gavin staples

Public scandal.

Ross Clark says that if you want job security plus good pay and conditions,
forget the private sector and take up public service.
To get elected in 1997 Tony Blair championed the cause of 'Mondeo Man', a
hard-working, hard-driving travelling salesman who had suffered from years
of negative equity and suppressed bonuses. It is not Mondeo Man, however,
who has ended up as the beneficiary of Labour's six years in office. It is
Principal Project Delivery Officer Person. That antihero of Chekhov, the
white-collar government employee, is emerging as the hero of Blair's
Britain.


Forget the corporate fat cats supposedly draining the British economy dry
through their self-rewarding of failure; it is the public sector that is
enjoying the explosion in pay. Between the first quarter of 2002 and the
first quarter of 2003, according to the Office of National Statistics, the
average public-sector salary rose by 5 per cent, a more than healthy 2 per
cent above the rate of inflation. The accelerating wealth of the nation's
outreach workers and community-development officers, however, has been at
the expense of private-sector workers. Over the same period, private-sector
pay grew by just 2.7 per cent. Subtract the 1 per cent rise in national
insurance contributions, and private-sector workers have just 1.7 per cent
more in their pay packets than they did last year. With inflation running at
3 per cent, private-sector salaries have actually shrunk over the past 12
months by 1.3 per cent - equivalent to about half a week's wages. Not since
Denis Healey was chancellor have workers found themselves in such a
situation.

It is fair to say that when New Labour won its first election, the fortunes
of public- and private-sector workers were more or less reversed.
Public-sector salaries weren't shrinking, but they were being held down by
Labour's promise to stick to Tory spending plans. Meanwhile, huge numbers of
well-paid jobs were being created in the new economy. For a teacher or nurse
in 1997, thumbing through an executive appointments page must have been a
painful experience.

Yet the boom in private-sector salaries in the late 1990s was illusory. The
young and spotty dot-commers who began on salaries of £50K plus share
options enjoyed a few months' easy spending before realising that the
difference between a public-sector post and a job in a business start-up is
the difference between a gilt and a junk bond. No matter how grim the
economic outlook, HM Government simply does not default on the salaries of
its employees. Not so those dot-commers reduced to pilfering their laptops
when, without warning, the banks pulled the plug on their employers.

Over the five years between 1997 and 2002, who do you think enjoyed the
biggest percentage rise in salary: software engineers or prison officers?
The answer is prison officers, by 34 per cent to 24 per cent. The salaries
of advertising executives rose by 6.9 per cent in 1997, but over five years
they rose by just 13 per cent, significantly below teachers (26 per cent),
local government officers (22 per cent) and social workers (20 per cent). As
for bank managers, their pay has risen just 7.6 per cent in five years -
compared with 23 per cent for civil servants. Of the few classes of
private-sector employees who have clearly done well out of Blair's time in
office, one is hardly a surprise: thanks to overregulation, solicitors have
seen their pay rise by 34 per cent.

Until recently, it was accepted that when you took up a public-sector job
you traded earning potential for security of tenure. You weren't going to
get rich, and your car was always likely to be a level of trim below that of
your private-sector neighbour. But come the next recession, you could count
on still being able to pay your mortgage. Over the past year, however, the


nearest equivalent in the private sector. Hence local-government functionari
es are now called 'chief executive', and, in the case of the City of
Bradford, earn £200,000 a year.

It emerges that the five directors of Network Rail, the state-owned 'not for
profit' company which replaced Railtrack, have been engaged on the same kind
of bonus structure that ministers have attacked in the private sector. The
only difference is that in Network Rail's case there are no shareholders to
register a protest at the AGM. Instead, it is taxpayers who are left
screaming at the prospect that Network Rail's five directors will each
pocket more than £1 million this year if they can hit an unchallenging
target: that 82 per cent of trains run on time. In the year before the
Hatfield disaster, Railtrack achieved 88 per cent punctuality - and that was
by running considerably more trains than Network Rail proposes to allow.
When Network Rail's board pockets its millions next year, it will be at the
expense of commuters whose trains are being axed in order to speed up the
services which remain.

The argument that public-sector salaries need to rise in order to attract
and retain talented staff may have been true during the late-1990s boom, but
it certainly isn't now. It is the fat pay packets of public-sector jobs
which now leap from the pages of the executive appointments supplements.
Last week, there were two jobs advertised in the Times 'First Executive'
pages offering salaries of more than £120,000. One was UK general manager of
an American company making electronic payment systems. The other was
executive director for Housing and Social Services for the Borough of
Kensington and Chelsea. 'You are passionate about public services,' reads
the blurb, 'obsessed with the front line and constantly seeking to drive up
standards.' If the job-hunter is really so passionate about being social
worker-in-chief for a London borough, why the need for the £120,000 salary
plus performance-related pay - twice as much as is offered for the post of
senior manager (service delivery and supply management) for the Royal Bank
of Scotland? The argument that a social worker could achieve such a high
salary by switching to the private sector is absurd; more likely he would
end up as an 'outplacement counsellor' at one of the many banks in the
process of laying off hundreds of staff.

The borough of Kensington and Chelsea isn't alone in paying booming salaries
to its functionaries. Salford City Council is offering £73,000 for a 'head
of marketing and communications' - a figure which the subjects of his
'marketing' might do well to remember when they receive their next demand
for council tax. Then there is chief executive of the Thanet Community
Housing Association, who was hired for £70,000 a year.

Public-sector salaries are not being chased up by competition from
private-sector jobs; they are being inflated by the billions that Gordon
Brown is pouring into the public sector without a coherent plan as to how it
should be spent. Take GPs, who last week voted four to one in favour of a 26
per cent pay rise which will lift their average earnings to £82,000. While
it may be true that there is a shortage of GPs, it isn't because they are
running away to a more or less static private medical sector; it is because
medical-school graduates have been diverted from general practice by the
large pay rises to NHS hospital doctors in recent years. As to the
government's case that GPs are taking on extra duties in order to qualify
for the extra cash, it is spurious, to say the least. Under the new
contracts, GPs will be able to opt out of all-night working and of 24-hour
responsibility for their patients' health - which has always been one of the
cornerstones of general practice - by forfeiting just £6,000 a year in
earnings, a mere one third of their pay rise.

One could quote no end of inflated public-sector salaries, but they would
only ever tell half the story. Increasingly, public-sector workers are
enjoying perks denied to private-sector staff. While tens of thousands of
private-sector employees have seen their final-salary pension schemes
discontinued in favour of cheaper and far less remunerative money purchase
schemes, public-sector pensions have been largely untouched. In addition,
10,000 public-sector 'keyworkers' in London and the South-east are being
showered with interest-free loans of up to £30,000 to buy their own homes.
The effect is simply to inflate the lower end of the housing market still
further and make it even more difficult for essential private-sector staff
to afford housing. Sure enough, it might be difficult for nurses - whose
salaries average £22,842 - to afford a home in London. But it is infinitely
more difficult for waiters (£10,009), sales assistants (£12,156) and
plasterers (£16,225). Somehow, the government expects London to function
without private-sector staff.

In reaction to public horror over corporate greed, the Department of Trade
and Industry last year introduced new rules compelling public companies to
put their directors' pay packages to a vote at the company AGM. There being
no corresponding check on public-sector salaries, from next week, The
Spectator will be taking on the task itself. Every issue, we intend to draw
attention to an outrageous public-sector salary or a spurious non-job.
Outreach workers and skills development co-ordinators, you have been warned.

Source: The Spectator Magazine.


Comment:

I think that it should be emphasised that fat cats are not
restricted to the private sector at all. The public sector is now getting
out of hand and we are all paying for it in the form of higher taxes.

Gavin.
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Gavin Staples.

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www.gavinstaples.com

Currently writing book titled: Contemporary Societies East and West. The
introduction of this is on my homepage.

"Always watch a 'Liberal' when he says 'we.' It means you will either be
given orders or blamed for something. 'We must' is a 'Liberal' giving
orders, and 'we are responsible' is a 'Liberal' blaming you for something he
has done." ~ Susan Huck, Vietnam Falls, June 1975.

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