Croke Park II preliminary Talks started today

Dreamertime wrote: »

Do you really think cutting my wages from €382 a week to € 350 a week will get more productivity out of me?

Here's how it works in the real world . . . Productivity is managed seperately to salary . . If your productivity is unacceptable you will be given x amount of time to improve and if you dont show an improvement you will be removed from your position . . I will then hire someone else at the market rate who can achieve an acceptable level of productivity. .

That may sound harsh to those in the public sector but that is how the private sector works every day . . You pay a fair (market) salary and you demand an acceptable level of performance . . The fact that such concepts are alien to the public sector is a big part of the problem. .

Uriel. wrote: »

It's not so much that the suggestion might not equal the actual savings it's more a case of the workability and realism of the suggestion.

For example. On fire chiefs for example. Say there's 75 in the country and the suggestion to save a few million a year is to sack 70 of them. That's hardly workable is it?

Why Northern Ireland has 1 chief fire officers and 2 senior assistant chief fire officers, while Republic has 29 chief fire officers and 173 senior assistant chief fire officers? What is reason to hide useless local authorities bureaucracy in critical sector and pay them a fortune?

MMAGirl wrote: »

You get a nice pension in the private sector if you negotiate it. You are worth what you can negotiate. No more no less, whether you do it personally or through a union. Don't negotiate it and you won't get it.

Negotiation won't change anything because DB pension are too expensive for private sector. Only 200,000 private sector workers have it and 90% of their pension plans already in trouble. If PS workers managed effectively privatize public sector and enjoy monopoly, nearly all private sector workers have to work in competitive environment and their employers cannot afford such luxury.

Count Dooku wrote: »

no, only with one month notice

Presumably as public sector workers they can't be made redundant though can they?

Count Dooku wrote: »

My apologies, I forgot about Labour court decision that they have jobs for life. Then cuts, cuts, cuts

Which goes back to my original point, it's all well and good for subsectors in the public sector to claim they can make savings, but it has to be realistic savings. Now, in fairness, I haven't seen the proposal being made by the firefighters so I don't know exactly what they are proposing.

hallelujajordan wrote: »

The reality is that regardless of how big or small the hole in the government finances is we have a public sector that is 1) significantly overstaffed 2) significantly over-paid and 3) has no proper mechanisms in place to manage / reward performance and to ensure that only those workers who contribute and add value continue to exist in their roles.

To your first point, I'd like to see some evidence/links to support your statement that the PS is significantly overstaffed without which it appears baseless. A 2009 OECD survey of percentages employed in the area indicates otherwise(link below). While having higher numbers than Germany, Ireland has a significantly lower percentage of PS than Nordic countries - Ireland appears to be average in this respect. And the numbers in the PS in Ireland have fallen since the survey.

http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/9789264075061-en/05/01/g09-01.html?itemId=/content/chapter/9789264061651-13-en


On your second point, while I agree that on average the PS is probably overpaid to a greater or lesser degree depending on which analysis you choose, averages by their nature hide a multitude. I've said this before (quite some time ago) but we need a non-opaque benchmarking excercise where it can be clearly demonstrated where the disparities are and then correct them rather than any one size fits all Croke Park agreement. This could lead to some rises as well as drops in salaries depending upon grade, experience and job. The problem with this is the political difficulty in addressing it as there is evidence to suggest that it's the lower paid (who are larger in number) who are possibly overpaid in comparison to privates sector norms.

Your third point has some validity. While there are such mechanisms in place unfortunately unions seek to protect underperformers along with everyone else they represent. Where underperformance exists (and normal analysis indicates that this is probably less than 10% of workers) it should be far simpler for management to take action up to and including dismissal without union interference. This would be to the benefit of taxpayers, each organisation as a whole, and the colleagues of the underperformer who take up the slack.

Bumski wrote: »

To your first point, I'd like to see some evidence/links to support your statement that the PS is significantly overstaffed without which it appears baseless. A 2009 OECD survey of percentages employed in the area indicates otherwise(link below). While having higher numbers than Germany, Ireland has a significantly lower percentage of PS than Nordic countries - Ireland appears to be average in this respect. And the numbers in the PS in Ireland have fallen since the survey.

http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/9789264075061-en/05/01/g09-01.html?itemId=/content/chapter/9789264061651-13-en

As someone who has spent a signigicant amount of time living and working in Sweden, you can't really compare Ireland (or many other countries) to the Nordic countries. The government is involved in so many aspects of life in Sweden that it really is a world apart from Ireland.

In a normal workplace such an attitude would be met with a "step into my office" response from management.

There are many PS workplaces where people are allowed do a modest amount of work, the place being kept together by those who do more. They can simply drop their performance to the level of the wasters.

Dreamertime wrote: »

You can dress a pig up in frills and tassles, its still a pig

You can dress or undress a pay cut, but its still coming.

Vizzy wrote: »

I'm actually on your side on this,but do you genuinely believe that there is not €20m of tax(and more particularly Welfare Fraud going on) ?

Seriously ?

Of course there is - do you know how much money Revenue already recovers through its audit & compliance work?

520m in 2011, up about 30m on the previous year.

The problem is its very difficult to forecast how much money the Revenue audit programme is going to recover - think about it logically. They wouldn't need to do audits if they knew how much the tax was, they could just make assessments.

Ironically, paycuts and whatever other measures go on the table now, will force some of Revenue's best staff back out to the private sector - that could cost the exchequer any amount of money.

My point is, it's easy to tell Josephine Feehily that you want Revenue to recover another 20m, but unless you've got some ideas about where to find it, you're talking pie in the sky.