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Unread 17 Jul 2008, 21:57   #12
roadrunner_0
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Re: Council strike, inflation and living cost

as a local govt. worker who voted for the strike, im going to put my 2p in

i dont know where you are getting your figures from furball, but i have worked for durham county council since 2000, and i assure you in that time we have never had a large pay rise, evidenced by the fact that this is our 3rd strike in those 8 years. In those 8 years my place of work has endured budget cut after budget cut, in fact, my department had to make savings of a cool million last year, consequently we lost (iirc) 20k from our programming budget and 12 hours of staff time - yet are still expected to do more work to get more people through the doors so that the budget fairy looks elsewhere next year for its ritual sacrifice on the altar of efficiency. another consequence of these on-going budget cust is that training budgets has evapourated, and whereas in the private sector you will get a lot of promotion from within, this simply isnt viable within some councils now, as due to post restrictions (that they either cant or wont re-draw) the most skilled people for the jobs simply cant apply for them - and i know from experience that going for this kind of training yourself can cost easily upwards of a grand, and for some of the professional qualification you are easily staring at a bill for 3k - how do you afford that on 15k a year?

now then, looking at your nice headline figure of 15k a year there... I know for a fact that teaching assistants do not start on that figure outside london (dont know what the london weighting for them is though so that figure might apply to them) and in the council that i work for, a teaching assistant would also have to be getting supplements (being responsible for Special Educational Needs pupils, after school clubs etc) to reach that figure - and the basic wage is (ballpark figures, not sure of the exact scale without looking it up) a starting salary of 11k rising to 14.5k (you would have to have 5 years in the job to reach that top figure though.


overall the government are once again in a hole of their own making - they have pissed away funds for years and years, as usual, the people at the top have insane salaries compared to 'the little people' (for instance, im sure that looking down the barrel of a 2.5% pay rise is a lot less of a hardship when you are getting 100k a year, which is what our chief exec is on) and overall, there is no central government leadership to address issues that have been being raised for years now without sucess - hence strike.

unfortunately i for one believe that the unions simply dont have the will to pull it off, they will cave before the end of the summer, possibly after another 1 or 2 day strike, after getting us another .2% on top and call it a victory, which it isnt. local government needs a full review of funding, and unfortunately, more funds need to be diverted. Because no matter how they paint it, the problem isnt going to go away
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