As the recent public sector strikes help to turn private sector against public sector, thanks largely to the hideously biased media, I find myself in an odd position. After leaving college I worked in the retail industry for nine years, on and off, fitting a degree course in between. After the company I worked for went under, I found a job as a civil servant. Nothing particularly admirable or heroic – I’m no teacher, nurse or police officer, just a sit down job in an office.
Working in retail can be quite a bit more exhausting than it might appear. Presenting a helpful smiling face to your customers day in, day out, regardless of how you feel, or how much they make you wish you could simply spit in their eye and walk away. Christmas was ridiculous, and could involve working 80 hour weeks with no more than your regular 37.5 hours of salary to show for it. You had no real weekend, working almost every Saturday and many Sundays. Flexi-time? Don’t make me laugh. It was more difficult to be competent at that job than you think.
When I first started my public sector job, I could scarcely believe it. A canteen. A gym. Childcare facilities. (All subsidised, but none even close to free.) Never being expected to work more than your contracted hours – such a thing is actively frowned upon. Every weekend off. Flexible working patterns. More holidays. Slightly higher pay. A pension.
With it still being quite new to me, I can with a certainty understand fully the frustration of people in the private sector, angry that us, who are so privileged in comparison, are protesting changes to our pensions. Asking someone who has worked a manual labour job for minimum wage their whole lives with no pension beyond the state one to feel sorry for a teacher on a decent salary annoyed at losing a part of a generous pension is a bit much.
But. And it is a big but. The argument that you should not fight to protect what rights you have simply because there are many people with fewer rights is not a sensible argument. It is an understandable frustration, but being angry at striking public sector workers for refusing to accept diminishing terms of employment, bringing them more in line with what you’ve lived with all your life is pointless. If a starving homeless man told the manual labour worker that he shouldn’t complain and should live hand to mouth on the streets like him, the argument would not make sense. A better option, surely, would be to improve the starving man’s standard of living.
Obviously, I make no claims of expertise, but surely it should not be impossible to improve working standards within the private sector. The relentless drive for profit above all is damaging. Instead of looking to prop up shareholders and CEOs, the money could be channelled into providing pensions, increasing low wages, easing long working patterns. Not that our current economic climate is geared to that sort of thing, obviously. Putting people before companies, profit and production is at the moment too fundamental a shift to really be feasible. But it could be done. It should be done. If a company cannot be profitable without providing decent working conditions it is not a sustainable business venture. So, while the anger toward the apparently privileged public sector is understandable, it is sorely misplaced and better directed at the small minority of very, very rich people getting richer off the back of others who are willing to put up with crappy working conditions for the security of a small regular wage.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Things annoy me.
Too often, people make their minds up about things before they know the truth. When a person’s worldview is informed by their ingrained ideology, they will already know what they think of everything. Everything has to be filtered through that ideology. They refuse to acknowledge objective truth if there’s a chance it conflicts with their own subjective viewpoint. Like wanting the death penalty brought back to the UK, even though there is not a shred of evidence anywhere that it is any more effective a deterrent. They just want to see people who they perceive as bad punished. Never mind the clear evidence that psychopathic behaviour is a form of mental disorder that could be treated – that’s just the lefties trying to give monsters human rights. Well, get over it. Humans have rights. Humans who have committed the most atrocious acts imaginable have rights. A right to liberty (which, in my own hair-splitting and admittedly rather sketchy opinion means to determine your own path through life, accepting that actions will have consequences – imprisonment is a deprivation of freedom, not liberty, and is a consequence of exercising one’s right to liberty in a way unacceptable to the majority). A right to not have the ability to pursue a route that may eventually lead to positive change crushed out of them. It won’t ever change. People are uninterested in a possible treatment which could one day prevent these awful things from happening, because that will deny them the chance to be outraged. People love being outraged.
People who fall for the garbage shat out by the press about all of our problems being caused by the reckless spending of a previous Government, and how they’re being compounded by greedy civil servants on pensions fit for royalty and the apparent armies of benefit cheats out there. People blinded to the fact that compared to tax avoidance, the current civil service pension scheme won’t be all that much of a drain on our economy in the coming decades, or by the fact that economies are more heavily influenced by stock markets and banks than they are by people walking a dog while on disability allowance. Or even the fact that if they could get Bono, George Osborne, Vodafone, Boots and Barclays to pay their taxes we wouldn’t have a problem at all.
Energy companies that inform you in all seriousness that unfortunately even though they haven’t raised their prices for ages, they now have no choice but to increase the cost of your gas and electric by 15%. We’re very sorry, they tell you, but the price at source just keeps rising, thanks to those civil wars those silly people keep fighting over our product. They don’t mention at the time that they make billions a year in pure profit. Billions. Do they really need to make quite so much? Do they really have to make more than the year before every year, lest they be considered some kind of failure? Would it not do simply to make millions? Or even hundreds of thousands? Then you could help prevent old people from dying in Winter due to being unable to afford to switch on their heating. Wouldn’t that be nice? You rancid bags of ball sweat.
I’m not blind to the clear evidence that I’m equally stymied by my own blinkered ideology, although I try to keep an open mind for as long as possible. While that may be true, I’ve long since come to terms with my own hypocrisy. Also, my ideology pretty much amounts to ‘don’t be a dick’. Granted, I don’t always succeed, but you’d be surprised by how many people, Governments and organisations resolutely fail at it repeatedly and purposefully. Then again, maybe you wouldn’t.
And it isn’t just left and right. There’s a positive and negative version. People who will try to convince you that everything’s just dandy while the sky falls down around their ears. People who try to tell you that running everything from the health service to schools and every Government agency in between like a private sector business where profit is all would be a great idea, and is just what this country needs. People who cut away at your support structure, removing piece by piece everything you need to make your life worth living, while telling you that we’re all in this together as though it is actually true.
On the opposite side to that are people who will see doom, gloom and treachery in all things. They are automatically on one side of the fence, so they must force everything through a filter until it reinforces their bizarrely paranoid way of thinking. And reinforces other people’s opinion of them as a bit of a dick, until you simply can’t go back and have to keep forging ahead because you can’t ever admit that you might not have been right about a few things. Until you end up saying things like there is a secret gay agenda in schools to ‘gayify’ kids, or that doctors want to perform as many abortions as possible and they will try to convince a scared pregnant woman to undergo one whether it is right for her or not (take a bow for those two pearls, Melanie Phillips).
What is so hard about taking each development as it comes and seeing it for what it actually is before viewing it through your ideological prism? About thinking things through and trying to minimise the damage your actions might cause others? About putting yourself in other people’s shoes, just for a minute? If I could have any superpower in the world, it would be the power to make people see what it is like to be someone else, just for a few minutes, just to give them a chance to make better decisions. Or at least to not be such dicks.
People who fall for the garbage shat out by the press about all of our problems being caused by the reckless spending of a previous Government, and how they’re being compounded by greedy civil servants on pensions fit for royalty and the apparent armies of benefit cheats out there. People blinded to the fact that compared to tax avoidance, the current civil service pension scheme won’t be all that much of a drain on our economy in the coming decades, or by the fact that economies are more heavily influenced by stock markets and banks than they are by people walking a dog while on disability allowance. Or even the fact that if they could get Bono, George Osborne, Vodafone, Boots and Barclays to pay their taxes we wouldn’t have a problem at all.
Energy companies that inform you in all seriousness that unfortunately even though they haven’t raised their prices for ages, they now have no choice but to increase the cost of your gas and electric by 15%. We’re very sorry, they tell you, but the price at source just keeps rising, thanks to those civil wars those silly people keep fighting over our product. They don’t mention at the time that they make billions a year in pure profit. Billions. Do they really need to make quite so much? Do they really have to make more than the year before every year, lest they be considered some kind of failure? Would it not do simply to make millions? Or even hundreds of thousands? Then you could help prevent old people from dying in Winter due to being unable to afford to switch on their heating. Wouldn’t that be nice? You rancid bags of ball sweat.
I’m not blind to the clear evidence that I’m equally stymied by my own blinkered ideology, although I try to keep an open mind for as long as possible. While that may be true, I’ve long since come to terms with my own hypocrisy. Also, my ideology pretty much amounts to ‘don’t be a dick’. Granted, I don’t always succeed, but you’d be surprised by how many people, Governments and organisations resolutely fail at it repeatedly and purposefully. Then again, maybe you wouldn’t.
And it isn’t just left and right. There’s a positive and negative version. People who will try to convince you that everything’s just dandy while the sky falls down around their ears. People who try to tell you that running everything from the health service to schools and every Government agency in between like a private sector business where profit is all would be a great idea, and is just what this country needs. People who cut away at your support structure, removing piece by piece everything you need to make your life worth living, while telling you that we’re all in this together as though it is actually true.
On the opposite side to that are people who will see doom, gloom and treachery in all things. They are automatically on one side of the fence, so they must force everything through a filter until it reinforces their bizarrely paranoid way of thinking. And reinforces other people’s opinion of them as a bit of a dick, until you simply can’t go back and have to keep forging ahead because you can’t ever admit that you might not have been right about a few things. Until you end up saying things like there is a secret gay agenda in schools to ‘gayify’ kids, or that doctors want to perform as many abortions as possible and they will try to convince a scared pregnant woman to undergo one whether it is right for her or not (take a bow for those two pearls, Melanie Phillips).
What is so hard about taking each development as it comes and seeing it for what it actually is before viewing it through your ideological prism? About thinking things through and trying to minimise the damage your actions might cause others? About putting yourself in other people’s shoes, just for a minute? If I could have any superpower in the world, it would be the power to make people see what it is like to be someone else, just for a few minutes, just to give them a chance to make better decisions. Or at least to not be such dicks.
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