Dinosaurs

As the Gorse Fox reads this morning’s news he discovers an article in the Telegraph that clearly shows evidence that there has been another dinosaur find. In this last 18 months or so, there has been a rich vein of dinosaurs (metaphorically) crawling out of the wood work.

There has been the BA cabin crew – best paid in the industry – complaining when the Company needs to change some of their working practices because of the change in financial circumstances resulting from the credit crunch. So these dinosaurs strike – losing the company many millions of pounds.

We have seen the execrable Bob Crow (£140k p.a.) calling for “general action” over pay freezes in the Public Sector and changes to their pension arrangements. Wake up! Smell the coffee! In the Private Sector this has been happening for several years and you don’t get pay rises unless you have earned them. There was an article in the Daily Mail last week talking about the Planning Department of a local council and the attitude to absenteeism and work in general. The Gorse Fox has never seen anything like this in the Public Sector and suspects it is grossly exaggerated – however he does know of one significant organisation where there are typically 25% of the staff off-sick at any one time.

And now we hear about the BBC. The BBC announced that proposals to dramatically cut back its “gold-plated” pension scheme, including closing it to new members, that will ultimately save £50million a year. After talks with the BBC broke down on Wednesday, the broadcasting union Bectu warned that a ballot on strike action is likely.

Now let us remind ourselves why we are in this parlous state. The previous government sold the gold reserves at the bottom of the market, failed to do anything to regulate the risk being taken by the financial sector, and robbed from private pension funds in a way that made Robert Maxwell look like an petty shop-lifter. Now we are all having to pay for this – but some groups, namely those supported by the big unions who have slavishly lapped at the Nu-Labour table – feel that they should be exempt from the pain imposed by their masters’ incompetence.