Sunday, September 12, 2010

Hypocrisy thou art a Union Leader...

Apparently Brendan Barber head of the TUC thinks that the public wont stand for large scale spending cuts, this is a guy who has never had a proper job in his life along with other union leaders coining it in from members benefits who are telling those of us who do work for a living and are struggling to manage to fight the spending cuts we all know the country needs to break even.

BBC.
TUC chief Brendan Barber has said the public will not accept large-scale spending cuts, as trade unions gather in Manchester.
Mr Barber said unions would reach out to the wider community to form a "progressive alliance" to make the case for alternatives to spending cuts.
RMT union leader Bob Crow called for a campaign of "civil disobedience" in protest at spending cuts.
Ministers say they must take action to tackle the £155bn budget deficit.
Without "decisive action", Chancellor George Osborne argues that Britain's economic stability and reputation would be put at risk.
Now I don't know what Brendan Barber earns, but I'm suspecting it's way above the national average. Plus his Wiki tells me this...

Early life

He was educated at the independent school, St Mary's College, Sefton (then a direct grant grammar school). Between school and university, he spent a year with VSO teaching in the Volta Region of Ghana. At City University, he earned a BA Hons in Social Sciences in 1974, then spent the next year as the President of the Students' Union..

Career

He spent a year as a researcher for the Ceramics, Glass and Mineral Products Industry Training Board based in HarrowTUC.
In 1975 he got his first job at the TUC as a policy officer. In 1979 he became the head of the TUC's Press and Information Department.
In 1987 he became head of the Organisation and Industrial Relations Department and in 1993 he became Deputy General Secretary.
In other words he hasn't had much experience of life in the private sector and doesn't really know how sick we are of the public sector creaming off our taxes to expand and increase their numbers and wages at our expense.
As for Bob Crow, well I've actually met the man and I know what an utter knob he is, however if you take a look at this little list from here...
Bob Crow (RMT) - £79,564 in salary, £26,115 in pension contributions, £13,013 expenses
John Hannett (USDAW) - £81,742 salary, £16,389 pension contributions
Billy Hayes (CWU) - £83,530 salary, £14,190 pension contributions
Sally Hunt (UCU) - £63,743 salary, £7,612 pension contributions, £2705 car benefit (start of June 2006 to end of May 2007)
Paul Kenny (GMB) - £81,000 salary, £21,000 superannuation (pension contributions), £8,000 car
Dave Prentis (Unison) - £92,187 salary, £23,603 pension contributions, £11,646 expenses and car benefit
Derek Simpson (Unite-Amicus) - £62,673 salary, £16,156 pension contributions, £13,333 car allowance, £26,181 housing benefit (Derek Simpson now receives nearly £200,000 in pay and benefits, with his pay package increasing 17 percent this year. He also has the right to stay in his £800,000 house in Hertfordshire until he dies, after which his partner will be able to remain there at a heavily subsidised rate.
Simpson, according the Times, demanded that the union subsidise his accommodation to "make it affordable" - a perk worth about £40,00, bringing his total remuneration to £194,252.)
Mark Serwotka (PCS) - £82,094 salary, £26,104 pensions contributions, £2,245 additional housing cost allowance and additional housing cost supplement
Steve Sinnott (NUT) - £99,846 salary, £23,963 pension contributions
Tony Woodley (Unite-TGWU) - £59,333 salary, £9,552 pension contributions, car fuel £3,360
Matt Wrack (FBU) - £66,389 salary, £44,281 pension contributions, £5,134 car
You can see the man telling us all to get into civil disobedience to fight public sector cuts whilst not being short of a bob or two himself  along with the other "leaders" of the working men/women who are in a union. You can bet your bottom dollar they wont suffer no pay or perks if we go on strike.
So the people calling for civil disobedience are well off, wont be hit by getting no pay and wont be worse off at all if there is civil disobedience.

Yes, that stinks of hypocrisy to me.

13 annotations:

Macheath said...

An elegant summing-up of the situation - and presumably the bosses are each accompanied by a shoal of pilot-fish equally well-protected from the consequences of the disobedience they will soon be sent out to foment.

William said...

Politicians, union men all the same political class. Round them all up, put them in the field and bomb the bastards!

Anonymous said...

Just sent Brendan Barber a rude e-mail. Him and his mate Bob Crowe are scum. Good old Bob gets paid 109k (he has just been awarded a pay increase of 12%)and he lives in a council house in Woodford.Send this twat a piece of your mind
brendanbarber@tuc.org.uk

Anonymous said...

Amusing that you attack Trade Union leaders.

The same bankers that took us into this mess earn millions of pounds in salary and have diamond encrusted platinum pensions.

Why do you attack the people who stand up for the poorest when you should be targeting the people who took us into this mess in the first place. Where is the attack on the greedy and feckless breed of grammar school twats that took us into this mess in the first place. Government didnt cause the recession, bankers did.

The right wing toffs love this sort of class war. Whilst you focus on union barons they will continue to cream off millions of pounds of your money and flutter it away on the stock market. Meanwhile low-paid public servents suffer as a result.

James Higham said...

The union bosses are very much of the whole problem confronting us right no, of which EU control is the biggest.

Edward said...

If union members are on strike and not getting paid, surely the least that they can expect from union officials is that the officials will donate all of their salary for the period of the strike to a hardship fund for the strikers?

Quiet_Man said...

@Anonymous, at least the fat cat bankers aren't trying to tell us to go on strike and lose money.
The Bankers only got as far as they did because the useless Labour government loosened the regulation. The union bosses look after themselves as do the government, neither could give a damn about the poor.

Anonymous said...

I have to agree with my fellow anonymous - the TUC leaders may not be salt-of-the-earth, and neither are they poor, but their salaries don't compare with the big bosses and traders etc who really are on millions per year (plus similar bonuses). To single out union leaders for attack as is done here is simply to consciously divert attention and anger away from the true causes of the recent (and more general) problems of the nation (and beyond). Labour may have been useless in this field, but will the Tories/LibDems do more to limit the freedom of the banks? I haven't heard a squeak about any such efforts since they got in - maybe its because the banks are too big to tackle and its easier to have a go at the poorest (public and private sector workers, unemployed etc) and get back to banking business as usual. The red herring of pitching public sector versus private sector is another right-wing smoke screen (classic divide and rule) which it is very sad to see repeated in such a sheep-like fashion both here and elsewhere. The union bosses look after themselves, as do governments, but there is at least some democratic accountability for them - unlike for the bosses and high-fliers, who I can assure you (having met several) despite their inflated salaries and self-importance often don't even know (care?) what's happening in their own companies. Yes it's the banks, insurance companies, oil companies (oh, and I wonder how safe nuclear really is when we see how safe BP et al is?).
Yes, ordinary people are being made to pay back all the money squandered (and now safely tucked away in tax havens) by these big wigs, and the technique is to set each group of ordinary people against the other, and blame them one by one for causing the mess. Resistance if any will only come from ordinary people, but if TUC leaders are prepared to take a lead, so much the better - oh, but of course, don't trust them too much when it comes to the crunch tho...

Anonymous said...

Union bosses are parasites. Unions came about to give power to down-trodden workers, even though there has always been abuse. Those don't exist anymore eg. When a binman can earn nearly 40k a year. The real poor people have no unions to fight for them. It's no wonder the Union bosses want strikes because without them they wouldn't have jobs !

Anonymous said...

Union leaders are hypocritical scumbags getting rich off the misfortune of the average man

Anonymous said...

Brendon Barber was doing the rounds on TV this morning but no one asked him how much he earns on the backs of the Union Members It would also be interesting to know what perks he receives

We're in the Brown stuff said...

Amusing that 09:18 Anon defends Trade Union leaders.

The same Trade Union leaders that destroyed manufacturing industries and took us into this mess where we're dependent on the financial sector to prop up the socialist state and its multitudinous dangleberries.

Anonymous said...

You think that's a lot of money, look at the nurses - Peter Carter is on well over £120K and is hunting down his knighthood as is frequently mentioned in the Press (and is downplayed by his PR engine...): best example ever here where the guy got caught out cleansing the facts!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Carter_(nurse)