The Consertives v Public Sector

If you work in the public sector in the United kingdom rather than being seen as doing something worth while for society you are singled out by the Nasty Conservative party as some kind of plage that needs to be purged from this fine country. As we know teachers, social workers, nurses, doctors, dustmen, street cleaners, carers etc. working in the public sector with their Union agreed pay scales are made out to be some kind overpaid socialist disease. Over the years successive Conservative governments and Conservative run councils have either made cuts to public services or contracted out services to the private sector where the Unions have less hold, and re-employed the same staff for less money.

Since the Nasty Party came to power there has been a public pay freeze across the public sector that came to an end this year when Government announced that the workers in the sector would be allowed a token one percent rise. Hardly something that will really be noticeable give the cut in real terms of peoples wages.

People in the public sector now live in fear of losing there jobs, in the first three years of government the Nasty party have controlled, over 600,000 people have lost there jobs and their is speculation in 2013, that a further 400,000 people will lose their jobs before 2015. Public services have been cut to the bone and the pain is not over yet with predictions of another slow down coming our way and promises of tax cuts if the Conservatives get voted in for a second term at the next general election in May 2015, more jobs will have to go and more services lost.

It is not surprising that workers have been concerned about cuts in living standards due to years of pay freezes and cuts to pension schemes for a number of years, when you think that the rate of inflation between 2009 and 2014, and including this years pay rise, has resulted in these group of people having their spending power reduced by 15.23%. 

This means that someone earning £15,000 in 2009 would have expected with pay increases which are in line inflation to be earning £17,458 today, however the freeze and the one percent pay rise this year mean they are now earning just £15,150. That is effectively a reduction of £2,304 in the wages that they might have expected without the pay freeze. This sort of saving multiplied across the whole of the public sector has saved the government billions and billions of pounds.

Earlier in the week nurses and midwives staged their first strike in over thirty years by nurses and the first ever by midwives since they formed a professional body in 1881.Such is the level of feeling that they have been treated badly by the current Conservative Government. They took this action because Nasty Party rejected an across-the-board one percent pay increase that was recommended by an independent pay review body, which was made worse by the fact that the Members of Parliament have been awarded a pay rise of some 10% by their professional body. This the MP's have accepted, plus an additional one percent they are due in April. It seems there is one rule for some public servants while the mainstream public workers have to suffer.

Today thousands of people march for better wages as unions demonstrate across Britain under the slogan "Britain needs a pay rise" to bring awareness to the drop in living that many in the public sector have had to deal with over recent years, together with those in the failing industries and retail in the private sector.  He is the story of one of them that was on the BBC news website today:

Mick Bowman a 56 year old mental health social worker told his story, he hasn't had a pay rise for four years, so with the cost of living rising that's a very substantial pay cut. Over those four years his workload has increased and his job has become more stressful as a result. To get by he relies at the end of every month on his credit card to by food and hasn't had a holiday in three years. Like many on the match he is angry and believes it is time to invest more in the public sector to get people in to a position where they spend more and pay more taxes to the government.

As we run up to the election this is going to be a battle that goes on and on between the uncaring Nasty Party, who have cut services to the old, the disabled and the vulnerable, and the Trade Unions will go on and on. 

It about time this government told the truth and dropped the lie about about being the compassionate Conservatives, for there nothing compassionate about the fact they are going to now start freezing benefits affecting millions of working people in the UK if they are return to office after the elections in may next year. They care about one thing power and money and their friends in high places.