Ruthless, evil Capitalism. Under it, jobs exist to do useful productive work that absolutely needs doing. Companies employ the least number of people they can get away with in order to provide a specific service or goods, and they’ll always be trying to find ways to do the same job with fewer people.
Jobs themselves are a mixed blessing and a curse. In return for turning up at a specific time on specific days and doing a specific quantity of work, you get paid a fixed rate for that. You get the money no matter what. It is a direct trade of freedom for security.
Throw the public sector into the mix, where the ‘company’ can never go ‘bust’ (not strictly true though) and suddenly there’s the option to keep people working for the sheer sake of people continuing to have jobs, because it’s ‘nice’. No dirty competition. No dirty market forces. Just human beings loving and caring for each other.
But why should public sector workers be able to trade *my* freedom for their *their* security. That’s not part of the deal. You take my money, you take my freedom. Literally. Leave me living hand to mouth and my life choices are reduced to zero, and yet that’s exactly what the current burden of tax does to the vast majority of people whom all this tax is supposed to be in aid of.
You trade your own freedom and it’s none of my business, but my freedom? That I have a problem with.
Public sector jobs are at the mercy of the will of the public who pay for them. What we give we can take away, on a whim, for whatever reason we like. We don’t even need a reason. We’re paying for it, you’re ours, we own you. I’d rather we didn’t, but I’m democratically outvoted on that one. We like having National Butt-monkeys, apparently.
For this reason the public sector aren’t blessed – they’re cursed. Only the public sector can face redundancies and that be a cause of celebration for the people who pay for it. When Woolworths collapsed, people were universally dismayed by the news and worried about the staff. When a Quango gets axed, people jump for joy.
The lesson here isn’t that people should care more about the public sector. It’s that people shouldn’t work in the public sector if they don’t like the idea of having something much, much, much worse than market forces in control of their immediate future. At least competition’s fair. If you’re doing something people want, you’re going to survive. If you’re not, you won’t. In the public sector it’s about how strong your union is or how kindly disposed the public are to your department or your function. Usefulness or otherwise doesn’t come into it. That’s a damned way to live.
UPDATE: I was damned grumpy when I wrote this. I should have added, “which is why we tend to choose to treat the military and the police and others very, very nicely “)
