Where people are paid per hour is the greatest source of in-efficiency. In both public and private sectors this is abused. If an employee turns up for work and clock in at 8:00 am and clock out at 7:00 pm, but yet only does 4 hours productive work the other hours are a direct loss and unrecoverable. Where agreed set salaries are in place the hours can be recouped and production maintained.
This shows a distinct lack of understanding of most public sector work environments, and many private sector environments. How do you measure the productive work of a policy advisor. It may months of meetings/calls/emails/draft to get a policy idea accepted by relevant officials, and then all that work might get blown out of the water by a political whim. Does that mean the policy advisor was not productive? If you're lucky, one phone might just result in a change of legislation that improves the quality of life for thousands of people (I've seen this happen), but that is really down to luck - not down to the productivity of the advisor. How do you measure the success of a Community Welfare Officer - is it the number of cases he sees (which creates an incentive to rush through cases, regardless of the result), or how much/little welfare they provide? The same issues apply to many knowledge worker roles in the privae sector. In much of the public sector, it is effectively impossible to quantitatively measure productivity. In the UK, several chief constables recently announced publicly that they have decided to ignore Govt instructions about achieving specific targets and they are moving back towards empowering their officers on the street to deliver good policing.
Maybe this post says it all. In the private sector this "them and Us", "Workers and management" ethos is very rare and in the truly competitive sectors it is non-existent. Basically if I don't do my job properly and efficiently the people who work for me can’t pay their mortgage and if they don't work the same way I can't pay mine. There is no "them and us", we are all in the same boat. I hate when some bearded clown from a public sector union starts prattling on about "the workers" as if they were a bunch of half-wits who couldn't look after themselves and "Management" as if managers didn't work (and in many cases were promoted to their positions from the roles that they now manage). This is not a Dickens novel; it's 21st centaury Ireland with all the laws and safeguards that go with it.
Indeed, this kind of polarisation of 'them and us' is generally unhelpful. Just as the kind of polarisation of public vs private as frequently seen on this thread and others on AAM is unhelpful.
Public sector and private sector aren't different worlds. Public sector staff and private sector staff aren't different races or cultures. They are all just people. People move to/from both sectors frequently. People generally do their best to do a decent day's work for a decent day's pay.
Yes, there are skivers on both sides of fence. Yes, there are great managers and bad managers on both sides of the fence. Trying to create division through polarised arguments will not solve any of the many problems that exist in both the public and private sectors.
I work in the public sector, and my administrator has been calling and emailing weekly the venue that hosted an event for us last year. We've been telling them each week that we owe them €4.5k and we'd like a valid invoice so we can pay this money. The great, competitive private sector business hasn't been able to produce a correct invoice in 4 months, despite the fact that we've given them the damn figures repeatedly.
We're all consumers, and we all come up against examples of great service and terrible service in both the public and private sectors. No-one has a monopoly on efficiency or inefficiency.
Those who like to believe the Daily Mail rants about overpaid and underworked public servants might like to check out some of the facts and conclusions from the recent OECD report on the Irish public services - see - Here's a few (admittedly selective) quotes;
From 1995 to 2005, public expenditures in Ireland experienced real increases of more than 5% annually, second only to Korea in the OECD . Much of this spending has been in the health and education sectors. [...] Much of these increases have reflected a need to play catch-up from historically low levels. In 2005, Ireland still had the third lowest public expenditure rates as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), third only to Korea and Mexico
The number of Public Service employees has increased significantly by 30%
between 1995 and 2007, but also from a low base relative to other OECD countries
Ireland’s real average annual growth rate in public expenditure between 1995 and 2005 was 5.1%, significantly slower than real GDP growth of
7.5% (Figure 1.1). Government policy therefore has actually decreased the total number of public sector employees as a percentage of the labour force and decreased the overall public sector wage bill as a percentage of GDP.
In comparison with other OECD countries, Ireland thus has been able to deliver public services with a public sector that is relatively small given the size of its economy and labour force (Table 1.1 and Figure 1.2). Even when factoring in infrastructure investment, Ireland has the third smallest total public expenditure as a percentage of GDP, and this figure has actually decreased over the past 10 years.
etc etc etc