Prof. Alison Smith gives a potted summary of her own report in The Times:
... public sector pay scales are almost entirely uniform across England. Conditions of service are also negotiated and set at national level. This creates a fine lifestyle for professionals in areas where house prices are a fraction of those in London or the southeast. It makes it easy for schools in the affluent Wirral to hire teachers; more generally, hospitals in the north can find good permanent nursing staff, while trusts in the southeast scramble from agency cover to agency cover. But the positive side stops there...
However, the main thrust of her argument - and this is a good explanation for why certain parts of the UK are far more dependent on public sector jobs than others - is as follows:
Private employers who want a good quality workforce have to match or exceed what people can get in the public sector. (It is not just wages: it is also pensions and job security.) Poor regions and poor cities typically have bad road or rail connections as well as old industries that have died; one of their few, but genuine, competitive advantages should be lower wage costs.
By importing national pay scales for large parts of the workforce, we force local employers to match these. In other words, the way we set public sector pay directly increases private employers’ costs in our poorer regions and reduces their ability to create jobs for local people.
Anyways, the first thing I consciously heard on Radio 4 this morning was Prof Wolf calmly and patiently explaining all this. To give a 'balanced view', they had also invited Sarah Veale (who appears to be the TUC's head of equality and human rights) who had a shrieky whiney voice and constantly interrupted, repeating over and over again some mantra that "National pay scales protect jobs and ensure fair pay" or words to that effect, without stopping to consider that this policy contributes to high unemployment in large areas of the country. And there was me thinking that trade unions were supposed to be against unemployment! D'oh!
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10 comments:
"And there was me thinking that trade unions were supposed to be against unemployment!"
Trade unions are against one thing: anything which gets rid of trade unions.
It's why a vouchered, privatised NHS and schools are such a fear. Once you do that, people start negotiating with their employer on a local level, and you no longer need unions (plus non-unionised businesses would send unionised businesses to the wall).
Lets go back to the pre-NHS system where the poorer areas with crap infrastructure and crap way of life could not afford very high wages and were always short of nurses etc.And in London to this day people living in family property can walk into most jobs because they do n't pay any rent or mortgage.
Sounds ideal.Or you could get property prices down with LVT so freedom of movement and settlement was not restricted by house price differentials as insuperable as Apartheid pass laws.With LVT you get infrastructure for free,since it puts up land values and the LVT
claims some of them,stopping house prices keeping people who need a job out of areas where there's work.
"And there was me thinking that trade unions were supposed to be against unemployment! "
Against unemployment for themselves, mostly...
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/30/turning-cash-to-ash/
Why not go the whole way and liberalise the state monopoly of money? Let Newcastle (upon-Tyne of course, not the other one) issue its own money. They'd love that. 'Du'ye arksept Geordies heyah man?'
The unions are there for one reason and one reason only, to look after their members. If that means we all get shafted with high taxes and poor services so be it.
All this bollocks about the poor and unemployed is just smoke and mirrors to make them feel good about themselves as they shaft us.
Read my link. Unions are there to look after the union management.
Great way to start the day; shouting at the radio. So unions, having destroyed competitive large scale industry (coal, steel, ship building) they want to keep people out of decently paid work by the price that they can get their public sector members. Nice.
OC, JM, AC1, TGS, M, exactly! But at least Alison Wolf got up at six in the morning to make the point.
DBC, shifting from income tax to LVT is another part of the cunning plan, but I couldn't really link it in to this topic.
Trade unions are to look after their membership (or leadership if you are cynic). The unemployed are not members so don't count.
Sad but true.
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