posted on Jul, 3 2010 @ 01:53 PM
Well let's take this one from an academic debate about balancing the budget to the hard reality.
I'm a British civil servant. I work for social security. We've just been hit by a pay freeze.
I'm on the salary maximum for my grade. But many colleagues aren't, they've only worked with us a couple of years ...and they're now going to lose
thousands of pounds because the usual "pay progression" to get staff from salary minimum to salary maximum has been frozen for the next two years.
So they're losing approx £5,600 (maybe USD $8,000) over the next 4-5 years.
How do you motivate new employees on that ? Hard work should be rewarded, my team are each working at least 10 hrs per week over and above contracted
hours ... unpaid, I hasten to add. We need to do that because we're so short of staff there's no alternative ... and if we don't, there's people
in our town who won't eat. That's the bottom line of it.
It maddens me that government use our wages as a tool of economic management. I can't plan my finances whatever, the wages I'd hoped for at the end
of July are now going to be £250 short ... I just can't afford that. I'd only be a few hundred pounds worse off each month by claiming social
security, rather than working for social security 50+ hrs per week.
And I think the OP and some of you guys need to be more responsible. Because we're working long hours for a pittance, getting spat on, sworn at,
assaulted by a client base who seem to think we're lying about on loungers and drinking pina coladas all day ... whereas the truth is we're stressed
out our nuts simply trying to keep the show on the road.