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Politically Motivated Teachers
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brian


Posts: 2,002
Joined: Apr 2005
Post: #1
30-06-2011 10:01 AM

It is a disgrace that so called professionals are going on strike when then will still have gold plated pensions compared with the private sector. How can they sleep at night.
I trust the authorities will ensure all strikers will get a black mark in case they apply for promotion.
They should know there are consequences to actions............................

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poolsneighbour


Posts: 162
Joined: Mar 2011
Post: #2
30-06-2011 10:04 AM

Here here Brian! I agree entirely! Thumbdown

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michael


Posts: 3,255
Joined: Mar 2005
Post: #3
30-06-2011 11:08 AM

I think the title should be 'economically motivated...'
My understanding is that, before the government review reports, teachers are being asked to increase their employee pension contributions to 10% of earning - which is higher than the rate of most private sector or stakeholder pensions.

Public sector pensions almost certainly need reforming, but this is almost certainly the wrong reform to impose.

At the same time the government wishes to calculate the inflation by CPI rather than RPI, this was recently ruled illegal for private pensions.

I don't like it when teachers strike (having gone to school in the 1980s when teachers striked for two days a week for odd lessons, and children were expected to find their own food on the streets unless they were on free-diners - when they were given a hamburger and chips, and told to eat it in the playground), but I can understand why they feel the need for a single day of strike action based on how they are being treated.

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brian


Posts: 2,002
Joined: Apr 2005
Post: #4
30-06-2011 11:28 AM

These pensions are not available in the private sector now so comparisions do not apply.

I went to school in the 60's when there were no strikes and good school dinners which about 98% of pupils took advantage of.
Most of the teachers had fought in the war and would have believed strikers should be put up against a wall and shot.

All these unions ranting about negotiations. Private sector companies just said this is what is happening move to another company if you do not like it.

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jgdoherty


Posts: 372
Joined: Nov 2007
Post: #5
30-06-2011 11:51 AM

Politically motivated certainly, but entirely mis-directed in its attribution to teachers.

Our calamitous coalition led by u-turn prone Prime Minister "Calm Down" Cameron and the Civil Service minister, Francis Maude have been inaccurately quoting the Hutton report as stating that public sector pensions are unaffordable.

Former Labour minister Lord Hutton has acknowledged that public pensions are affordable in the long run, a view supported by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, because their cost is set to fall in relation to the size of the economy from 1.8 per cent of national income to 1.4 per cent

So therefore, politically motivated ? - certainly by this short-term dogma driven coalition.

Even its Treasury minister, Justine Greening, has studiously avoided using the term unaffordable, preferring the term "untenable". The term untenable as applied to public pensions is used in a comparative sense with the depleted private sector provisions.

What is shameful is how private sector pension schemes have been diminished so. Equally shameful is how this fallacious argument about the difference in private vs. public sector benefits has been foisted into the public domain for purely political reasons.

I believe it to be entirely logical that any reasonable public sector worker would seek to avoid seeing their pension provision being unnecessarily placed on a similarly slimy slope that could only finish in being a race to the bottom.

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Londondrz


Posts: 1,538
Joined: Apr 2006
Post: #6
30-06-2011 12:20 PM

I work commission only, I put money into my own pension. Can I strike?

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michael


Posts: 3,255
Joined: Mar 2005
Post: #7
30-06-2011 12:36 PM

Brian wrote:
Most of the teachers had fought in the war and would have believed strikers should be put up against a wall and shot.

Were you educated in Germany by any chance? In Britain we were fighting against such dictatorships. Did your school uniform include a black shirt, it might explain a few things.

Brian wrote:
Private sector companies just said this is what is happening move to another company if you do not like it.

I guess that's why you never hear of strikes at British Airways. But wait a minute, pensions were one of the issues that the unions were unhappy with when they went on strike.

jgdoherty wrote:
I believe it to be entirely logical that any reasonable public sector worker would seek to avoid seeing their pension provision being unnecessarily placed on a similarly slimy slope that could only finish in being a race to the bottom.


How true. Already private employers are trying to switch to CPI. We are all in this together (except for those already retired) and what is taken away from private pensions ends up being applied to state pensions and vice versa. We need to be supporting each other rather than being jealous of fairly minor difference in pension arrangements.

I think it will be quite an achievement if I manage to live until retirement age and have a decent amount to live on. I'm just hoping that my private pension investments in high risk Asian stocks pays off!

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jgdoherty


Posts: 372
Joined: Nov 2007
Post: #8
30-06-2011 12:57 PM

Londondrz - you must do what you think is principled.

However I think it advisable that you be wary of any retribution brian may seek to deploy from his little list of mandatory treatments of strikers.

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Sherwood


Posts: 1,412
Joined: Mar 2005
Post: #9
30-06-2011 02:08 PM

Does the Geneva Convention not apply to strikers?

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brian


Posts: 2,002
Joined: Apr 2005
Post: #10
30-06-2011 03:34 PM

Hi Michael

No Forest Hill School but did learn German. I just could not imagine a strike in early 60's. They were a profession then.

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rshdunlop


Posts: 1,111
Joined: Jun 2008
Post: #11
30-06-2011 03:41 PM

The first official teachers' strike that I can find record of was in 1914.

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rshdunlop


Posts: 1,111
Joined: Jun 2008
Post: #12
30-06-2011 03:46 PM

Scratch that. 1896.

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DerbyHillTop


Posts: 120
Joined: Aug 2008
Post: #13
30-06-2011 04:01 PM

What I find astonishing that there is no current valuation of funds and liabilities. From what I understand this is something which will be available next year. Now, pensions are long term products and I can’t see the urgency of drastic action without having at least having a recent valuation of the funds.

I am all for public pension schemes being self sufficient, but I do not like the idea of changes on vague analysis.

Yes it may be necessary to have an action plan, but without valuations...Confused

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robin orton


Posts: 716
Joined: Feb 2009
Post: #14
30-06-2011 04:11 PM

To me, 'professional' is not necessarily a term of approbation. I'm not sure whether teachers have in any case been 'professionals' in any other sense than that they have (mostly) had to obtain some sort of qualification in order to be employed, or at any rate to be able to get a reasonably well-paid job. The same is true of e.g. plumbers and electricians.

I think the change has been in the status of teachers. The highest aspiration for respectable working-class families used to be that their child should become a teacher. Teachers were looked up to in the same way as doctors and clergy. All this has changed, for a variety of reasons. Teachers feel under-appreciated and under-valued. So they are more likely to do things like going on strike if they feel that injury is being added to insult. They have got less to lose.

(I speak as the son of two teachers and as someone who - briefly, unhappily and incompetently - was a teacher himself).

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seeformiles


Posts: 269
Joined: Apr 2005
Post: #15
30-06-2011 08:19 PM

How then would you define 'professional'?

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robin orton


Posts: 716
Joined: Feb 2009
Post: #16
30-06-2011 08:59 PM

It's quite difficult to define, actually, because I think it's used much more broadly than it used to be. I suppose what I had in mind was the traditional idea of a profession as a self-governing occupational group, that is, one which lays down its own entrance requirements, prescribes a code of 'professional conduct' with which practitioners are required to comply, and controls who is and is not allowed to practice (typically by keeping a register to which practitioners' names are added when they qualify and 'struck off' if they are naughty.) Doctors, lawyers and clergy are the classic professions in this sense; teachers aren't, I'd have thought.

The upside of 'professionalism' in this sense is that the public are protected from quacks; the downside is that the 'professionals' can exploit their privileged position to their own advantage. George Bernard Shaw called professions 'conspiracies against the laity.'

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roz


Posts: 1,796
Joined: Mar 2005
Post: #17
30-06-2011 09:56 PM

The usual Abfall from Brian and a few other German words I remember well but won't mention here.

Teachers lives have changed in the last few decades. They have to work long hours to deliver a much more complicated curriculum with more stringent standards and a heap more criticism awaiting them if they make mistakes. My partner is a teacher and on average he works 10-12 hours per week in the evenings and weekends catching up on marking and lesson planning. Thats almost two whole days extra, but I say that with a pinch of salt as a day for him starts by 8am and finishes at 6pm- thats 50 hours per week plus 10-12= over 60 hours. Did you work 60 hours a week as a matter of routine, then Brian? I suspect not. Thats almost twice the contracted hours. Work out what the hourly rate for that is. I;m sure your teachers taught you how to add up if seemingly not to think critically and present logical well informed arguments.

All this in the context of fairly low salaries in the first place with little scope for progression especially now that budgets are restricted and schools are looking to cap teachers pay locally and are asking them not to move beyond the main scale as they can;t afford to pay them. Pensions are deferred salary and many people chose to go into professions with traditionally lower salaries because of the prospect of secure and reasonable pensions. However gold plated is something that few people will recognise as something coming to them.

Londondrz, you may pay into a private pension, but you probably still benefit from tax breaks and National Insurance savings so I would be wary too as people like you might be next on the Governments list.

I also went to school in the late 60s and 70s and do in fact remember teachers going on strike, so I don;t know where you lived Brian- a different planet perhaps.

I also work in a local authority where I work overtime for which I do not get paid, to achieve outcomes in public service on which many members of the public rely. I work in the same building as social workers who were still there at 8pm when I left the office this evening and who get paid around £34k for fairly arduous responsibilities and workloads. All this talk about goal plated anything is a load of rubbish-both I and my partner will be extremely lucky to get anything like £10k a year when we retire so I don;t know where this comes from. People are very lucky anyway to have been able to have worked long enough and consistently to acquire any sort of decent pension

In addition, teaching like a lot of public service work is hard work and the prospect of having to hang on to 68 is a joke as it simply is not an option for many people due to the difficulty of the work. Employers in any sector dont really want people of 68 hanging around.

All of this extension of peoples working lives is also ridiculous as there is so much ageism around that keeping ones job until your in your mid 60s is extremely difficult. Having been around for a bit it has become apparent how often people over 50 are booted out of any organisation on some pretext or other as they cant be controlled in the way that younger people be as they are not so easily intimidated or bullied. The other issue of course is reducing the disposable income of a fairly large group of people is not going to help the economy.

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jgdoherty


Posts: 372
Joined: Nov 2007
Post: #18
30-06-2011 10:49 PM

Roz's reply is excellent and omits only one significant factor.

As a reasoned society we should never set aside the respect that is due to those who provide a lifetime's public service and who deliver those duties professionally and diligently. The qualities of services articulated in Roz's post should be recognsed.

To describe a protest that is undertaken in order to protect what can only be described as an entitlement as flawed, is dogma of a category on its own.

It serves only to irrationally set aside public servants' dedication and thereby to insult and offer a level of disrespect that is genuinely untenable in a reasoned mind.

Does Abfall equate to ordure ?

DHT's astonishment at the absence of a solid metric of what is measurably affordable is supported by the parliamentary PAC which has called upon the coalition to define exactly what they mean by "affordable".

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notstoppin


Posts: 32
Joined: Jun 2009
Post: #19
01-07-2011 07:30 AM

Londondrz - are you really suggesting that, if you can't strike, no-one should be able to? Pursue that argument to its logical conclusion and no-one would be allowed to do anything!

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Londondrz


Posts: 1,538
Joined: Apr 2006
Post: #20
01-07-2011 11:00 AM

I am not suugesting that no-one not be allowed to strike but why the teachers are striking. They know it would make little difference to their cause if they did and that it would cause working people like myself and my wife a great deal of hastle but still did it.

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