The view from the fence.

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.