Civil Service is nice soft easy job, no pressure compared to the private sector

I'd love to see someone in media do an in depth piece on the pay and conditions in the public sector. I feel generally they are overpaid and should actually get less than private sector as security of tenure,generous pension and flexibility is worth a lot per annum. Look at prison guards for instance, they are glorified security guards but earn on average 80k per annum when their organised overtime is taken into account. And the powerfull union backed workers in likes of ESB get well above market rates for the work they do. A lot of the office type jobs in civil service may not pay much more than private sector but theres more perks and room for lazy/incompetent people to hide.
 
I went the other way to Rainy, I was in the service for 6 years and spent time in 3 different departments before going private. Ive remained in contact with several people. Most who do the same work as I (in I.T) earn more money then me and are surprised when they find this out (as am I..grrr). Most work less hours then me. Some work more.

I seen it all in the service, Ive seen people knitting, Ive seen people routinely take 45 minutes break in the morning and afternoon. Ive seen people asleep at their desks, in one department there was a story that you could get the days news off a particular womans forehead as she fell asleep every morning for an hour on a fresh copy of the indo. Conversely, in another department I was once given out to, while on lunch, for reading a paper at my desk as it was interfering with a co-workers concentration while I turned the pages. swings and roundabouts.

Some of the best and talented people Ive worked with were in the service, but also some of the worst and laziest and its these that give the bad name.

didnt know about the finglas leisure centre problem, thanks for the heads up. I will say I frequent there quite often and Ive always found the staff very courteous.
 
bearishbull said:
Look at prison guards for instance, they are glorified security guards but earn on average 80k per annum when their organised overtime is taken into account.
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If it is such an attractive option, one might wonder why they aren't queueing all the way down the street for application forms every time they recruit?
 
RainyDay said:
If it is such an attractive option, one might wonder why they aren't queueing all the way down the street for application forms every time they recruit?
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They do, massive numbers apply for prisons, gardai, fire brigade etc. The governement don't seem to employ enough and there always seems to be huge overtime available according to officers i know personally. The strong unions keep the wages high.
 
http://www.onrec.com/content2/news.asp?ID=5950
11,000 applications for Garda recruitment

21/12/2004 10:09:00
Almost 11,000 people have applied for just 2,000 Garda posts, it emerged today.

The Public Appointments Service was inundated with applications from potential recruits before last week’s deadline.

That'd be a pretty long queue - about 3 miles.
 
bearishbull said:
They do, massive numbers apply for prisons, gardai, fire brigade etc. The governement don't seem to employ enough and there always seems to be huge overtime available according to officers i know personally. The strong unions keep the wages high.
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Would you want to work in a prison - I know that I wouldnt. I don't know of any prison guard who grew up dreaming of being a prision guard - they do it for the money. If there was no money in it you wouldnt get the people to work there - that is why the money is so high. Along with I suppose 'danger money' - going into work everyday with the possibility of being attacked.
The prison officers who are getting €80k pa are working mental overtime & basically have no life outside of work.
I think this is a diff situation to general civil service discussion - where I would agree with most of the previous comments.
 
One of our close family friends is a prison officer close to retirement. A more wonderful, gentle and courteous gentleman you couldn't hope to meet. To me he is pure a wonder. How could anyone work in a place like the 'joy and be so well adjusted? By his own admission he is set upon at least once a forthnight but puts it down to just being 'part of the job'.

This individual sees his work as vocation, and is genuinely interested in the inmates welfare, although I'm sure he never conciously set out to be where he is today.

In my opinion I wouldn't do his job for twice the money! His is definitely no soft option!
 
Ancutza said:
By his own admission he is set upon at least once a forthnight but puts it down to just being 'part of the job'.
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By " set upon " do you mean physically beaten / attacked ? Once every two weeks ? Well, whatever he is in to I suppose.

If this happened every prison officer as well as the army deafness claims ( as in the army ) the taxpayer would be faced with "set upon" claims from the prison sector !
 
This thread started out about the civil service but seems to have spread on the public sector in general. To be honest, as a private sector employee, I would never claim that nurses, guards, prision officers etc are being overpaid. They deserve good pay. I agree that there might be issues with overtime and the costs associated with it especially in the guards and prision service and that needs to be addressed

My one major problem with the civil service versus the private sector is the whole concept of benchmarking that has been introduced. We were told that public sector wages had fallen behind the private sector and needed to be brought into line. No complaints so far. So how they do they achieve this. They set up a body that compares each job in the public sector with a job in the private sector and decides that they are underpaid by x%. Fair enough. They also promise that the pubic sector will have to accept greater accountability and work practice changes. So far this sounds great and no private sector worker could really have any complaints. But then it all starts to go wrong.....

Instead of making the whole process transparant, the report is confidential and so nobody in the priate sector can see exactly how the decision was made that workers in the public sector were underpaid and hence the mistrust that exists in the private sector about civil servants. I would like to know the answers to the following questions so we can start having an informed debate about the topic.

1. What are the equivalent jobs in the private sector that public sector jobs are being compared to.

2. What value is put on the defined benefit pension enjoyed by the public service especially in light of the growing examples in the private sector of companies replacing these schemes with defined contribution.

3. Does the same level of accountability exist in the private sector and the civil service. For example, how many civil servents/politicians were held accountable for the nursing home charges scandal that is costing the country over 1 billion euro. Think there would be a few job losses in the private sector for a similar cockup.

4. What work practices changes have been introduced since the last round of benchmarking

5. Why does the number of public sector employees keep growing and growing without a noticeable improvement in services provided.
 

And Q 2 (b) should be:
We were told how much benchmarking was going to cost in terms of increased salaries - but how much is it going to cost in terms of the increased Defined Benefit Pensions. This is the hidden unquantified cost of benchmarking that all civil servants are aware of but nobody seems to be making a fuss about it

As for Q5 - if the govt persists with its decentralisation plan the number of civil servants will have to go up since they can't fire anybody. So if 100 people work in OPW (say) and it's moved to Tralee but only 10 people avail of the move, there's still (technically) the work of 100 people to be done so they'll have to hire more people in Tralee. But the 90 or so left in Dublin won't be fired so you end up with more than you started with.
This is supposed to be mitigated by non-replacement of retirees/leavers etc but I don't believe it works like that in reality.
 
I'm in the private sector and since the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill it must be better in the public sector. After all there's only a couple of hundred thousand people working in it so picking the slackers I have come across in different areas of the public sector and tarring the whole lot of them with the same brush is fair enough. Right?
 
Purple said:
I'm in the private sector and since the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill it must be better in the public sector.
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Its not that the grass is always greener on the other side of the hill , its simply a fact that those on the other side of the hill enjoy better pensions, holiday pay, sick leave, longer coffe breaks, less real pressure, security of employment etc..... all paid for by the taxpayer.

Purple said:
After all there's only a couple of hundred thousand people working in it so picking the slackers I have come across in different areas of the public sector and tarring the whole lot of them with the same brush is fair enough. Right?
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They are all tarred with the same pay and conditions, but nobody denied there are good conscientous workers in the public service too.
 
Anyone hear the nurses at their demo yesterday? They want more money and won't accept the labour court ruling and won't go through benchmarking as they won't get enough that way! Now i think most nurses do a great job but i also think they are well paid and this is borne out by a comparison with other european countries.

They seem to be using the justified public annoyance at the current state of the health system to benefit themselves. Nobody will criticise the likes of nurses as they do such a highly regarded job.

Nurses flock to this country from all over the world so it can't be that bad in the health system.

If the nurses succeed in getting more than the benchmarking system would award, then public sector workers from other areas will think they can get more than benchmarking etc and we'll have many more threats and incidents of industrial action. Massive wage increases in public sector just increase inflation in wider economy and make us less competitive internationally in this increasinglt globalised world.
 

Yeah - unbelievable - I really have to ask myself the question what planet these people are living on sometimes. A starting salary for a staff nurse has increased from 23000 eu in 2001 to 35000eu in 2006 - thats one hell of a jump in 5 years and that doesnt include the generous overtime that the unions jealously protect , at the expense of proper reform of the bottomless pit known as the Health Service. They were going to get the 3% under the national pay agreement and more under the last tranch of the current benchmarking agreement and God knows what fantasy numbers they will come up with in the next one.

Well , personally speaking , thats 100% more than I'll be getting this year - the National pay agreements are voluntary in the private sector - we are going thru a downturn at the mo in our industry - its a cyclical thing - and if we survive and further improve our productivity (I have 5 guys now handling the same amount as 18 guys 4 years ago) I ll benefit on the way up again (I hope - for the moment Im grateful my job hasn't been outsourced yet) - thems are the breaks in the private sector - when things are going well and you are functioning well in your job you benefit , on the other hand when there is a downturn you have to be prepared for cutbacks, unpaid overtime or even redundancy - its a dog eat dog world out there, particularly if you are working in the Global market .

In this country the global markets effects have been minimised for many in the legal professions, Property and construction related sector by the huge flood of borrowed money that has entered the economy over the last 4 - 5 years and the salaries and wages in those industries are just silly even with added immigrants slightly deflating the rocketing salaries and that has been responsible for the inflation spiral that is driving the public sector discontent - however this situation is temporary - sooner or later (and the by the looks of things sooner ,given the cooling property market) the pendulum will start swinging the other way and renumeration in those sectors will reflect this . The difference is that in the Public sector is once a raise is given it can never be taken away - well not by the bunch of pussies who are in residence in Dail Eireann at the moment anyway.

There is a sense of victimised marthyrdom within the Public Service as many of them are under the illusion that they are giving up millionaire status in private sector for the vocation and public duty to the Country. They always seem to compare themselves to the very high executive level of large Private sector firms when it comes to salaries etc etc . Personally I think many of them have a massively overinflated sense of self worth - from my own interactions with them on a daily basis and from comments here from Purple and others - The talent and application levels exhibited leave a hell of a lot to be desired - I wouldn't leave the vast majority I deal with it in a charge of a bottle bank , let alone a department of a private sector company.

Later

Edo
 
What most people don't seem to realise is how benchmarking in the public sector works. They are being benchmarked against each other, not against the private sector. This results in a never-ending spiral of wage growth and shorter hours.
I don't deny for a minute that many or even most public sector workers work hard and well (if not efficiently or in a efficient system) but since benchmarking obviously ignores DB pensions and total job security there can be no comparison with the private sector.
I also don’t for a minute accept that Nurses have any real interest in patient welfare and have always thought that their protests about patient conditions in A&E was cynical and disingenuous as they will always elbow themselves in at the head of the queue when the money is being given out in the health service. At least the bus drivers etc are honest when they go on strike and don’t hide their pay claims behind a façade of vocational concern.
 
I just left a job in the health sector last month. With no job lined up as I could not stick it any longer. Without going into too much detail about it, my supervisor sat all day playing solitaire (which was an ongoing joke, everyone knew about it) but it ground me down eventually and when I complained was told that she had been there 13 years and that she was the supervisor and that was that. There were other similar things, the waiting list for the particular service was over 3 years and IMO this is because most of the people I worked with were too into that civil service type mentality of coffee breaks and leaving at 5 on the dot so they only saw 1 or maximum 2 patients a day when if it was a private service believe me they would have been seeing around 6 or 7. I was on great money, great holidays and great pension but I just could not stick the job any longer as the whole thing was so disorganised. I am going back to working in the private sector with back to the paltry 20 days holidays (in comparison to the 26 I had) and extra 2.5 hours per week and alot more work to get done. Luckily I was confident I could secure work in the private sector again quickly, which I have as I have good experience but I can only speak from experience, which is on two occasions I have worked in the health sector and civil service and on both occasions I ended up frustrated at not being able to get my own job done due to people who were there years being used to doing an hour's work a day. I'm an idiot for leaving a well paid job with great holidays, I know I am, but unfortunately I am just not off that civil service mentality.
 
Purple said:
What most people don't seem to realise is how benchmarking in the public sector works. They are being benchmarked against each other, not against the private sector. This results in a never-ending spiral of wage growth and shorter hours.
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Didn't realise that. Thought the whole point of benchmarking was to bring public sector pay into line with the private sector. What the hell does does benchmarking public sector worker against public sector worker acheive? So it's even more rubbish a process than I thought it was. Wow.

People don't understand benchmarking because they never bothered to explain it.
 
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