[An ASTI delegate having his megaphone removed during Ruairi Quinn’s address yesterday in Wexford]
Megaphone diplomacy.
Class warfare.
They don’t know they were born.
Eamon Delaney writes:
We have teachers unions this week telling us all what a terrible life they have – yet they have shortest hours, longest holidays and very good pay, conditions that the rest of us, and European teachers, can only envy. But the unions are always angry – professionally angry, theatrically angry. And of course they will undoubtedly bring up the’ reckless bankers’ and other convenient whipping boys when in actual fact they should be celebrating how well off they are.
The reality is our public servants have got a very fortunate let off in our ‘fiscal corrections.’ Unlike in other EU countries, there were no compulsory redundancies and the pay cuts were minimal compared to the decimation visited on the private sector. The first of these cuts was, heaven forbid, a contribution to their own gold -plated pension, a thing the rest of us can only dream of.
This big let-off is thanks to the Labour party, of course, and a weak willed FG, who ring-fenced their public sector colleagues in the Croke Park deal and then, for good measure, in the Haddington Road deal, making sure that the only public servants likely to be among the 300,000 people at the welfare offices were those working there, at the hatch, with secure jobs.
Just look at the Haddington Road deal – public servants on over €65,000 will have their pay cuts reversed in three years. Nurses have to work an hour and a half extra per week, and teachers lose their supervision/substitution allowance but will have it restored in 2017. For the unions, this is great news, but they daren’t say so.
Better instead to keep up the moaning, as has always been done. No recognition here that the rest of us will have to pay for this big let off in longer hours and higher taxes, including among lower paid civil servants themselves. Meanwhile, the squeezed middle and the retail and SMEs continue to get hammered.
This is the great irony, that those with could complain the most are ground into silence and just trying to survive whereas those who should be grateful, such as many public servants like teachers, have the time and the job security to moan to high heaven. But was it ever any different?
Heckle!
Boo!
*ironic applause, walk-out*
Teachers lead the way in public sector whingefest (Eamon Delaney)
