I think it fair to say that the Unions can be thanked for todays 1100+ job losses!

Re: Unions !

Grumpybut... said:
Docking-I completel accept that the pain needs to be shared but in the area in which I work, none of us are lighting cigars with 100e notes! We work on the coalface with a difficult client group for which no money would pay us! It's just very frustrating that we get tarred with the same brush as highly paid, high level administrators.
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Fair point. Im not tarring all with the same brush but some cut has to happen and I think the unions need to accept this and then they should be concentrating on how these cuts are applied. Look at what happened, no acceptance of cuts so a a cut across the board and outrage then Unions blame the govt . Unions get real a 2bln cut needs to happen, unions say ok now we'll talk about how.
 
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Re: Unions !

Unions destroy companies in the long run. its becoming apparent that the union heads are very stupid and ignorent people that dont understand economic cycles and booms / busts etc.
 
Re: Unions !

billko said:
I think it fair to say that the Unions can be thanked for todays 1100+ job losses ! They have made this country seriously uncompetitive with their policies in many large companys and are directly responsible in many cases for 1000's of job losses over the last decade. Getting a little tired of it to be honest.
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Rubbish!
The country is uncompetitive, I agree, but why do you lay this at the door of the unions? Surely the financial bosses, property speculators, shop owners, and the self employed whose blatant profiteering constantly raised prices over the last 15 years are just a little to blame for Ireland's uncompetitiveness.
 
Re: Unions !

limerick123 said:
its becoming apparent that the union heads are very stupid and ignorent people that dont understand economic cycles and booms / busts etc.
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Rather like Ministers for Finance, property developers, bankers, property investors, shareholders, company directors ...
 
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Unions are yesterdays game. Dinosaurs. Their last holdout is the public services.
 
Re: Unions !

sorry have to come back again on union leaders. Its very easy to say no to pay cuts and raise taxes. I can do that. Their members should be getting better bang for thier buck from so called socialist , left wing whatever, who are 100k plus a year (a bit of a paradox). In the interest of fairness they should be asking how come there civil servants on 250k etc and how did it get to this for civil servants in ireland. They should be demanding pay reform in the civil service first ie share the wealth. Do a bit of hard work them selves, make tough decisions. Then accept the pot of money is smaller and work than one through. As I said its very easy say no, then spin to their members they're being attacked. Union member need to question 100k salaries these guys get. again they are causing the devide between public and private. Whast to Jack if the country shuts down for a week.
 
Re: Unions !

Wexfordguy said:
Ah but we're NOT insulated.
The media and the government have vilified the Public sector to the extent that they're taking hit on the pensions levy by themselves and the private sector are sitting around going "ha,that'll teach you!"
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Indeed, it's the old 'divide and conquer' strategy. But it's not working;
[broken link removed]

dockingtrade said:
There is and has been value in unions, but at the moment they are acting irresponsibly in not accepting that a cut in public sector pay, in any form. Jack O'connor was on the other day about right wing agendas and the media having workers at each others throats. Its the unions that are deviding the workers. Jobs are being lost in unionised companies and pay has been cut and pensions wiped out.
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This is wide of the mark. Jobs are being lost right across the board, in the non-unionised sector (Dell, RR Donnelly, Ryanair), the unionised private sector (SR Technics), and the public sector (Dublin Bus, Bus Eireann, many local authorities). Attempts to create division to targeting one sector only will fail.

dockingtrade said:
Yet the same unions are outraged when there's a cut in public sector pay. How can a union official not accept any public sector pay cut when unionized private sector jobs are being lost in the 000's each week. Whats unfair about a cut in a garaunteed job?
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What is unfair is that it targets one particular group of employees for no good reason. There are many very secure jobs in the private sector - why aren't they making a contribution? There are many self-employed people who continue to bring in a good steady income - why aren't they making a contribution?

The simple solution was to increase the tax rate, so those who are earning pay.
 
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The only union that I have ever dealt with was the IBOA. I have to say that if I had my time over I would not contribute one penny to this organisation in subscriptions. They may have been good back in the 1970's but the latest crowd running this organisation seems more focused on producing a fancy glossy magazine, spending large sums of members money on a glitzy website and buying themselves new premises.
If you have a problem with your employer as an individual the IBOA doesn't want to know. They don't even answer your correspondence. There's no publicity in taking up the case of an individual, so they don't bother.
 
Re: Unions !

Sure unions are to blame but so is the goverment , the polit bureau (Social Partnership), the reckless banks and the individual citizen.

For years most of people and organisations in this state did know that the whole economy was build on reckless lending and that most of the archivements were actualy only possible because of borrowing from either banks (private sector) or our future children (public sector).

Nobody realy cared and everybody thought it would go on for a long time and hence acted accordingly, got greedy (not only the banks got greedy, nearly everybody did) and in some cases reckless.

Unions and employers did know that the cost base in Ireland is significant higher than in other countries due a lot of reason ranking for high salary over infrastruture cost (Electricity/Gas) to a bad tax system which shifts the tax burden to individuals instead of the whole economy.

So for years a bad sense of entitlement existed in which everybody tried to make the most without planing for the future. How many people realy took out a private pension, how many people actualy tried to save 1 year of salary to be ready for a possible downturn?

The problem with unions is that they did not react quick enough once it became clear that the ponzi scheme that is our economy has broken down and even once they realzied the problem they are still in the "entitlement" mind set.

SR Technics lost major contracts (From Gulf Air over to the state controlled AirLingus) and has a 20% higher cost base in Ireland, so what do the unions expect?

The Goverment is unable to lower the cost base because it needs to hike taxes, the ESB can't lower power cost because they need to be able to pay more to their workers, the airlines don't need so many aircrafts and there is no work in general in that sector.

So unless we realy make the jump to a communist state (and we are on the road to it), where the goverment forces the companies it controlls to not use the best bid for their services but rather those where the masses are keept quite than maybe the goverment should instruct AerLingus to use SR technics to keep at least some jobs. But is that fair?
 
Re: Unions !

Complainer. Do you not accept that the avergae public sector wage is too high given the state of the public finances. And because jobs are being lost in the 000's (not pay cuts but job losses), that there should be a cut in public sector pay where the jobs are garaunteed.
What Im saying is that the unions need to accept this, and relay this to their public sector members and then the unions get to work to work out how the cut should be implemented in a "fair an equitable way."

You talk about taregeting workers, the private have been targeted and reduced in thousands, a pay cut comes nowhere near a job loss.
 
Re: Unions !

One last post on this. I just listnened to the radio and guy asking his members to protest outside wherever over the DEVASTATION the pension levy has caused. he used the word devastation. What planet are these people on.Im convinced to only people out of touch with the real world and also insulated from the recession are the union leaders. 000s losing jobs but protesting at a levy because of the DEVASTATION it has caused....ban me im done
 
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Re: Unions !

dockingtrade said:
Complainer. Do you not accept that the avergae public sector wage is too high given the state of the public finances. And because jobs are being lost in the 000's (not pay cuts but job losses), that there should be a cut in public sector pay where the jobs are garaunteed.
What Im saying is that the unions need to accept this, and relay this to their public sector members and then the unions get to work to work out how the cut should be implemented in a "fair an equitable way."
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The unions were and still are ready to sit down and work out how the cuts should be implemented in a fair and equitable way. The current proposal is not within an asses roar of a fair and equitable way. The current proposal is that those who gained least from the boom years pay most for the recovery.

I certainly don't believe all the media guff about public sector pay being too high. The famed ESRI report was not an ESRI report, even by their own standards it was a 'working paper' not a report, and had not been peer reviewed. It was based on some Ernst and Young analysis which took a very superficial approach to job matching - the results just don't stand up. It certainly would not have been accepted as credible by the large multi-national where I used to work. When they did job-matching/benchmarking exercises, they looked at the detail of what the job was about, not just looking at a few superficial numbers about years of service (picked because the data was easily collectible).

I do appreciate that public sector staff have to share the pain in recovering from our current mess, but that sharing must be fair and equitable. The obvious simple and fair method is a simple tax increase of the higher band, and/or bringing in a higher-again-band for incomes over say €100k. Those who are earning will pay. Those who've had pay cuts will pay less. Those who've lost their jobs will not pay at all. Simple and fair.

dockingtrade said:
You talk about taregeting workers, the private have been targeted and reduced in thousands, a pay cut comes nowhere near a job loss.
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It is comments like this that lead me to believe that talk of public sector cuts are motivated by jealously and/or spite, not by any sense of fairness.
 
Re: Unions !

dockingtrade said:
One last post on this. I just listnened to the radio and guy asking his members to protest outside wherever over the DEVASTATION the pension levy has caused. he used the word devastation. What planet are these people on.Im convinced to only people out of touch with the real world and also insulated from the recession are the union leaders. 000s losing jobs but protesting at a levy because of the DEVASTATION it has caused....ban me im done
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I work in the public sector and have not heard one single colleague complain about having to contribute towards economic recovery. What we are objecting to is the unequal way some people are being asked to contribute. The public sector includes many people on low salaries which qualifies them for family income supplement. Of course a drop in pay is going to devaste them if they can't pay their mortgage and are at risk of losing their house. The unions are not trying to imply that higher earning public servants are in the same bracket as dell workers or waterford glass staff. In fact, the unions are now trying to heal the damaging rift that was manufactured by Government between private and public sector workers as this then allowed them to 'divide and conquer'. They have also come up with a ten point plan for economic recovery. I haven't seen it but I assume it will address issues such as TD pensions, millionaires paying no tax because they are domiciled outside of Ireland, bankers and developers getting off scot free and all of the issues that Fianna Fail ignored and hoped they would get away with. I understand the plan includes a public sector levy and I don't think public serva.nts have any problem with that
 
Re: Unions !

Complainer said:
I certainly don't believe all the media guff about public sector pay being too high.
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lol lol lol Its much higher than the private sector ( despite the security , pension + perks of the public sector ) but shure you " certainly don't believe all the media guff about public sector pay being too high ".
No wonder the world laughs at us. ...from the most overpaid public servant of all ( Cowen, paid more than the President of US, Germany, France etc ) down.
 
Re: Unions !

rabbit said:
lol lol lol Its much higher than the private sector ( despite the security , pension + perks of the public sector ) but shure you " certainly don't believe all the media guff about public sector pay being too high ".
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I guess you can keep on saying it, and hope that enough people will believe it.. regardless of the lack of evidence.
 
Re: Unions !

liaconn said:
I work in the public sector and have not heard one single colleague complain about having to contribute towards economic recovery. What we are objecting to is the unequal way some people are being asked to contribute...
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Let's put aside the issue of whether there should be a levy, and ask ourselves if the particular levy is equitable. I believe that it is not in two ways.

First, it is a long-established pattern that contributions to pension plans are proportional to pay -- the same percentage for everybody. The imposition of different rates for the levy breaks the supposed link between contribution and benefit.

Second, the scheme ignores the fact that a portion of the pay of post-1995 public servants is not covered by superannuation schemes, but is covered by the SW Contributory Old Age Pension scheme.

In my judgement, a fairer scheme would have been to exempt the COAP element from the levy, and apply a uniform rate on all income over that threshold. My guess is that to yield the same amount, that rate might have to be about 12%. The net effect would actually be more progressive than the existing scheme.

[As the arrangements for pre-1995 recruits are different, some further work would need to be done to ensure equivalent treatment of all staff. It would not be too difficult.]
 
Re: Unions !

Complainer said:
It is comments like this that lead me to believe that talk of public sector cuts are motivated by jealously and/or spite, not by any sense of fairness.
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Rubbish. So what do you think is fair... no cuts?? People want ps workers to take a cut out of spite, again the reality of it all
 
Re: I think it fair to say that the Unions can be thanked for todays 1100+ job losses

For every three euro the governments spends this year - be it on public service, politicians, nurses, Gardai, teachers , social welfare, FAS , embassies, McAleese or whoever - the government is having to borrow one further euro.

For every three billion euro the governments spends this year - be it on public service, politicians, nurses, Gardai, teachers , social welfare, FAS , embassies, McAleese or whoever - the government is having to borrow one further billion euro.

We are borrowing 23 billion this year. We simply cannot afford to spend so much.
 
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