My beloved wife will be – assuming there’s no last-minute breakthrough – one of the 300,000 public servants on strike tomorrow. Like many of them, she’s not especially keen on the strike. She’d much rather be at work, with her students.
But collective action is collective action. And nobody can deny that the public sector unions, for all their villainy, have a point when they say that their members have been hit very hard by the cost of living. Just like the rest of us.
There will, of course, be a pay deal. This Government, which has never yet found a problem it would not attempt to solve by throwing more money in its general direction. But in doing so, it will create more problems for itself.
So the public sector will get a pay rise. The alternative – strikes – is not something that Government can live with. But handing them a pay rise will set a bad precedent.
Ireland’s public sector is – as most of us who don’t work in it know – very inefficient. One reason for that is that it suits politicians perfectly for the system to be inefficient. Hear me out.
The best and most successful politicians are the ones who can make it work for their constituents – the idea being that you get so frustrated dealing with the system that you eventually call up the local TD or Councillor who makes a phone call and suddenly the system delivers what people need.
In fact, if you know who to talk to and what to ask for, the public service in Ireland can magically transform from “frustrating” into “boy I’m glad I pay my taxes” very quickly. And who knows who to talk to? The local TD or Councillor.
A system that actually worked effectively would not be good for politicians, especially in an Irish context where “he got me the medical card” is the most effective way to win votes. Whether TDs understand this themselves, or whether it is subconscious, is hard to say. But if the system was less frustrating, we would need our TDs less. And that would shut off an invaluable supply of votes.
How do you win elections in Ireland? It is not, dear reader, by fixing a broken system. It is by helping voters navigate the broken system with your help.
If they did try to fix it, they would be screwing themselves: Imagine what would happen to the politician who said “we’re going to cut 100,000 public sector jobs and get rid of a lot of paperwork”.
It sounds good on paper, but in reality most of you likely know somebody who does one of those jobs.
Consider the efforts they’ve made, over the years, to “fix” the public sector:
During the last recession, major efforts were made to make the public sector work harder. Readers of the correct age may remember the Croke Park and Haddington Road Deals, which essentially asked public sector workers to do more hours for the same pay. The basic idea was that if you added more hours, then the “pay divided by hours worked” sum would look better, and the Government could say it was getting bang for its buck.
But of course, those hours are quite often a sham: Meetings. Training Days. Doing paperwork. The extra hours worked do not equate to more time with patients for nurses, or more time with students for teachers, or more hours chasing crooks for the Gardai.
Their net effect, arguably, was to lower morale, create a shortage of applicants, and leave the public with broadly the same public service as before. It was an accounting trick, not a drive for efficiency.
Meanwhile, the size of the state has dramatically expanded. The best figures I can find suggest that from 2010 to the present day, the total number of state employees has gone from about 300,000 to nearly 420,000: A near 40% increase in the number of people employed.
So Ireland now has a bigger, bloated, less efficient public sector. And all of the people in it need – like the rest of us – to heat their homes and fuel their cars, so they need more money.
That money will come from everyone else. It will come from the private sector. Where businesses have just been told in the budget that they must also pay their own minimum wage workers more. And where workers, in general, work longer hours and have lesser benefits.
It’s no individual worker’s fault, and the public versus private debate doesn’t really help. It’s the fault of politicians, maintaining a system that suits them but doesn’t really suit anybody else.
JMG
It's the same with the criminal justice system. It's designed to never solve crime. If we could add something to our water that would magically make everyone a law abiding citizen there would be a whole cohort of people out of work .. Gardaí, prison officers, lawyers, barristers, judges, probation officers, etc. The justice system we have is designed to keep crime and everyone who benefits from it ticking along nicely.