Originally Posted by Gilles de Rais

If something doesn't perform, the solution is not to throw good money after bad. You shut it down. And maybe start over - In the case of health care provision, you'd have to start over. But you don't just keep the system going on forever.

Well, really? We sack everyone working for the country's largest employers, spend a huge premium in redundancy payments, and then hire pretty much the same people - after all who else has the qualifications - to do much the same work?

You've got to be careful that the cure isn't worse than the disease. Lets say you managed to do all this in a month - would you just expect everyone to calmly accept all the preventable deaths that would occur in that time?

I don't think this is any more practical than trying to change the spark plug on a moving vehicle, and the fact is there is no way to stop this one. It can only be tinkered with while it's live, there's no other way to do it.

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I am even more pissed off at all these quangos floating around which don't seem to add much value. Or the DoD. Or Brussels. The only thing is that numbers do add up i.e. £80 a week is nothing... until multiplied by millions and by many years. MPs are less than 500? It's still not fair and it still pisses me off but the problem for public finances is less accute.

To me this is much the same as the perennial "waste" argument - everyone thinks there is "waste" until you start asking to specify what they would cut. Maybe if a quango doesn't "seem" to do anything, that just means that you don't know what it does?

£80/week, however multiplied, is a bargain basement price for the decades of work you get out of public sector workers. What precisely is the alternative, gassing our OAP's or turning them into Soylent Green? I've pointed out before how ludicrous and absurd it is to claim that we don't have the resources to support our citizens in old age; if that's how the system we live under works, then that just tells you that the system is totally fucked up.

You provided a link to the speed-up; you know as well as I do that the proportion of all wealth going to the richest has been increasing for decades. You know, in short, as well as I do that our system is making all of us poorer for the benefit of the rich. THAT is where the problem lies.

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In finance? In a struggling start-up? C'mon... No - I either need to change jobs to a decent employer/one with legacy employee benefits or get the zeigeist to change...

Well as the saying has it: If not you, then who? If not now, then when?

I'd be happy to see pensions made mandatory for all employers, but then it might just as well be a state benefit paid for from corporate taxation. Which is in fact what I would prefer.

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As I've mentioned before, I got a friend of mine, rather smart guy, more moderate (or mainstream, say) than I & definitely left/liberal leaning - He supports unions & works for the HMRC. There was some kind of union-backed action going on some time ago bent on making old guys supra-expensive to fire and my friend, sympathetic to unions in general, said "Wait a sec here. I'd like to support unions & stuff but I see no reason I should support some reforms that would make me so much cheaper to fire than some useless geezer whose only worth is having become old on the job"...

Except of course that is not their "only worth", it lies in the fact of their accumulated experience and knowledge.

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"It's in all of our interests" take a certain amount of macro-viewing to agree with.

Yes, it does. And that's the whole point.

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I might be projecting a bit but, in France, public unions are extremely self-serving. "Public goods" and "the public service" is usually just a leaf used to hide sectorial interests just as big businesses use 'freedom to entrepreneur' and 'choice' as code words for 'We're going to fuck you up & make a killing on the way'...

Well, I can't really comment, but it sounds like propaganda to me.

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How? And my point is that they are the last ones who can break the law with inpugnity. What's the gvt is going to do about it? Jail every nurses and doctors and court clerks and cog in the gvt machine? It would be self-destructive. 500 MPs can't carry out their own laws everywhere...

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Well the "how" is of course because they are setting a price in the marketplace, from which you also benefit. You might think that it is in your interest to have every other worker reduced to the minimum wage, but then of course you'd just get reduced to the minimum wage too.

I don't really think they can do so with impunity, because unless the military are also on strike they can just start shooting people. It's not as if that's never happened before, and it's the primary reason the police and the army are not allowed to strike. And if you are in a situation where things do develop to that point, then what you have is a de facto revolution.

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I am with you on the abolishing of anti-strike laws. I wouldn't go as far as supporting any strikes.

Well the only ones that I think shouldn't be supported are those in which, say, a group of white workers strikes against hiring black colleagues, or similar. But that doesn't happen much these days. But otherwise, I would indeed argue that all strikes are ultimately to your benefit, even if they are annoying in the immediate term, that they should have you support, and that you should never cross a picket line or encourage anyone else to do so.

The only weapon that workers have is the withdrawal of their labour. By failing to support strikes, you blunt that weapon and make life worse for everyone.

Michael Gove's call for parents to break strike provokes union fury
Education secretary accuses unions of militant strike action as Vince Cable intervenes over 'war-like rhetoric'


Polly Curtis and Patrick Wintour
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 26 June 2011 20.55 BST


A war of words has broken between Michael Gove and the teachers' unions in an echo of the bitter divisions of the 1980s on the eve of crucial talks to avoid mass strike action on Thursday.

Teaching unions reacted with anger after the education secretary accused them of risking their members' professional reputations by taking "militant" strike action and suggested that parents could volunteer to break the strike and keep schools open on Thursday.

Thousands of schools – along with colleges, universities, ports, courts and jobcentres – are expected to close in the walkout over pensions.

Crunch talks with ministers are scheduled for Monday, with some unions billing them as the government's last chance to avoid strikes. Ministers have extended the deadline for negotiations into the summer.

Gove told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday: "I do worry that taking industrial action, being on the picket line, being involved in this sort of militancy will actually mean that the respect in which teachers should be held is taken back a little bit."

He said he didn't want to ratchet up rhetoric against unions, but added: "The public have a very low tolerance for anything that disrupts their hard-working lifestyles."

Mary Bousted, the head of the normally moderate Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), told the Guardian: "I think the threat to get parents to cover teachers is just ludicrous, the idea that children can usefully spend time in school being baby-sat ups the ante even more. This is inflammatory and it is inept. Michael Gove's intervention is further evidence of ineptitude and cack-handedness.

"The last thing my members want to do is strike. This is the first time in 127 years. We're looking for government to negotiate in good faith."

Tensions have escalated in the runup to Monday's talks amid renewed suggestions the government would try to change the strike laws and public funding of union activity should industrial action get out of hand.

Whitehall sources confirmed that the use of public money to pay union officials to organise is now "under review" as part of a wider rethink in the civil service.

Bousted said her union would challenge any attempt to toughen up strike laws – such as raising the threshold of the proportion of union members who take part in a ballot in order to trigger a strike – in the European court of human rights. But the business secretary, Vince Cable, who is responsible for strike laws, intervened to cool the rising tension.

Insisting that he was speaking for the government, he said it had no plans to change strike laws and no need to prepare anti-strike contingency plans.

His tone was markedly different from what he said was war-like rhetoric coming from some parts of government, including Gove.

Cable told BBC Radio 5 Live: "There are people who are pushing from both sides, some people want strikes, some people want strike legislation. That's not the way I'm going, the way the government wants to deal with this is through negotiation."

He added: "What I'm expressing is a government view. I'm not just expressing a personal or Lib Dem view.

"And there is a view across government that we want to talk sensibly to the trade unions and we recognise the vast majority of trade unionist we talk to, whatever the rhetoric in public, is basically constructive and they want to avert large-scale disruption and we have to negotiate in good faith with them and will do so."

Most of the unions refused to comment in advance of the crunch talks.

But Mark Serwotka, the head of the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS), whose members will also strike on Thursday, said: "My prediction to you now is that they will have the shock of their lives on Thursday.

"And it is just the beginning unless the talks develop. Our task is to attend those meetings, represent our members, but to organise for a sustained battle."

PCS and ATL will be joined by the National Union of Teachers and Universities and College Union on Thursday's strike.

They are calling for the government to reverse a decision to change the method of uprating pensions, which they say has already drastically reduced their members' pension pots.

They are also calling on ministers to put the question of whether their contributions should increase by an average of three percentage points from next April – not just how they go up – on the negotiating table.

Ministers say contributions must go up to reduce the taxpayers' cost and safeguard defined-benefit schemes in the public sector. Most other public sector unions – along with the professional associations representing headteachers – are poised to ballot for strike action. The British Medical Association will debate whether to ballot for industrial action at its annual conference in Cardiff this week.

Tensions are also simmering between the unions and the Labour party after the head of Unison, Dave Prentis, told his conference last week that his union would withdraw support from Labour candidates who did not back their aims during the selection process.

In a Guardian interview on Saturday, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said that this week's strikes were a "mistake". On Sunday, the former prime minister Tony Blair urged unions to "engage with the process of change".

He told the BBC's Politics Show that the unions "have got to modernise" and added: "The thing about the trade unions is that they too have got to modernise. I said this constantly when I was leader and they used to think that meant I was anti-union. I'm not. I'm in favour of strong trade unions – I think it's great. But you've got to understand today how fast the world is changing. "What you've always got to be careful of – particularly with public sector unions – is you don't become 'small c' conservatives."

Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, said: "I can assure the public now that we have rigorous contingency plans in place to ensure that their essential services are maintained during the strike action on Thursday."

Michael Gove's call for parents to break strike provokes union fury | Politics | The Guardian