{"id":3115,"date":"2010-03-15T12:55:41","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T16:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=3115"},"modified":"2010-03-16T12:39:46","modified_gmt":"2010-03-16T16:39:46","slug":"psac-president-says-public-servants-not-paid-as-well-as-private-sector-workers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2010\/03\/15\/psac-president-says-public-servants-not-paid-as-well-as-private-sector-workers\/","title":{"rendered":"PSAC president says public servants not paid as well as private sector workers"},"content":{"rendered":"

In direct opposition to common belief, John Gordon of the Public Service Alliance of Canada<\/a> says that civil servants are worse-paid than private sector workers:<\/p>\n

\n

“Here we are again,” says John Gordon, the president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada that represents 165,000 workers.<\/p>\n

“Every time the government gets into [trouble] they kind of ramp up the rhetoric and the Canadian public starts to believe them . . .” he said.<\/p>\n

In general terms, he added, his members’ wages run behind those in comparable positions in the private sector.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You see, unlike in the bloated private sector, where jobs are for life, and pensions are awesome<\/em>, civil servants are overworked and underpaid. Any hint of reducing the costs of the civil service will automatically<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Update, 16 March<\/b>: An interesting sidelight to this is reported in Hit and Run<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

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.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,84],"tags":[509,95,392],"class_list":["post-3115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-cancon","category-government","tag-civilservice","tag-jobs","tag-unions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-Of","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3115"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3115\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3136,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3115\/revisions\/3136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}