I'd love to see .............
those in the public sector try and do a proper job for a few weeks - without flexi-time, two hour lunch breaks and a 37 hour week.

As somebody who worked in local government for over ten years before escaping to work in the real world I think I'm qualified to state that:

80% of local council white collar staff do sweet f.a. and get paid a shit-load of money for doing it. They get institutionalised after a while - 20 years of pasing the same piece of paper backwards and forwards between 10 different departments means they become useless in the real world.

There are whole departments purely in charge of 'policy' - they spend months producing a 40 page document on some utterly trivial subject, full of totally incomprehensible management speak which no will ever read and then a few years later they'll rewrite it 'cos the last one is now out of date.

But by far the two biggest wastes of space in the local council are social services and HR - despite working there ten years I never actually managed to figure out what HR did (except get in the bastard way - oh and insist we interview a guy in a wheelchair for a paviours job)

As for social services (specifically social workers) what a fucking work-shy lot they were - one lass was on the sick for FIVE years due to stress - every six months she'd come back to work for a couple of days, become 'stressed' again and go back on the sick - but 'cos she never had more than six months off she was on full-pay for the whole five years.
They had human-rights at the council before the EC had even thought of it.
(apollo36uk, Wed 28 Jan 2009, 13:49, 3 replies)

I agree to some of what you say
I've worked with loads of people that could be classed as career civil servants, and they have certainly become institutionalised. I saw the horror in their eyes when computers started replacing pen and paper - big, burly hardmen being reduced to gibbering wrecks because they suddenly had a typewriter with a telly attached to it on their desks.

I could be classed as a career civil servant, I suppose, having always worked in the public sector. Not really through choice initially; I started on a casual contract because I would rather work than not, it was the first job that came along, and I ended up being sucked in and trying to get out of it again for a few years.

I eventually found something that I get a buzz out of, that just so happens to still be in the public sector, and so now I don't mind. My current organisation is a bit different in that it has a very definite private sector vibe to it in terms of the work ethic. It actually threw me a bit for a few months and I did question my decision to join, but stuck with it. Now - I love it, I'm busier than I ever have been and it's great.

Point taken about the sick leave stuff though. And sacking. I've only ever seen two people sacked - one a senior manager who was discovered to have a stash of hard core porn in his desk; the other a casual admin person who was marched off the premises for managing to reconfigure the stand alone stationary ordering PC in order to send emails to his girlfriend - in the days before emails were commonplace. The kid was a genius...
( Davros' Granddad a voice of calm reason in a world of spastics., Wed 28 Jan 2009, 14:18, closed)

I really can't comment on your local council
But I have worked within the NHS and social services for 9 years, and I can assure you that the established culture is that of no lunch breaks at all (I certainly haven't taken one since I was band 4 - ie earning about £11,500 in a graduate job, you can't really blame me!). Flexitime is common yes, of course, to enable call out for emergencies etc., wouldn't you be grateful of this if someone close to you needed care at night or weekends?

As for a 37 hour working week. We are all contracted to work 37.5 hours under A4C. I would estimate my average working week to actually be around 60 hours. And there is no such thing as overtime pay (for the vast majority of staff anyway).

I have done more 'proper' jobs than I am able to blot out the memory of - including working in the city, in admin, as a librarian, as a waitress, in sales, as a runner, and in probate. If 'the real world' means working less than a 45 hour week on a reasonable salary with no chance of being physically assaulted, not having to witness the worst of societies pain and suffering, then yeah, it would be a shock to most of my colleagues.
(cherrynicola, Wed 28 Jan 2009, 15:01, closed)

Those 2 hour lunch breaks...
Anytime I was 'at lunch' in my previous job, I was in fact desperately trying to buy myself some time to actually sort out what the person who was ringing me wanted me to do, whilst balancing it with the other 300 million things I had to do that day.
(grandmaswhiskers, Wed 28 Jan 2009, 18:30, closed)