Life in the Public Sector

Somewhere in England in 2010
I'm feeling hounded. I'm a middle aged, hard working, tax paying, full time worker in the public sector. The newspapers are full of the financial crisis caused by the ginormous national debt which our (unelected) government says we must reduce by slashing our public services and reducing the benefits of the poorest in our society. To this end, the government has softened up the general public to the idea of huge redundancies in the public sector by systematically portraying public sector workers as faceless work-shy pen pushing jobsworths. This is making me very, very cross indeed.

I work in the public sector, the NHS to be precise. I'm a manager; I manage a team of people that provide a service to the organisation. We help other people in the organisation to work out the best, fairest, most efficient and effective ways of providing health services to the 300,000 people that live in this city.  We have to ensure that every single man, woman and child can get their health care free at the point of delivery. Because that's what they expect and it's what they pay their taxes for. So if they need a doctor - they can see a doctor. If they need a prescription, they get a prescription. If they need an expensive test or drug, they get an expensive test or drug. If they need a dentist, there is a dentist. An eye test? - there you go. An operation? - of course. All this stuff doesn't happen by magic you know - someone has to work it all out - how many doctors, nurses, dentists, opticians, drugs, hospitals, wards, theatres will it take? How much will it cost, where should we add, take away. But no, according to the newspapers, if you're not actually mopping the brow of a dying child, we public sector workers are parasites on the face of society. Blood sucking bureaucrats sitting with out feet up on the desk, whiling away the hours and years til we can pick up our fat pensions and retire to our stately homes in the country.

Does the nation at large really think that the only conceivable reason anyone would choose to work in the public sector is because their burning ambition is to have an averagely paid job with an average pension at the end of it - as long as they stick it out for 40 years? To read the papers, anyone would think we public sector workers walked into our jobs through some privileged grace and favour scheme granted to us at birth. Rather than applying for them in open competition and getting through a fair interview process.

I saw my job advertised in the paper, many years ago now, and I thought 'That looks interesting'. And it has been interesting which is why I'm still doing it. I could have applied for a job in the private sector doing much the same thing (I analyse data) and probably have been paid a lot more. But its always been much more interesting analyzing health and the need for health care than analyzing the market for widgets and calculating how many people would need to buy my widgets for the company to make a nice fat profit ripping people off.

Now the powers that be have told us we're rubbish and the organisation we work for will be abolished because the private sector can do it so much better than we can.

That would be the private sector that ran the banks and brought us to the brink of ruin. The private sector that lent billions of pounds to people without two half-pence to rub together and went bleating to the government to bail them out when they couldn't pay it back? The private sector that took over provision of school meals and fed our children 'turkey twizzlers' - a combination of mechanically recovered chicken and fat so disgusting you wouldn't feed it to a dog? The private sector that took over hospital cleaning, sacked all the staff and re-employed them on minimum wage?

It makes my blood boil.