In direct opposition to common belief, John Gordon of the Public Service Alliance of Canada says that civil servants are worse-paid than private sector workers:
“Here we are again,” says John Gordon, the president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada that represents 165,000 workers.
“Every time the government gets into [trouble] they kind of ramp up the rhetoric and the Canadian public starts to believe them . . .” he said.
In general terms, he added, his members’ wages run behind those in comparable positions in the private sector.
His workers are an easy target, he said, because the government fails to explain what it means to get rid of public servants — that services provided to the public would be affected.
For example, Mr. Gordon points to the work done by federal public servants during the H1N1 crisis to get vaccines in place and deal with the pandemic.
“It’s easy to broad brush it and say they should be freezing wages, which they have already done and cutting public services, which they are already doing . . .” he said, but added that the public has to ask itself what services it would like to see gone.
You see, unlike in the bloated private sector, where jobs are for life, and pensions are awesome, civil servants are overworked and underpaid. Any hint of reducing the costs of the civil service will automatically produce the most painful cuts for the public — that’s how the game is played. Even a freeze would somehow, through the arcane alchemy of public service financing, result in cuts only in the services most visible to the public.
Update, 16 March: An interesting sidelight to this is reported in Hit and Run:
California citizens are now encountering “state and local government officials [who are] increasingly . . . blaming budget cuts and furloughs when they withhold or delay the release of information requested under the state Public Records Act.”
