Civil Service keeping their "privilege days": reform will have to be forced

RichieC · 21-03-2011 10:37PM

The Waltzing Consumer wrote: »

Ah yes, I loved the times when everyone who was not in the public service was a builder. Even all the children were builders. :rolleyes:

Good times indeed.

RichieC · 21-03-2011 10:38PM

Gunsfortoys wrote: »

Funny that, they actually worked for their living?,
They weren't protected by unions or took money from state coffers?

Completely stupid and irrelevant argument.

I used to be fking run off my feet in the CS...

You haven't a fking clue what you're talking about, you have an opinion that's been spoon fed to you by the media.

The Waltzing Consumer · 21-03-2011 10:40PM

No, the civil service should keep these extra days

RichieC wrote: »

I used to be fking run off my feet in the CS...

You haven't a fking clue what you're talking about, you have an opinion that's been spoon fed to you by the media.

And you are certainly not doing any of your CS colleagues any favour by arguing in such an arrogant and abusive way. Think before you type.

RichieC · 21-03-2011 10:42PM

The Waltzing Consumer wrote: »

And you are certainly not doing any of your CS colleagues any favour by arguing in such an arrogant and abusive way. Think before you type.

yak yak herp derp.

Gunsfortoys · 21-03-2011 10:42PM

No, the civil service should keep these extra days

RichieC wrote: »

I used to be fking run off my feet in the CS...

You haven't a fking clue what you're talking about, you have an opinion that's been spoon fed to you by the media.

No it hasn't, the figures speak for themselves.

I actually do know what I am talking about, I have known enough of the penpushers and office dwellers of the service through my profession over the years. Their sense of entitlement is quite disturbing.

I am certain that money would be better put towards other areas of care.

The Waltzing Consumer · 21-03-2011 10:44PM

No, the civil service should keep these extra days

RichieC wrote: »

yak yak herp derp.

Classy. Good talk, good talk. :rolleyes:

Side Show Bob · 21-03-2011 10:45PM

No, the civil service should keep these extra days

The CS should have the two days in question removed without delay.
its a disgrace the way they behave, about 20 more days holiday should also be removed ASAP!

RichieC · 21-03-2011 10:46PM

Gunsfortoys wrote: »

No it hasn't, the figures speak for themselves.

I actually do know what I am talking about, I have known enough of the penpushers and office dwellers of the service through my profession over the years. Their sense of entitlement is quite disturbing.

I am certain that money would be better put towards other areas of care.

You act like they're a different race of people, anyone could have gone in and tried to join the CS.

RichieC · 21-03-2011 10:48PM

The Waltzing Consumer wrote: »

Classy. Good talk, good talk. :rolleyes:

It's a long Long time since I've realised there's no point reasoning with sour grapes.

Gunsfortoys · 21-03-2011 10:48PM

No, the civil service should keep these extra days

RichieC wrote: »

You act like they're a different race of people, anyone could have gone in and tried to join the CS.

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Ronin247 · 21-03-2011 10:55PM

Yakult wrote: »

I would like who ever voted no to state why they shouldnt be abolished?

that should make for good reading!!

I am not nor was I ever a civil servant,nor am I as eloquent as a lot of posters but I will try to explain why I voted no.

The 2 "priviledge days" are part and parcel of the pay and conditions package that people signed up for when they took the job,in a recession all employers will try and break down the conditions of the working man/woman.
If we stand idly by while other workers have enforced changes to the agreed contracts then eventually we all end up working for minimum wage with free overtime thrown in.
If the government want reductions then bring in enforced redundancy for the excess staff.

Its amazing that we want our fellow workers brought down while our leaders pay off the 100billion or so gambling debts of French and German banks with our tax money.They give away 10 s of billions of our oil and gas to FOREIGN multi nationals and we begrudge our fellow Irishman a couple of legitimate days off..Shame on us,I wish we had balls as a nation.

21-03-2011 11:04PM

Ronin247 wrote: »

I am not nor was I ever a civil servant,nor am I as eloquent as a lot of posters but I will try to explain why I voted no.

The 2 "priviledge days" are part and parcel of the pay and conditions package that people signed up for when they took the job,in a recession all employers will try and break down the conditions of the working man/woman.
If we stand idly by while other workers have enforced changes to the agreed contracts then eventually we all end up working for minimum wage with free overtime thrown in.
If the government want reductions then bring in enforced redundancy for the excess staff.

Its amazing that we want our fellow workers brought down while our leaders pay off the 100billion or so gambling debts of French and German banks with our tax money.They give away 10 s of billions of our oil and gas to FOREIGN multi nationals and we begrudge our fellow Irishman a couple of legitimate days off..Shame on us,I wish we had balls as a nation.

Ronin after 4 years of this crap i can honestly say that is the most sensible and reasonable post i have read on the subject.

lightangel · 22-03-2011 02:22PM

No, the civil service should keep these extra days

Us lesser citizens feel duped by this arrangement more because the value for money of these " servants if the state" doesn't match up. This all adds insult to injury. I'm ashamed to be Irish in this instance.

Sam Vimes · 22-03-2011 03:01PM

Ronin247 wrote: »

I am not nor was I ever a civil servant,nor am I as eloquent as a lot of posters but I will try to explain why I voted no.

The 2 "priviledge days" are part and parcel of the pay and conditions package that people signed up for when they took the job,in a recession all employers will try and break down the conditions of the working man/woman.
If we stand idly by while other workers have enforced changes to the agreed contracts then eventually we all end up working for minimum wage with free overtime thrown in.
If the government want reductions then bring in enforced redundancy for the excess staff.

Its amazing that we want our fellow workers brought down while our leaders pay off the 100billion or so gambling debts of French and German banks with our tax money.They give away 10 s of billions of our oil and gas to FOREIGN multi nationals and we begrudge our fellow Irishman a couple of legitimate days off..Shame on us,I wish we had balls as a nation.

The government tried to take away a holiday that was granted to celebrate the birthday of of a foreign monarch who's been dead for 100 years and the unions fought against it. What do you think would happen if there were mass enforced redundancies?

Also, since you're totally against the idea that a company should cut back pay and conditions in the bad times, I presume that you're also against them improving them in the good times? After all, why should the staff share in the good times if they refuse to share in the bad?

sdanseo · 22-03-2011 03:22PM

My dad said it best a while back.

If you're going to cut the public service budget, you're going to cut public services.

It's all very well to say ah sure we can reduce civil service payroll bill by x amount by sacking x workers, or reduce their holidays to the bare minimum, reduce the lunch break pay to zero, etc etc. If you sack people, less work gets done. If you reduce people's renumeration, they become less incentivised to be productive. It's simple maths.

The same people moaning about civil servants getting two extra days' holidays will be the same ones who'll moan when the phone goes unanswered.

The same people arguing that they should sack 10,000 public servants will be the same ones moaning when Gardaí don't arrive till four hours after their house is burgled.

There are of course exceptions to the rule. Some areas of the public service are overstaffed and that's a seperate issue. The HSE, for example, seems to have more managers than nurses and doctors put together. That's a seperate issue.

People are never happy. Begrudgers, get over yourselves.

The Waltzing Consumer · 22-03-2011 03:37PM

No, the civil service should keep these extra days

sdonn wrote: »

My dad said it best a while back.

If you're going to cut the public service budget, you're going to cut public services.

It's all very well to say ah sure we can reduce civil service payroll bill by x amount by sacking x workers, or reduce their holidays to the bare minimum, reduce the lunch break pay to zero, etc etc. If you sack people, less work gets done. If you reduce people's renumeration, they become less incentivised to be productive. It's simple maths.

The same people moaning about civil servants getting two extra days' holidays will be the same ones who'll moan when the phone goes unanswered.

The same people arguing that they should sack 10,000 public servants will be the same ones moaning when Gardaí don't arrive till four hours after their house is burgled.

There are of course exceptions to the rule. Some areas of the public service are overstaffed and that's a seperate issue. The HSE, for example, seems to have more managers than nurses and doctors put together. That's a seperate issue.

People are never happy. Begrudgers, get over yourselves.

In other words, there are plenty of examples to show that all you have written here is not accurate and can be proved wrong

Let me take another wild guess, your father works or has worked in the public service. In case you did not notice, even in the boom times with no cuts and increases across the board, the public service still did not answer phones and Gardai still had a great reputation of taking hours to arrive. Your whole argument is lazy and the premise is that cuts means bad quality in service, except in celtic tiger Ireland, no cuts and plenty of perks and salary increases meant bad quality in service. They hired more people, paid more, gave more perks and the public service was awful. You would have to be pretty indoctrinated in the public service to try defend the "quality" of work done.

Sam Vimes · 22-03-2011 04:16PM

sdonn wrote: »

My dad said it best a while back.

If you're going to cut the public service budget, you're going to cut public services.

It's all very well to say ah sure we can reduce civil service payroll bill by x amount by sacking x workers, or reduce their holidays to the bare minimum, reduce the lunch break pay to zero, etc etc. If you sack people, less work gets done. If you reduce people's renumeration, they become less incentivised to be productive. It's simple maths.

The same people moaning about civil servants getting two extra days' holidays will be the same ones who'll moan when the phone goes unanswered.

The same people arguing that they should sack 10,000 public servants will be the same ones moaning when Gardaí don't arrive till four hours after their house is burgled.

There are of course exceptions to the rule. Some areas of the public service are overstaffed and that's a seperate issue. The HSE, for example, seems to have more managers than nurses and doctors put together. That's a seperate issue.

People are never happy. Begrudgers, get over yourselves.

The simple maths here is that we can't afford the public service in its current form. If we have to take a hit on service so that we don't have to borrow money at punitive rates to pay for it then so be it

And as you point out there are plenty of areas where we could bring in cut backs with no effect on service.

gazzer · 22-03-2011 04:50PM

Side Show Bob wrote: »

The CS should have the two days in question removed without delay.
its a disgrace the way they behave, about 20 more days holiday should also be removed ASAP!

You do realise that if 20 more days were to be removed from CS staff they would have NO leave. The annual leave allowance for CO's in the CS (which make up the vast majority of the CS) is 20 days.

sdanseo · 22-03-2011 04:57PM

Sam Vimes wrote: »

And as you point out there are plenty of areas where we could bring in cut backs with no effect on service.

And therein lies the problem. While cutting out useless jobs is one thing, most of the wage cuts and removal of perks or benefits are across the board. They're cutting renumeration from evryone in the public service to pay for the inefficiencies of bodies like the HSE.

Yes, my Dad was a civil servant, and luckily he was there long enough that he was able to absorb pay cuts while still being quite comfortable. In fact, he was offered early retirement to avoid an 8% pay cut, took it and then Lenihan stabbed him and a number of others in the back and took the 8% off the state pension anyway.

I'm as angry at the powers that be as the rest are but there is an assumption that public servants are total layabouts who scrounge off the state and just take, take take while everyone else suffers. That's not the case. My mother for example, works in a semi-state and is roughly €400 a month down on this time in 2006. That's over 30% of her after tax pay gone when you add up all the different deductions. To the extent that if I wasn't earning money, we'd probably be in the red (my sub-€15k income was 100% disposable until the USC, thank fúck). Yet she's still just as productive and the PS is just as wasteful as it always has been.

I know there are private sector jobs in exactly the same or worse situations - but the idea that the PS is a guarenteed cash cow for all its luck members is absolute horseshít.

Sam Vimes · 22-03-2011 06:31PM

sdonn wrote: »

And therein lies the problem. While cutting out useless jobs is one thing, most of the wage cuts and removal of perks or benefits are across the board. They're cutting renumeration from evryone in the public service to pay for the inefficiencies of bodies like the HSE.

Yes, my Dad was a civil servant, and luckily he was there long enough that he was able to absorb pay cuts while still being quite comfortable. In fact, he was offered early retirement to avoid an 8% pay cut, took it and then Lenihan stabbed him and a number of others in the back and took the 8% off the state pension anyway.

I'm as angry at the powers that be as the rest are but there is an assumption that public servants are total layabouts who scrounge off the state and just take, take take while everyone else suffers. That's not the case. My mother for example, works in a semi-state and is roughly €400 a month down on this time in 2006. That's over 30% of her after tax pay gone when you add up all the different deductions. To the extent that if I wasn't earning money, we'd probably be in the red (my sub-€15k income was 100% disposable until the USC, thank fúck). Yet she's still just as productive and the PS is just as wasteful as it always has been.

I know there are private sector jobs in exactly the same or worse situations - but the idea that the PS is a guarenteed cash cow for all its luck members is absolute horseshít. .

I don't know anyone who thinks the entire public sector are layabouts, I know there are parts that work very hard but equally there are parts that don't. If you want the government to target the inefficient parts of the sector it's not the government you need to complain to, it's the unions who protect the 'layouts' to the detriment of everyone in the country, including those parts of the public sector who work hard. Just look at what's happened here; the government tried to take away a perk that should have been taken away 100 years ago and that only about 10% of the public sector get and they couldn't do it because of the unions.

Having said that, I don't think you're grasping the scale of the problem. Yes there are inefficient parts of the public sector that need to be tackled but even if we removed all of the inefficiencies we still wouldn't be able to afford to pay for it. We need to remove the inefficiencies and cut pay and conditions to bring it back down to a level that we can afford. If that means worse services then we'll just have to put up with it and if the staff feel that it's not fair then tough, they can take their chances in the private sector if they feel that their job isn't paying them what they're worth. At the end of the day I don't really care how the public sector reduces its costs to an affordable level but it has to be done one way or another and no argument about how unfair it is or how hard some of the staff work is going to change that

sdanseo · 22-03-2011 07:37PM

Sam Vimes wrote: »

I don't know anyone who thinks the entire public sector are layabouts, I know there are parts that work very hard but equally there are parts that don't. If you want the government to target the inefficient parts of the sector it's not the government you need to complain to, it's the unions who protect the 'layouts' to the detriment of everyone in the country, including those parts of the public sector who work hard. Just look at what's happened here; the government tried to take away a perk that should have been taken away 100 years ago and that only about 10% of the public sector get and they couldn't do it because of the unions.

Having said that, I don't think you're grasping the scale of the problem. Yes there are inefficient parts of the public sector that need to be tackled but even if we removed all of the inefficiencies we still wouldn't be able to afford to pay for it. We need to remove the inefficiencies and cut pay and conditions to bring it back down to a level that we can afford. If that means worse services then we'll just have to put up with it and if the staff feel that it's not fair then tough, they can take their chances in the private sector if they feel that their job isn't paying them what they're worth. At the end of the day I don't really care how the public sector reduces its costs to an affordable level but it has to be done one way or another and no argument about how unfair it is or how hard some of the staff work is going to change that

I agree about the unions. They've taken collective bargaining to mean collective hostage-holding. CIE, DAA, HSE all spring to mind. I worked in the DAA myself and you are all but forced to join the union. Workers are stupendously unproductive and any even minor change in anything is instinctively pounced on and eliminated by union reps. Changing from Public to quasi-quango as I call it (its current state) had no difference whatsoever. Trying not to be biased by my parent's situation however; my main reason for postiing was to make out that - again any bias aside - I've never encountered it having been in both their places of work countless times nor heard any such stories form them, and therefore the problems that are serious in the large areas of the public service and thus costing us huge amounts of money are NOT prevalent in every area. Whereas I have encountered it in the much larger organisations I mention. It also seems to trend that the more mundane the tasks carried out - or more importantly, the lower the pay grade - the more indignant the staff will be about any extra work or responsibility without something in return. The smaller quangos seem to work OK because they generally don't have as much union oomph, so to speak. More than that though, they tend to have higher proportions of higher-paid jobs that don't includfe manual labour or dealing with the public and pay better.

As for mass sackings - I'm all for draconian measures given the scale of the problem but any stupidly drastic measures will only have far-reaching consequences in terms of productivity and in terms of union issues. That shouldn't be the way (although workers should stand up for themselves). That said, the particular bodies that are costing us huge amounts of money in return for silly, shoddy, and simply not enough work done need to be isolated and taken apart. The above mentioned bodies are just examples of where I've come across staff doing absolutely nothing for extended periods of time - they need to do some work, be deployed where they are needed or be sacked. Voulantary redundancy is a useless tool unless you can redeploy the people who's job description is to sit on a stool watching planes or trains all day to fill the position that becomes vacant - in a lot of cases it will be senior managers retiring and you'll be trying to promote someone who was pushing trolleys or stamoing tickets. That doesn't work. Another issue too is that with any redundancies is that you may get rid of 5,000 people who are simply surplus to requirements, but end up with 300,000 who decide to work to rule or walk out. Is it worth the hassle or the expense in the long run?

Capt'n Midnight · 23-03-2011 12:26AM

sollar wrote: »

No they shouldn't be abolished. Even now public servants get less annual leave days than most other european countries barr the UK.

Its much ado about nothing.

They get 50% more annual leave days then much of the private sector [on the news about the 31 days]

also can civil servants still use up all their untaken sick days ??

Capt'n Midnight · 23-03-2011 12:40AM

sdonn wrote: »

My dad said it best a while back.

If you're going to cut the public service budget, you're going to cut public services.

Please tell us all about the extra services provided by the glut of new hires by the last government

The same people moaning about civil servants getting two extra days' holidays will be the same ones who'll moan when the phone goes unanswered.

You say that as if the someone actually answers the phone in Social Welfare in Clondalkin

The same people arguing that they should sack 10,000 public servants will be the same ones moaning when Gardaí don't arrive till four hours after their house is burgled.

I don't think anyone would equate the constant understaffing of the Gardaí (barely enough hires to cater with "natural wastage") with the overstaffing of the civil service

ChunkyLover_53 · 23-03-2011 12:47AM

FFS this is typical, I have never got any of these Privilige Days.

Can I back date them and take them in bulk?

:pac:

Civil Service keeping their "privilege days": reform will have to be forced

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