You honestly believe the likes of Sibbald and Whelan at Unite will be docked a day's pay when this day of action goes ahead!! No wonder they find it so easy to get the lemmings over the cliff.

So you thought he/she should respect your decision to strike but you couldn't respect his/hers decision not to!!

I get your point, but found it galling to hear David Cameron dismissing these figures as lack of mandate when precisely 23% of the electorate voted for his party at the 2010 General Election.

When was the last general election with a turn out in the 30% region?

Thanks for the reply, I'll take a look.

I'm not generally in favour of a cap on potential earnings, but I am in favour of a system that allows transparency of decision making, and that is fair an equal to all.

I understand that there are many in unions that are simply trying to look out for not only themselves but also their co workers, and this is honourable, however as with many areas of society, the few bad apples can rot the whole barrel, and this appears to be the case I see at the moment.

Let's hope that for all concerned, a workable, long term solution can be found quickly, and that those who seek to individually profit from the misfortune of others are left contemplating their own principles as a result.

well this argumen was put forward the Danny Alexander when he was condeming the strike quite vociferously ,but The Libdem share of the vote at the last general election was about 19%.so to insinuate that the unions dont have a mandate to call a strike ,then neither does the tory led coalition have either to enfoce the kind of policies they are doing

In every case it was a whole lot more than voted against a strike.

bang right! the staff are getting short changed too after VLS staff are being asked to cover the job's of the people who've left with no plans to replace them which is heaping more pressure and stress on the staff, and the uni is now looking into setting up a redundancy commitee for the first time ever after stating that it has always had a no redundancy policy, so to me he ( the VC ) while saving £35 million is not exactly looking after his staff is he?

then after all this the staff's pensions (which will be a fraction of his pension) are getting attacked after them paying into it for years and years. is this fair? i personally don't think so.

Unfortunately fair isn't always one of the decision criteria. I really feel for the people who are under threat of having their pensions eroded, regardless of their current standing vis-a-vis the private sector on pensions and other terms. I am fortunate enough to be on a final salary pension scheme in the private sector at the moment, and whilst I fully expect this to close in the next couple of years (it's been closed to new entrants for 8 years or so), I don't expect the company to bankrupt itself, therefore costing me my current income as well as any future pension, by trying to maintain this current pension provision at the levels I currently have.

Sometimes it's about getting the best possible outcome for everyone not just yourself, regardless of how difficult this may be to accept.

That is fine and right, but often the temporary downturn like we see now, is used as a way of bringing long term commitments down. Then in 5 or 10 years time, we see companies making big profits and paying big dividends.

Pensions are a long term investment, the only reason a company wouldnt be able to pay them as promised is because they are either a) poorly run and negotiated contracts they couldnt honour and capitalism demands they suffer or b) they are having a temporary blip which leavees them unable to meet their obligations.

If the answer is A) then they should be taken for everything they can, It isnt up to the people they owe money to, to prop up a failing poorly run business. If it is B) then the problem is temporary and so should be the solution.

On the subject of top peoples high pay. It has indeed got way out of control as no one needs these huge incomes and they do cause so much upset. Much of the flak is going in the direction of the bankers and while some of this is valid much is not valid.

Yes there were/are villains in banking but they are in the minority and to lump all bankers is plain wrong. So before we throw out the baby with the bathwater we should consider the following:

The Financial Services sector (FS) made a total tax contribution of 53.4 Billion GBP in 2010 equal to 11.2% of total government tax receipts ie; the largest sector. In 2007 this was 13.9% and we are already missing the drop in tax receipts.

Thye FS sector employs 1 million workers (3.5%) of the total workforce generating 24.5 Billion in total employment tax. It has lost 91,00 workers from 2009-2010.

The average salary was 71,236 contributing 40,451 in tax. The banks are thebiggest tax payers in the FS sector & largest employer and largest payer of employment tax

The new 50% income tax will increase the FS sectors tax contribution even further.

Moving to the pay of CEO's of public companies. Well putting it bluntly unless you are a shareholder (owner) it has nothing to do with you. The shareholders have the opportunity to have their say regarding pay and how they attract the best top people but it has nothing to do with the rest of us.

Where we should be some influence is on the pay awarded to the top executives of the state funded sector. eg BBC & quangos etc.

Only the private sector creates wealth and we need the private sector to produce the profits to pay the taxes needed by govenment to run the country including paying for the public sector. So yes we much get rid of the cowboys but we must not put this important sector at a disadavantage to the rest of the world.

Smokey, the scenario most applicable in my case is A, however I completely fail to see what "taking them for all I can" will do to support my longer term prospects with this company, who happen to be one of the top 3 global companies in every market sector they operate in.

Where is the benefit in taking any organisation for all I can in the longer term? There is a finite amount of money to go around, the choice people face is how much they want/need and where it will come from. Financially crippling the company in my case (or the country in the case of the public sector workers) is not a long term solution.

Largely agree. It is the pay of a few of the top level executives that raises most hackles. I wouldn't dream of suggesting that all bankers are deserving of this criticism.



Quite so. However, banks do cross, or blur, that line between public and private at times. I think recent events suggest that some regulation of their conduct is not inappropriate.

Ill remember that I have no stake in the running of public companies next time one asks for a government subsidy, a tax break, or a bailout. The next time a high-tech company says we need to subsidies the roll-out of superfast broadband we can just say, why? You are a public company we have no say in what you do! Next time the CBI propose tax cuts or cuts to employment legislation we can comfortably ignore what he is saying, we have no stake in either their success or failure.

The next time Vodafone wants to avoid £8b in tax, its not our problem, no new enterprise zones, no trade missions to inhumane middle east countries to lobby for arms companies.

Yes but the difference is that in the election if people don't vote, they will still have a representative. They may not have their voice heard but, as long as voting is not compulsory that is a matter for them.

It is a different thing altogether to have a business or the whole country brought to a halt by a vote in favour of doing so of a small percentage of the voting population which is an even smaller percentage of the actual workforce.

By that logic it would be impossible to have a strike without having a national referendum on it.

It depends on whether or not the problem is long term or not. If it is a long term problem then your long term prospects aren’t particularly bright anyway, if it is a short-term problem then you have no need to make a long term sacrifice.

What is more likely is that the money saved from minimising your enumeration will not be needed to safeguard the company but to give to shareholders.

When the public sector work forces were created,particularly the direct labour ,public works dept's.It was done to stop the private firms getting together and naming their own price I.E this is the lowest we will tender.It was also decided to give these people a fair deal ,decent pension scheme,sick pay,paid leave,not just holiday stamps,protective work clothing etc.Something they were not getting at Slap it on and MakeHaste LDT,or Joe bloggs and co.All these attacks On the public sector all went on in the famous novel "The Rgged Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressel.It was written about 1905 it could have been written last year

Smokey, the company has over 1BUSD in the (global) bank, but on a country level the pension commitments are unsustainable in the longer term. I have been through the "pay more in" scenario twice already, and the company still has to add £20M to the pot every year just to get the annual pension account to balance. Given that there are no new people paying in, and that the population are living longer, and therefore taking from the pot for longer, how can this be sustained in even the medium term?

As the company have a number of different pensions running in UK, regardless of the other schemes from outside the UK I can't see how this is a sustainable proposition going forward.

Ultimately the current scheme is more generous than the company can sustain at a local level (equivalent to a UK country level for the wider public sector debate) and therefore it has to change. I don't like it, but I have to accept it.

No it wouldn't. I think by "workforce" he refers to the union's membership.

In all fairness, I think the low turnout does suggest some pretty widespread apathy for strike action within the unions. It's unlikely that significant numbers of people in favour of the strike (the ones who feel most strongly) would fail to vote, so the small sample has obvious suggestions of bias.

One possible interpretation is that around 70% of the collective membership of those unions didn't actually support the strike.

Comparisons with General Elections are somewhat flawed, as you compare a vote for elected representatives, who are usually largely unknown to most voters, with a relatively simple yes/no question.

Well quite easily. They have $1BN sat in a bank. What they are asking for isn’t for you to make a sacrifice to keep the company going, or a sacrifice to safeguard the future in the company. Its asking you to make a sacrifice so it can pay out higher dividends to shareholders.

It’s a genuine question but I cant see why you think it is in your best interests, for you to make a sacrifice so other, likely richer, people can make more money?

But that was the companies error. The company has offered you remuneration, you have agreed to it. Why is it now acceptable for them to renege on that agreement so that it can pay out higher dividends?

What do you mean by that?

The lines between public and private companies is blurred. With banks, they are largely taxpayer owned, and in some ways the pay of top executives is very much the business of us as tax payers. However, a contract is a contract, and although I'm no legal eagle, I would imagine that there would be little that could be done to get around a contract saying someone is given a 400% bonus as part of their package.
Where the previous government missed a trick was by not getting more involved in how the banks actually worked when they nationalisded them. It could have made the situation much better.

On the subject of infrastructure, again there are companies which you could call semi-public sector. The likes of BT & E.ON. They are private companies, yet the government wants to have their cake and eat it. They want to tell players in the energy market what they can charge, and how much profit they can make, but also rely on these companies to have the capital to invest in the future. new power stations, new broadband networks all cost billions of pounds. The reason energy companies are percieved to make large profits isn't because they are greedy and want to make loads of cash, they are huge organisations, with a huge investment in infrastructure without which the country couldn't function.

It's impossible to cap earnings in the private sector, it is simply market forces at play. The workforce is the work force. If they want a cut of profits, they need to become the bosses and start their own business. Harsh, but that is capitalism.

Don't forget, the large salaries taken by directors are often taxed at 40% to 50% so they're putting more money into the country than the whinging masses of worker ants.

And, by they way, I have been on strike for the last fifteen years but nobody has yet noticed and I am still collecting a wage.

If you're talking about the directors at the city banks, very few of them will be paying anything like that amount, and many will be paying no income tax at all.