Solidarity is a path towards fairness - Assessing work performance

During the darkest days of the recession, when nearly every worker in every sector faced bruising pay cuts and more demanding conditions — if they did not lose their job — any imposition on those employed by the State was characterised by the public sector unions as ‘an attack on the public service’. 

The suggestion was that these cuts, no matter how unavoidable, might have been hatched by heartless neo-conservatives during cocktail hour at Davos and that the recession was used as an excuse to cut the public sector pay bill.

On the other side of the fence, private sector workers looked on with a mixture of astonishment and envy as tens of thousands of public employees were offered, and took, early retirement supported by golden handshakes and pension packages unimaginable in their world except for a tiny percentage at the very top of the work pyramid. In the private sector, this process meant many workers were made redundant, often at an age when a return to work was very hard, but were paid no more than statutory redundancy. For them, the idea of an early pension was, and is, laughable.