Over the past few years public sector workers have become yet another hate figure for the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail gives the impression that private sector workers are noble and hard working people who have suffered during the current recession eg job losses pay freezes while public sector workers have been living it up. Public sector workers are portrayed as lazy people who work in unnecessary jobs, receive huge salaries, get massive pay rises every year, are never made redundant and can retire on gold plated pensions. I feel there is an agenda in pushing the poor downtrodden private sector workers versus the pampered public sector workers idea. I feel the Mail is trying to turn public and private sector workers against each and is using divide and rule tactics.

The unions who represent public sector workers have threatened strikes over the cuts the government plan to make to public services. I feel the Mail wants to make sure that if public workers do go on strike, they get no sympathy which explains the constant stream of anti public sector workers articles.

I am a public sector worker and I am angered at the myths created by the mail about public sector workers. One of the biggest myths peddled by the mail is that public sector workers never get made redundant when in fact redundancies have occurred in the public sector. For instance, large scale job losses have occurred in the civil service over the past few years. The Mail is constantly banging about gold plated pensions but conveniently never mentions how much public sector workers actually get in pensions. I work with the police as a civilian and I will get only £62 a week when I retire.

The public sector workforce is heavily unionised and the Mail is very anti union and could this be a reason why the Mail is so hostile towards public sector workers.

Inevitably the Mail and its readers have been calling for public sector workers to be made redundant and cuts be made to the public sector but the Mail which claims to speak for the downtrodden private sector workers has not considered the effect this will have on the private sector. The public sector bashers forget that the wages earned by public sector workers are used to buy goods and services from the private sector. If these workers are made redundant, they will no longer have any money to spend which will hit the private sector. Private sector workers who have lost their jobs in the recession will face more competition for jobs from redundant public sector workers. Many private sector companies depend on the contracts from the public sector. If public sector cuts are made, these companies will suffer. Research by the TUC has shown that private sector companies are already being badly hit by spending cuts.

I would be interested to hear the views of members of this forum as to why the Mail hates public sector workers so much.

Because they are more likely to vote Labour. Simple as that.

When attacking public sector workers the Mail is selective in how it uses data and claiming public sector workers earn more than private sector workers is a typical example of this. Average public sector pay may be higher than the private sector on average for the following reasons :-

* The private sector includes areas such as retail and hospitality which pay low wages which has no equivalent in the public sector.

* The lowest paid jobs in the public sector such as cleaning, catering and refuse collection have been transferred to the private sector due to privatization.

* Data for public sector pay includes the banks which have been bailed out by the government which means this data includes the massive pay rises awarded to heads of banks.

These factors have on average made public sector pay higher than private sector pay.

Trying to compare private and public sector pay is difficult because many jobs exist in one sector that do not exist in the other. For instance, the job of fire fighter does not exist in the private sector. Even if there are jobs which exist in both sectors, it can still be difficult to compare pay. For instance clerical and admin jobs exist in both sectors. Some private sector companies may pay less than the public sector and some may pay more which makes it difficult to establish if admin workers in the public sector are better paid.

"the Mail is selective in how it uses data"

I hate to appear cynical, but that is a bit like saying the Pope has slight leanings towards Rome. It's a lying right-wing rag.


Incidentally, I don't know if this is peculiar to the Scottish edition, but I noticed yesterday that it has a strapline under the title saying 'Scotland's best-selling quality newspaper'. It didn't, strangely enough, define quality, though it didn't seem to have significantly fewer tits'n'bums than usual.

I think you understand it very well already, Welshman.

My mother worked for the civil service for much of her life; she was at the Government chemist before I was born and later on she worked for Customs & Excise as an admin staffer. She's certainly not in receipt of a 'gold plated pension'. They do love to use that phrase but they never ever seem to back it up with actual figures. Rotten, lying shitheads the lot of them.

If the Mail and its readers get their wish and large numbers of public sector workers get made redundant, the unemployed public sector workers will no doubt then be villifed as benefit spongers.

That prompts me to wonder at what point in life 'x is getting benefits therefore s/he's a scrounger' transmutes into 'x has worked hard all his/her life and deserves what s/he is now getting from the state', in Mailland. Is a 64-yo on JSA a scrounger?

No, that's a war hero

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Soppy anti-British, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-family nonentity

Which war?

Doesn't matter - pensioner = war hero. How dare you disrespect our boys with such a question!

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Soppy anti-British, pro-crime, anti-education, pro-immigration, anti-family nonentity

Franco-Prussian was obviously a big Mail pleaser what with Frogs and Krauts both getting killed.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... sions.html

End gold-plated public sector pensions and have a later retirement age, says Hutton report


Why do the Mail repeatedly give the impression that everyone who works in the public sector is on some "gold-plated pension" as they put it? The ones at the very top maybe, but the vast majority? You're joking.
As for John Hutton- how he hasn't already had the Labour whip removed is a mystery. When he was Cabinet Minister I can clearly remember musing on this forum with someone that he had joined the wrong party- he should've been a Tory. Okay, if you vote Labour you lost, so you expect you're probably going to get kicked in the bollocks at some point by the Tory Government (EDIT 10 mins later; I genuinely forgot, it's Coalition ). But I think it's quite reasonable to expect that the person who's volunteering to do it isn't going to be a member of the party you voted for.

Hutton was on Today this morning and he was keen to dispel the "gold-plated" bullshit, saying the average public sector pension was just under 6k a year.

Fair play to him for that then, and I did say it was the Mail who use that phrase. Gold plated conjures up an image that all Local Government employees and Civil Servants are going to be rich enough to retire to some luxury palace in Dubai or something.