“Britain is braced for a winter of strikes – yet a public backlash just hasn’t happened”

Dec 16, 2022 | In the news

There’s a lot of support, I know, for the striking nurses/rail workers/posties/firemen et al. But you don’t have to go far to hear quite a bit of ‘you know some of them earn £40,000 a year not bad is it and they get great pensions don’t know what they’re complaining about there’s no money anyway’. Well, public sector pensions aren’t bad but are certainly not as good as they used to be; and most of those moaning wouldn’t or couldn’t do the jobs which they seem to think are cushy numbers. But it’s the inequality of the whole darned thing (Life? The economy?) which these days does get my gander. The average Premiership footballer earns in a week three times the salary of the average nurse. The average FTSE CEO had a 23% pay rise this year. And it’s not surprising that posties on £25k a year find it somewhat enervating that Royal Mail’s chief exec earns £62k a month. There is, as there always has been, plenty of money around; it’s just not necessarily in the right places. So. Power to the People and Freedom for Tooting! (kids etc.)

Read more here

“The working-from-home illusion fades”

“The working-from-home illusion fades”

Are workers working from home more or less productive than those catching the 7.02am to London Bridge every day? ‘Probably sitting at home in their bleedin’ jim-jams’, said someone recently of a less-than-helpful call centre employee, the assumption being that, were they surrounded by colleagues and with a manager cracking the whip, he or she would have sorted his energy bill more efficiently.