No wonder they're worried

The public sector is worried, they know that public spending cuts are coming and they know that they are in the frontline to be hit. Some of us also suspect that the middle management will also try and make sure that it is frontline services that are hit hardest to try and create some sort of outcry. The Unions too will no doubt try to flex their muscles though I suspect they're starting to realise that the only sympathy they are getting is from public servants. There are many reasons for this, but this is the main one...

Sky.

Public sector workers are paid 30% more than those in the private sector but in a lifetime will spend nine fewer years at work, a new report has said.

The Policy Exchange think tank says employees in the public sector enjoy better pay and pensions, shorter hours and early retirement.
The organisation found that in a lifetime a person in the private sector will work 23% more hours - the equivalent to 9.2 years extra work.
It said this was due to shorter holidays, later retirement and a smaller likelihood of going on strike.
The report says average pay is now £22,417 in the public sector and £19,932 in the private sector.
It states that between 1997 and 2007 public sector productivity fell, while productivity in the private sector increased by nearly 28% - leaving the former only two-thirds as productive as the latter.
The report also puts the true size of the public sector at over seven million people, with the number of employees growing five times more quickly than in the private sector between 2002 and 2009.
Policy Exchange director Neil O'Brien said: "To get things back under control, we should freeze the public sector pay bill in cash terms for the next four years, taking the pay bill back to where it was in 2003 in real terms.
"We should also follow the example of Ireland and other European countries, and ask public sector workers to pay some more towards their pensions."
Mr O'Brien told Sky News: "What's happened over the last 10 years is that the number of people in the public sector has expanded much more quickly than the number of people in the private sector and their pay has also increased much faster so overall the pay bill in the public sector has increased three times faster than in the private sector."
The TUC's general secretary, Brendan Barber, has accused the think tank of providing "deliberately misleading statistics".
The union said: "Public sector pay is higher because it has a much greater proportion of skilled and professional workers such as teachers and doctors than the private sector.
"Lower paid jobs such as cleaners and care assistants have been privatised, while the big growth in public sector employment under the last government was among professionals."

So, they work less and get paid more, retire earlier and get generous pensions, can't see a problem here can you? Well the TUC donkeys can't anyway, they harp on about professionals, teachers and doctors, sounds good, but the vast majority of civil servants aren't teachers or doctors, they're pen pushers in the various ministries. Teachers and doctors too could be made self employed, make it easier to weed out the bad ones for one thing, they simply wont have their contracts renewed, all the state would need to do is provide the heads of schools and hospitals with a budget, it would be up to them how they spent it, though in the case of Heads, this could be done via the proposed voucher system. Being forced to justify their positions on a yearly basis would certainly knock the leftist stuffing out of teachers, market forces have a tendency to do just that, a survival of the fittest.
That's all well and good though as doctors and teachers are frontline services, they aren't the areas the public want to see the axe fall. Where the public want to see swinging cuts are in the non jobs, quango's and fake charities. Diversity co-ordinators, race relation counsellors and translation services. The threefold growth of management in ministries and hospitals, these have to go, before a single doctor, nurse or teacher goes. Get rid of the red tape and those who gorge on it, get the professionals out at actual work rather than filling forms. In the 1880's the entire UK civil service running the Britain and the Empire was about 2000 people, now the UK tries to run on 7 million, something has to give and it has to be the public sector.