(no subject)

[tree_and_leaf]

A (right-wing) friend on Facebook indignantly cites a claim by the Spectator that:

there are 360 union officials not only working full-time in government departments but paid by the taxpayer to do so at a cost of some £19 million.

Contextualisation of this from people who know more about the labour movement? I know that shop stewards and the like are entitled to paid time off for their union activities, but that doesn't seem to be what he's banging on about. (I also strongly suspect that the truth is not going to shock or appall me, given that I think that unionisation is a Good Thing).

Comments

[oursin]

These are, presumably, people who are working in government departments and, shock, horror, being paid a living wage while doing so (which, of course, the taxpayer is paying for because these people are working in the public service) AND being union officials/reps/generally active in their union. In my Civil Service days I was the local rep for what was then the Institution of Professional Civil Servants. I think I got the odd day or so off to go on training courses and briefings, but I wasn't being paid.

Really, this sounds to me McCarthyite stuff - Reds under the bed paranoia. People working for the gummint B active in their (Civil Service) unions!!111!! Duh.

Or just very, very muddled thinking. When I was a civil servant I think you had to be in the union appropriate to your grade. But that was the 70s.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, that was pretty much what I thought. I believe that you can negotiate paid leave for union activities* - maybe that's where this is coming from?

My mother was a local union rep when she worked for the civil service, too. She certainly wasn't a union fat cat, should such beasties exist, which I doubt.

* A policy I'm thoroughly in favour of.

[legionseagle]

Ask lexin. But not today, because she'll be out on her feet.

Honestly, also, what's it with Cameron and "beat the strikes, take your kids to work"? I mean, does he assume all workplaces are CRB checked and that none of them include toxic chemicals, heavy machinery, fork-lift trucks or the need to drive cargo from Dumfries to Maastricht?

[tree_and_leaf]

I saw someone suggesting that you should take your kids to the picket line instead...

Cameron's an idiot. That suggestion's about on par with his idea that blackleg parents would be ideally suited to teaching thirty kids (and that the legal questions such as CRBs etc were irrelevant).

[legionseagle]

Well, if you were a striker then taking your kids to the picket line would be taking them to work, wouldn't it? I can certainly recall being taught songs like "Baa, baa blackleg" during the 6 week postal strike of 1971 or whenever it was. (We lived off potato fritters, mainly, because we had an organic allotment. This sounds rather grim until you realise that owing to my mother having lost her taste-buds in the Depression (actually, technically, probably in the General Strike; she had pneumonia three times before she was eight and I expect that didn't help) it was actually rather more edible than the normal stuff she produced, at least if you were nine).

[oursin]

Didn't anyone learn anything from that programme that I didn't watch, but saw the reviews and reports, wherein Big Thinky Publyk Intellekshuals were completely unable to control classes of stroppy teens? Let alone teach them anything.

[sir_guinglain]

There were some older children sitting today in the refreshment area in the Radcliffe Science Library - I think parent(s) were next door in the training room.

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

Not to mention that if you do the math, that works out to a little over 50,000 a year per person average. Which isn't exactly going to keep them flying first class, is it?

[shewhostaples]

Harrumph, no, not unless PCS operates very differently from the way we do. Union reps within an employer are expected to do their union duties alongside their work duties, though they will likely get time off (and this is a right, not that everyone gets it, harrumph again). Your friend, or the Spectator, may be confused by the existence of paid union staff (myself, for example). We're not funded by the taxpayer, not unless that taxpayer also happens to be a union member, since it all comes out of union subs past and present.