Public VS Private sector discussion

[eek]

Have no clue if such a debate exists here - so what do you think about the pubic sector then? Should teachers get less pay to help states, countries etc deal with their fiscal troubles, deficits and so forth?

Public servants



White collar exec lol



A mate from school is a CEO in a mid sized insurance company; he's got an exec MBA and speaks 3 languages fluently. Every time we go out for drinkies - he brings this on. He hates their guts basically.

What d'you reckon? It's a controversial debate nonetheless; however if mods think it's inappropriate here - then I'm sure they'll deal with it accordingly.

[Wendigo]

After having spent most of my working life in the private sector I was made redundant a few years back and got a job in the public sector.
Trust me the pay at my level is nothing to write home about but it's a job. It's interference by HMG changing rules and regs so often over time and generating a massive backlog of queries that created my job. Joined up thinking ..... nice idea.

It's the top levels that need attention in ALL areas public and private. Way too many people are being paid wages that cannot be justified by anyone but their peers.
I work with some hard working people and some time servers who do the bare minimum, but it was the same in my last job. The public sector is always an easy target.

[begos]

Republican Governor Walker of Wisconsin (and several other Republican governors) are using their states' fiscal difficulties as an excuse for concerted efforts to break public sector unions. Wisconsin's public sector unions have already capitulated to all of Walker's economic demands, but he refuses to take 'yes' for an answer. Instead, he persists in his efforts to strip them of all their existing collective bargaining rights. Opponents to Walker have demonstrated (entirely non-violently) in and outside the state house for more than a week.

Walker engaged in a 20 minute conversation last week with a telephone caller who impersonated billionaire David Koch. The Koch brothers donated several hundred thousand dollars to Walker and to pro-Walker advertising campaigns in 2010. (Koch and his brother have also spent enormous sums in the last few years creating and financing various sham political organizations that they've used to funnel money to Republican causes and politicians, to run advertising campaigns opposed to Democrats and liberal causes, and to underwrite the majority of "Teabagger movement" costs that weren't already being supplied directly by Fox News.)

Walker divulged to his "patron" several of the falsehoods and tactics that he was trying to employ to mislead Wisconsin Senate Democrats and trick them into returning to the statehouse, so that he could obtain a quorum in the senate and ram through the bill designed to destroy the unions. He also divulged that he and his underlings had actively considered, but decided against, planting thugs among the demonstrators to instigate violence.

By mere coincidence, Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin have just introduced a bill in the legislature that is designed to make it illegal to make prank calls like the one that caused so much embarrassment to the governor.

Headline, excerpt, and link from the 12/28/2011 edition of The Badger Herald (of Madison, WI):

Bill circulating in Legislature to end spoof calls
Although representatives deny any connection to the recent prank call on the governor, two legislators began circulating a bill Monday that would ban making trick calls masking the caller’s true identity...

Although the authors of the bill denied any relationship, the bill’s circulation comes shortly after blogger Ian Murphy’s prank call to Gov. Scott Walker last week. Murphy impersonated billionaire Republican donor David Koch in the call.
http://badgerherald.com/news/2011/02...lating_in_.php

Union membership in this country is at the lowest point it has been for over fifty years. In fact, it was probably at its highest point ever during the Eisenhower administration. The irony is simply immense when you consider that today's social conservatives pine longingly for the prosperity and social stability of that bygone era, but fail to recognize that much of that was made possible by the fact that union workers were empowered to share in, and contribute to, the creation of the strong middle class that was at its heart.

Since the inception of Reaganomics, the rich have grown richer and the middle class has dwindled -- and unions have grown weaker. But even as the power of unions has decreased, the anti-union rhetoric of the Republicans has continued to grow.

Nearly every Republican denounced the Obama administration's efforts to save the Big Three automakers and predicted that the bailout would result in utter failure. Luckily, it has succeeded better than could have been hoped for and millions of jobs were saved. But it was incredible (to me at least) to see that the Republicans would rather have had millions of people be thrown out of work, and had what little remains of our manufacturing base be totally decimated, rather than lift a single finger to help them because (GASP) most of those auto industry workers belong to a union, the United Auto Workers.

That pretty much summarizes today's Republican mindset. They are so full of blind hatred for any and all unionized workers -- because so many of the dirty commie bastards tend to vote for Democrats! -- that they'd rather see the entire U.S. economy go to hell than have even so much as a severely weakened union survive.

And now, the economic plague that the Republicans worked so long and hard to create is providing them with a pretense for putting the public sector unions in their sights!

(Note: The UAW made major concessions to all three of the Detroit automakers during the auto industry bailout of GM and Chrysler, and the economic restructuring of GM and Chrysler. Ford didn't need to be bailed out and didn't go through bankruptcy, but it did get concessions from the UAW that enabled its labor costs to remain comparable with those of the other two auto makers. And virtually no Republican has ever admitted that they were wrong and that the bailout was good for the country.)

[DTravel]

Ford's great idea wasn't the production line (others had already done that), it was to pay his workers enough that they could afford to buy the product they were making.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by DTravel

Ford's great idea wasn't the production line (others had already done that), it was to pay his workers enough that they could afford to buy the product they were making.

Read Joe Studwell's "The China Dream" for the flip side of that argument. Western companies bribing Chinese officials to open plants in China making products that the vast majority of the 1 billion strong "consumers" could not afford.
Some great examples of corporate greed overcoming common sense.

[Mad Koala Bear]

UK police to have their pay held for two years, effectively meaning a cut. Most satisfying news I've had all week. Mind you, you'd have thought the government might like to keep plod happy what with the protests against cuts only going to get more vociferous. Thatcher knew what was in store when she got in in 1979, and raised their pay almost immediately.

[Wendigo]

The UK public sector is a favourite bogeyman to some. Most public workers are on well below average pay, many work part-time so earn even less.
Shame that the examples so often quoted by the media are totally unrepresentative of the actual workforce.

Originally Posted by damp-patch

UK police to have their pay held for two years, effectively meaning a cut. Most satisfying news I've had all week. Mind you, you'd have thought the government might like to keep plod happy what with the protests against cuts only going to get more vociferous. Thatcher knew what was in store when she got in in 1979, and raised their pay almost immediately.

With the law taking such a soft hand to MP's who fiddled expenses you'd have thought they'd return the favour.

[9876543210]

begos,

I can't comment now on all you've said here as my router puked today so I'm having to use a poor connection from a neighbor.

The first thing you should do is pick up and read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine". It explains everything that is going on in Wisconsin as well as what will happen across the US and the western world. Maybe the most important book on economics in a long time.

This is a war on the middle class. No longer any doubt about it. The Republican objective is to turn all of us into $1.00 or less per hour workers. Once we'll work for that they'll bring back the jobs.

One other thing for now:

Originally Posted by begos

That pretty much summarizes today's Republican mindset. They are so full of blind hatred for any and all unionized workers -- because so many of the dirty commie bastards tend to vote for Democrats! -- that they'd rather see the entire U.S. economy go to hell than have even so much as a severely weakened union survive.

A few nights ago, Rachel Maddow really pegged what is going on. She had a graph which showed that five or ten years ago the public unions were three of the top five donors to political campaigns. But during last years campaign the same three public unions were at or near the bottom 10 of donors. Carl Rove said it on Faux News a while back. Get rid of the unions and you dry up the funds they can give to the Democrats. Which will leave us only with the Republicans.

Thats part of whats really going on.

[smutwerx]

I would add to the above that the binary/left-right idea that is pushed on so many of us actually doesn't exist. Neither Democrats nor Republicans, nor Labor or Tory (from what I can see) are interested in checking the rise of private sector (i.e. corporate) power. And it's always important to note that fact, lest you lose the ears of one side or the other to whom you may be speaking.

Left and right, as it exists within the current political structure, are nearly identical in terms of their capitulation to/partnership with corporate power. The only difference is a marginal one of how fast the capitulation is taking place.

I agree the Shock Doctrine is a great book. Not just great actually, but one of the most important books of the last fifty years, in my opinion. And what makes it great is that it discusses corporate vs. public power in terms that are heavily dependent upon historical fact. Klein outlines one incident after another, Bolivia, Chile, Iran, etc., using unvarnished and consensus-agreed history to make us face the truth that we are, in fact, in a class war where the elite class is taking back what the poor and middle classes fought for hundreds of years to get.

In the years since that book has been published, Klein had to publish exactly one — one —retraction, and a minor one at that. That is in a historical/economic tome that lays out probably 20,000 separate facts (a total guess there). But for those who don't have time to read the book, this is what it says about the public and private sectors, without all the overcomplicating political white noise, and it’s deceptively simple:

1: The government runs on tax revenue, so push through revenue-killing tax cuts and/or tax law revisions, and also funnel the government revenue to corporations so the government is strapped for cash. Key to making this happen is not just legalized bribes to politicians in the form of donations, but hiring politicians into the corporate sector, creating a revolving door that tells them in effect: you have a place with us after you ratify these horrible policies. Corporations are simply out-buying the public (and its unions). And the recent Supreme Court decision (Citizen's United) removes all limits to corporate donation, meaning the true buy-off of politicians has only just started.

For proof of the political/corporate revolving door, look at the Obama cabinet and see who has already moved to high-paying jobs in the corporate sector. Look at the cabinet of his (supposed) ideological opposite Bush for an example over eight years of time. The same, I must assume, holds true with Cameron and Blair.

2: When government services inevitably begin to malfunction due to lack of budget or overabundance of demand, criticize those programs as failures and/or criticize their workers as evil/lazy/communist/or what-have-you.

3: Propose that the solution is the sell-off of public services to the private sector, which always claims it will do a better a job, but more often does a worse job at a higher price. Key here is stepping in whenever a program fails spectacularly (inevitable when overburdened or malfunctioning), and force these "solutions" onto a public suffering from shock over the effects of that failure. In the U.S. we saw this with the Gulf disaster. The private sector tried to lay the blame on government for lack of oversight (rather than the corporation for cutting corners) and proposed as a solution... wait for it... the loosening or abolition of regulations, i.e. too much bureaucracy caused the oil spill.

4: Make sure once the sell-off has occurred it is legislatively impossible to reverse, at which point the private sector can bleed dry a public that has no choice but to pay.

5: Rinse and repeat.

In the end, what certain powerful people want is zero public resources—from postal services, to social security, to national parks and forests, to schooling, to the internet. They are pretty clear about these desires, too. No subterfuge really. But when we hear the words "private sector" we can translate it this way: "driven by the profit motive." Public services represent a vast pool of untapped revenue for corporations, and they want it. At any cost to the nation. Why? Because, it's written into their corporate charters. They must pursue the highest possible profit. Collateral damage — even to rivers, skies, communities and nations — be damned.

So the question becomes: do we really think the apex of civilization is one in which nothing can be done unless it profits soulless conscienceless corporations monetarily? In my mind, this is not the apex of civilization, but its nadir. So ultimately, it's a question of philosophy. Do we give free reign to man's inherently greedy nature and hope we manage not to destroy ourselves in pursuit of higher profits, or do we resist our nature by pulling together and realizing that, yes, there is a limit to what we as individuals are allowed to exploit for personal profit, and that public works are an expression of our higher selves?

That's my take anyway.

[VallesMarineris]

i work for a Union for 24 years, this year. we took cuts in our contract back in 1990, the last contract - a year and a half ago, and the upcoming one will most likely feature some more cuts.

all this after every Prez since Reagan has de-regulated the market,
and created massive debt. now they say, all this debt will result in Unions taking a loss. but no contracts ripped up for the criminal bankers.

the bankers used predatory loans for years, bought them back and bet against them in the market. only to be rewarded with billions in bonuses, that we the people will pay for, along with their endless tax cuts, and of course, War.

many say that labor Unions were formed for Socialism, but were in reality brought about to stop the flow of immigration in the US, back in the early 1900s.
you cannot have a free market system with Corporate Unions of Capital, and No Labor Unions, of Labor.

when war was declared on the Unions here in 1981? isn't it amazing how many millions of illegals have come across the border. obviously cheap labor and slavery is on the agenda, loss of Jobs by Nafta (talk about Traitors).
and an Unconstitutional Central Bank whose 100 year contract is up at the end of 2012. yes the guys who control the money flow are at it again. creating debt and money shortages, more war and depression.
every time their contract is up, depression hits, massive debt, loss of homes, World Wars and Death. now you know who is behind all of this.
lots of good stuff to look forward to from these cowards.