Cycling UK Forum

Trigger wrote:The propaganda seems to have paid off anyway, on the evidence of this thread at least. No doubt most other red-top-reading knuckle draggers now think bin men are on £30k a year and are looking to retire at 50 with a golden handshake plus a huge pension. Wise up.

Mawsley wrote:Quite.

or more truthfully, not quite. bin men are employed by private companies who have to bid against each other to secure the contract with the LA. they're not public sector employess but work in a competitive industry.

I would argue that even the gold plated pensions aren't as great as everyone is making out. at the end of the day its a pension based on a fiat currency that can and will be abused by the state at some point, eroding it's value. Even with an inflation link, the link gets fiddled by stealth so that the increase is less than actual inflation. Far too risky to throw all your pension in one pot over decades when the state has access to it.

Manage your own and spread the risk.


I'm enjoying watching the division widen between state and private employees though. The resentment will create an entertaining fight when the strikes kick off. Then the state's offer will be taken away and an even nastier offer will replace it when they threaten more strikes, then public opinion will probably decide the outcome eventually if the unions haven't been financially starved already.

Like in the 80s it will be a battle of hearts and minds, as well as a fanancial tug of war between the 2 sides, but the union bosses don't seem to have noticed that the composition of the 2 sides has changed considerably. Its no longer middle class vs working class, but private sector vs public sector. On the financial front, the unions are already severely on the backfoot due to their relatively tiny membership base and big debts. On the leverage front, the unoins no longer have the power they used to, and its probably only the teachers that pack a punch now - but their case for striking is probably the weakest in the public's mind.


Oh and the Daily Mash has a good summary - http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/soci ... 106143943/

"You'll know they are on strike because they will be wearing a big badge that reads 'my union says I'm special'.

"After spending their allotted 20 minutes on the picket line they will then break for a three-hour encounter session on Placard Sensitivity."

Nutsey wrote:After spending their allotted 20 minutes on the picket line

quite. there's hundreds of people working in local government - i'll bet the picket line is manned by around a dozen. i hope the weather's good for the rest of you having a day off

I dispute the assertion that public sector employees are a highly qualified elite. Top civil servants, judges, senior doctors etc. yes, but they are minority. In addition there are armies of poorly qualified, inefficient, ineffective and quite frankly often incompetent clerical workers, need I cite the Home Office, NHS administration, local authorities etc. Their advantagous pension arrangements are unfair, unwarranted, undeserved and unaffordable.
Economically the country pays its way through export earnings, the few engaged in exporting have to pay for the rest of us, public sector or private (eg. hairdresser, plumber, barrister etc.). The fiscal drag imposed by the public sector and social security upon the wealth creating part of the economy is unsustainable. Something has to give, either the country will fail like Greece or fiscal drag will have to be reduced. Hence economies are necessary, this includes public sector pension arrangements.

andrewk wrote:I dispute the assertion that public sector employees are a highly qualified elite. Top civil servants, judges, senior doctors etc. yes, but they are minority. In addition there are armies of poorly qualified, inefficient, ineffective and quite frankly often incompetent clerical workers, need I cite the Home Office, NHS administration, local authorities etc. Their advantagous pension arrangements are unfair, unwarranted, undeserved and unaffordable.
Economically the country pays its way through export earnings, the few engaged in exporting have to pay for the rest of us, public sector or private (eg. hairdresser, plumber, barrister etc.). The fiscal drag imposed by the public sector and social security upon the wealth creating part of the economy is unsustainable. Something has to give, either the country will fail like Greece or fiscal drag will have to be reduced. Hence economies are necessary, this includes public sector pension arrangements.

Actually compared with Central Government, local authorities are highly efficient. Many are classed as "excellent" or "very good" unlike most if not all Government Departments.
That's no reason of course for local government officers or even civil servants to have pensions which are unfair, unaffordable, unsustainable and uneconomic.
I wish the Government had taken action about 10 years ago to put private sector defined pensions on a sustainable footing as they are now belatedly doing with public sector pensions.
Perhaps in another 10 years they'll get round to putting MPs pensions onto a fair and sustainable basis.
jonty

When Mr Cameron said "We are all in this together",

I hope everybody thought it was as funny as he did!

My next door neighbour, Mark, works for our local council.
He's a bin man. Our council still has it's own bin lorries.
Nice man, looks after his family.
Seems to be a good dad to the kids.

Would some one explain why I, my wife, daughter and son should have to work until 66 so he can retire at 60!
Why we have to work an extra 6 years to fund his pension at 60!
Thats the bottom line for me!

LANDSURFER74 wrote:My next door neighbour, Mark, works for our local council.
He's a bin man. Our council still has it's own bin lorries.
Nice man, looks after his family.
Seems to be a good dad to the kids.

Would some one explain why I, my wife, daughter and son should have to work until 66 so he can retire at 60!
Why we have to work an extra 6 years to fund his pension at 60!
Thats the bottom line for me!

The retirement age for council workers is 65. It changed a few years ago...it's set to change again
Unless he has put in a whole lifetime at the council, and is willing to take a substantial hit to his pension then it is unlikely that he will retire at 60.
There's a lot of misinformation out there...

fatboy wrote:

Jonty wrote: Also even by the late 1990s many schemes were in surplus; however, the Government, through the taxation system, stopped pension funds from building up larger surpluses - in fact the surpluses were such that Gordon Brown levied a £5b a year "stealth tax" on pension fund income.
If early measures had been taken to 1) increase retirement dates 2) increase employee contributions 3) allow pension funds to build up very substantial reserves in case the stock exchange took a nosedive or stayed static over several years (which is what happened) and 4) pension fund dividends hadn't been raided, many private sector final salary schemes would be operating today and the pressure to change public sector schemes would not be so great.

Now the defecits are such as to bring companies to the brink. I used to work for Nortel (the Canadian telecoms company) whose pension deficits in the UK, US and Canada were the straws that broke the camel's back; incidently the pension protection fund or PPF (to which 20 years of my pension has gone into) docks the pension immediately by 90% and imposes a cap and I'm glad that it's there however will it exist by the time I need to draw it? A few more big companies going bankrupt could topple the whole fund (Nortel is the single biggest pension fund to date to go into PPF) and that will mean hundreds of thousands of people loosing pensions that they paid for.

Anyhow I think that the sums of the public sector pensions don't add up in just the same way that final salary company schemes don't add up and therefore reform is necessary and inevitable.

Many former private sector workers are in this position - their fund has gone bust and they only get a small percentage of what they were expecting. Of course this has never happened to public sector workers as their pensions are underwritten by the great British taxpayer.
Or at least that is the case but wether it will continue is another matter. If the economic situation deteriorates further I expect that the current public sector pension offer will be withdrawn and existing public sector pensioners given a severe "haircut" such as added years and index linking since date of retirement being withdrawn.
If things get difficult the Government can pass a law and do what it likes in the national interest.
During the last World War, Churchill was instrumental in getting a law passed which basically said the Government can do anything in the national interest. Land was acquired without compensation for air fields, factories were acquired without compensation to make armaments and farms were taken away from farmers if they were considered inefficient.
That's what I call decisive government.
jonty

andrewk wrote: .... the wealth creating part of the economy ....

A huge part of the considerable wealth of this country is still in the hands of a relatively few people. (As an aside, it's arguably the people in the public sector who prevent them from being rounded up in the modern equivalent of the tumbrils. There skill has been to appear to move towards a more equitable distribution of the £££ while actually doing it on tick. With regard to creating further wealth, the big anomaly of the broadly capitalist sytem we use, is that somebody has to buy the stuff which is made. For that they need money which nobody likes shelling out, especially in the 21C when there are people on the other side of the planet who will do the work for peanuts - for the moment or least.

I've no doubt that this country is heading for a series of relegations in the international league, but I don't think that pensions are high on the list of causes and to the extent that they are, things are not really so much different now from when these commitments were made.

As far as the recent so-called downturn goes, I recently read an explanation which seems to go to the heart of it. "People lent money they hadn't got to people who could never pay it back." The only public sector input to that mess was in not keeping a sufficient grip on the soi-disant "wealth creators".

thirdcrank wrote:

andrewk wrote: .... the wealth creating part of the economy ....

With regard to creating further wealth, the big anomaly of the broadly capitalist sytem we use, is that somebody has to buy the stuff which is made. For that they need money which nobody likes shelling out, especially in the 21C when there are people on the other side of the planet who will do the work for peanuts - for the moment or least.

I've no doubt that this country is heading for a series of relegations in the international league, but I don't think that pensions are high on the list of causes and to the extent that they are, things are not really so much different now from when these commitments were made.

As far as the recent so-called downturn goes, I recently read an explanation which seems to go to the heart of it. "People lent money they hadn't got to people who could never pay it back." The only public sector input to that mess was in not keeping a sufficient grip on the soi-disant "wealth creators".

1. Ultimately we have to export to pay our way, cars, armaments, TV programmes, banking services it matters not as long as we can get foreign customers to pay for it. Currently depressed domestic demand doesn't change that.
2. Things now are VERY different from when public service pensions were set up:
-People are living longer making pensions commitments more expensive.
-The currently bloated public sector is a far greater proportion of the workforce.
-The country is almost insolvent.
-Private sector pension funds have been decimated by Brown's tax grab leading to an imbalance between private and public sector provision. Why should private sector workers have to pay for a superior public sector pension provision than that they can themselves enjoy.
3. The public sector IS one of the principal reasons why the UK economy is in far worse shape than our competitors' eg. France, Germany, Holland etc. We are in such comparatively bad shape exactly because of excessive public expenditure, principally social security and the public sector payroll.

andrewk wrote: We are in such comparatively bad shape exactly because of excessive public expenditure, principally social security and the public sector payroll.

Would we still be in such a mess if the bail-out money was repaid with interest tomorrow?

Trigger wrote:

andrewk wrote: We are in such comparatively bad shape exactly because of excessive public expenditure, principally social security and the public sector payroll.

Would we still be in such a mess if the bail-out money was repaid with interest tomorrow?

In short: Yes.

Whereas the absolute deficit includes bank bail out money which will (hopefully) return with profit this only affects the structural deficit to the extent of interest on bail out funds. The structural deficit, even without bail out funding interest is unsustainably high. It must be reduced. There are only two ways: increase tax or cut expenditure. The UK tax burden is already massively too high.

andrewk

I understand the US, which is generally seen as the embodiment of everything you are prescribing, has gone from bank rolling the world to being one of its biggest debtors. How did that come about?

andrewk wrote:

Trigger wrote:

andrewk wrote: We are in such comparatively bad shape exactly because of excessive public expenditure, principally social security and the public sector payroll.

Would we still be in such a mess if the bail-out money was repaid with interest tomorrow?

In short: Yes.

Whereas the absolute deficit includes bank bail out money which will (hopefully) return with profit this only affects the structural deficit to the extent of interest on bail out funds. The structural deficit, even without bail out funding interest is unsustainably high. It must be reduced. There are only two ways: increase tax or cut expenditure. The UK tax burden is already massively too high.

So if Labour inherited an amazing Tory economy in '97 when spending was 41% of GDP, and that remained the same until '08 (bail-out money) why is 41% all of a sudden too much?

Or is it a case of 41% is OK so long as it goes into the correct pockets?