes. The strikes being partly driven by a lack of available agency staff in the first place).
First, the idea "frontline good, admin bad". It leads to nurses, doctors, teachers and the like spending time doing things badly because we don't want to spend money on support that frees people up to do their main job.
Second, the refusal to spend money now to unlock long term savings.
I don't know what we do about either.
His comments on the support provided by the system in the state schools is sulphurous. He would lock them out of their own system, apart from they are trying their best and it would be illegal.
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/welsh-labour-should-ready-split-13405860?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar
More and more are. It is fundamentally about frustration at not having the basic tools to do the
job.
Which is a function of pay. If we had an IT team who were paid more than your average computer repair shop technician it would be OK. But we don't.
Simply taking on an IT apprentice on the minimum wage of a 16 year old, and not giving them a budget to order parts next day on Amazon Prime doesn't cut it.
We have a labour shortage.
There are unskilled posts across the northeast at minimum wage and quite a bit above unfilled. Very few are paid to do nothing. Even fewer would be if wages weren't so low.
The bank where I work (for example), uses VDIs - that is, the local machine is just for logging into the a remote system which provides a virtual computer to work on.
So if the local machine dies, log in from any other machine. On the planet. Nothing is lost - the VDI is in the same state as the moment the connection went down.
All support is then remote and centralised, apart from pulling another local machine out of the box if it dies, and keeping the local network running.
Your general point may well be correct but you are using misleading data to make your point.
Perhaps you ought to be comparing the same job in the private sector with the same job in the state system. For example a teacher at a state school and a teacher at a private school.
There's a load of posters on here who write ill-informed bollocks about public sector pensions, sadly.
Nor indeed can we login from home.
There is a reform agenda here for the public sector. But it isn't "maintaining Frontline Services."
The ones that don't work are given a couple of hours of looking at (max) by the support guys (centralised), then junked.
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/teacher-salary-SRCH_KO0,7.htm
https://www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/private-school-teacher-salary-SRCH_KO0,22.htm
But there must be savings that can be made inside the likes of the health budget. It’s implausible that £210bn is perfectly spent
Hands up those who would work on a building site for £0.50 an hour, effective rate of pay?