Peter Elson: Perks of keeping your job in the credit crunch

Sep 29 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

WELL, if you have not been credit crunched yet, the grim financial reaper could soon be coming to you, according to our daily media diet of gloom and doom.

For once dumping the usual government spin, even the Chancellor of the Exchequer tells us that the economy is in its worst state since the end of the war.

Employment lawyers are being kept busy as companies contact them to find out how they can dispatch staff into redundancy quickly, legally and cheaply. If you’re lucky, you’ll only suffer frozen wages or a lack of staff recruitment to help shift your workload.

But, if you’re really lucky, you could be working in that blessed haven of the public sector called Quangoland, as we head for a Two Nations Britain, but not quite as Disraeli predicted.

Unlike the hammering that the private sector is taking, there are still pages of jobs in the press each week for the public sector.

This is not a grapeshot attack at all our public sector workers – I do not want to see nurses stop nursing, teachers stop teaching, firemen stop hosing, Post Office workers stop issuing car tax discs or librarians stop stamping books.

What I’m describing are those jobs which fall neatly into the “What on earth do they do each day?” category.

Even if we don’t know what, say, a surgeon does, most of us can make an educated guess. But how does a social inclusion co-ordinator fill his or her day? Or a personal best advisor? What is the timetable for an ethnic youth engagement key worker? Who makes these job titles up and why are they essential?

Although they all sound like Mickey Mouse posts, in salary terms those examples carry annual remuneration of around £30,000 or more, provided by us, the hapless tax-payers.

Being linked to the local government terms of employment, they come with good holiday allowances, bomb-proof pensions, flexible working hours and generous paternity and maternity leave.

And these are the basic salaries. Quite how Quangoland has boosted its pay packets above the £20,000 (or less) offered to our aforementioned nurses and librarians, who we actually need to make the country keep going, is a mystery.

As if this was not enough envy-stirring news, the Taxpayers' Alliance recently found that there are more than 800 people in local authorities earning above £100,000 a year, and 14 of those take home more than the Prime Minister, whose annual salary is £188,849.

We’ll leave the Prime Minister out of this equation, but these are salary levels offered in the commercial world because of the risk that the position involves – ie, you get fired if your management is unsuccessful. People who are effectively employed for life in the public sector, rarely get fired (in spite of some horrendous bungling) and whose employers never finally run out of cash, don’t deserve the same level of remuneration.

It’s also the norm now in the private sector to work in a world where elsewhere final-salary pensions have practically disappeared.

This laying waste of employees’ old age, leaving millions facing their final years in poverty, has not occurred in the public sector. Incredibly, not only have pension schemes survived, but retirement is generally available at far below 65.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates these schemes make the average public sector worker 12% better off than those working in the commercial world on the same salary.

Of course, all this money must come from somewhere – and that somewhere is the private sector – yet we’ve seen Britain’s traditional industries decimated over the last quarter-century, with both Tory and Labour administrations equally careless about protecting them, their skill-bases and, just as importantly, the social structures they created.

More than 5,000 manufacturing jobs are lost a week in this country (can there be many left at this rate?), so we should also worry from where the economic recovery that we’re told will eventually appear will actually emerge from. The financial services sectors led by the bankers who got us into this mess? Heaven help us.

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk