General Chat

Firefighters confirm four-hour strike in England and Wales - The strike will take place between noon and 16:00.

Firefighters in England and Wales will go on strike on 25 September in a row over pensions, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has confirmed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24129141

Think this might be start of many more strikes. I honestly think they seldom if ever achieve anything and play into the Tories hands on run-in to a General Election.

Strikes seemed to be the only way to get improvements years ago with coal miners and steel workers keen on maintaining differentials and Red Robbo in Coventry leading his car people out weekly it seemed. But since the pits were closed nearly 30 years ago, I cannot think of any strike (even those with a huge amount of public support like Remploy) achieve anything except a reduction in the wage bill that year.

Good on the Firefighters, next will be the Posties

Whether they win or not, they are making a stand to highlight problems that people just do not seem to be bothered about.

One of the Firestations closing is my local one. I live in an area full of old Victorian terraced houses, fires spread through these houses very quickly, I do not want my fire engines to come from several miles farther than is necessary.

We are allowing this government to walk us blindly into many things that we do not want.....

I for one suppport the Firemen and the Posties (but I am prejudiced on that one being an Ex Postal Office employee myself).

In a series of 1001 grandmother's footsteps the working rights that people fought for all the way back to Tolpuddle, the Peterloo massacre and before are being whittled away.

One of the current targets are state sector pensions. As well as the firemen the police are mightily pissed off and a fight with the teachers unions is on the cards. The major reason why the posties are considering strikes is pensions. They can already see how private sector post works in the UK in the guise of TNT.

For better or for worse anything in life worth having has to be fought for. That also applies to keeping it.

With the possible honorable exception of John Lewis there are few large scale employers in the UK who regard their employees as anything other than a cost point in a spreadsheet. That especially applies to UKGov.

When an MP retires would it not be a good idea that his or her pension should not be 1p more than the average applying in his constituency at the time of retirement ? Or taking the idea a little further maybe MP pensions should be voted on by the constituents.

JohnLovesFletcherofMadeley, DazedConfused, RolloTheRed, thanks, all excellent contributions, especially the one from Rollo - maybe this is the starting gun being fired for a winter of discontent.

I appreciate that pensions are always a bone of contention but how on earth are these future pensions going to be funded?

We drove past a fire station this afternoon and they had a huge notice outside asking for retained firemen. We relied on these completely in Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire after the full time fire service on the local MOD base was downgraded.

I don't have an answer to balance costs and safety, I wish I did.

I think pensions is a bad wicket for the unions to be playing on. If we did not have employer contributions, the average Joe would really struggle to build up a £300,000 pension pot in his or her lifetime. Yet that would give a man a pension of £8,400 a year at age 60 if they wanted it inflation proofed, a woman less because they live longer.

Most of these teachers who have retired recently at 60 have built up a pension pot worth considerably more than £300,000 and have not paid much out of their salary to amass that fortune. Even now their pension plan is very attractive to most in private sector.

And we are paying for all these pensions indirectly. If nursing homes are closing, if rubbish is not collected, if potholes are not repaired, it is because money is being syphoned off into ridiculously high redundancy settlements and early retirement packages.

we'd better hope that nurses don't go on strike - don't suppose they ever would but believe me, morale is at an all time low - well it is in this area - my daughter in law loves her job but is so disillusioned - her first thoughts when going on duty is "how many of us will be on duty today" - they are so short staffed - on a long day recently she had no break at all and the only refreshment she had was a glass of water - same old story - too many chiefs and not enough Indians

Well, other public sector employees have had to tighten their belts with pay freezes and changes to their pension schemes already, so it is only fair that the rest should be treated the same. Hundreds of offices have been closed in the public sector elsewhere a few years ago with reductions of thousands of staff.

When there were strikes when I worked in the public sector years ago, what was usually achieved was alienation of the public and your work piling up!

John, those redundancy packages and early retirement packages work out a lot cheaper than keeping people on the payroll though.

Annx :-) Yes, I concur with what most of what you say. But that "it is cheaper to get them off the payroll" is an old chestnut. It just pushes costs elsewhere, imo. They get paid a lot of money for doing nothing.

And at the age of 55 or 60 they should have an enormous amount of knowledge and skill which is being lost to the employer and their colleagues.

And junior people are being stressed out trying to continue a level of support whilst on long pay freezes and much lower pensions. Whilst their ex colleagues are buying their Jags and their motor homes and looking forward to 30 years paid by us.

I think these public sector workers may be surprised at public reaction to pensions. They get a lot of support for what they do, but to strike now may prove counter-productive for everybody. They need to win public support from people working in private sector who are on a much lower wage and have much fewer benefits.