VERSION|0.5.1|NAME|HarryR|DATE|1366215325|CONTENT|[blockquote]Because if you dismantle a top-heavy bureaucracy, all the people who administer it will no longer have jobs. And as their only skills will be in shuffling paperwork around, they will be basically unemployable.[/blockquote]

Is this an argument in favour of giving people nonsensical jobs just so that they&#039;re in employment? Like the army getting squaddies to paint coal or move stuff from place A to place B and then back again or the building of pointless famine roads to nowhere in Ireland? 

Patting a school leaver on the head and trapping him/her in a futile, uninspiring job for 40 years just to massage the unemployment figures or get votes locally does him/her no favours and should not be what the public sector is for.

Working in the public sector jobs should be en experience in best practice, working on a much broader scale and in conjunction with rational public policy effectively executed. 

In that idealised dream world priorities would necessarily be emphasised differently but the objective of providing good service at good value would remain. 

People who then left and moved to the public sector would have excellent skills and different perspectives that would add value when combined with their private sector colleagues. And vice versa when private sector employees moved to the public sector

Instead, public sector working is just paper pushing with no relevance to the private sector? Why are the tax-payers paying them to do that?

The UK needed to undergo a process of restructuring that is now included in the term &#039;Thatcherism&#039;. 

Germany and other countries had to do the same. The difference is that in Germany working people displaced from redundant industries were given unemployment benefits only a bit less than their working income, plus mentoring by able and well funded career councillors, plus access to good quality and effective training in whatever they fancied they could earn a living doing. 

After a year the income was cut, 6 months later it was cut again. The cultural expectation was that with application and assistance most people could retrain and regain on-going employment in useful and productive jobs. (Later, these retrained people have been very handy in maintaining and improving Germany&#039;s productivity rates and contributing to Germany&#039;s export growth.)

Sitting around with nothing to do was officially discouraged and without valid cause would lead to sanction or loss of choice about what jobs somebody was prepared to do.

Those with valid cause are supported very well as far as I can see. I see many more disabled people on the streets in Germany than I have anywhere else. Motorised wheelchairs are zipping around everywhere. I realised that if disability rates in the UK etc are similar then many must be trapped indoors.

In the UK many people had a different experience. They received redundancy pay, of varying amounts, and then sat at home with enforced leisure and fretted about their future without a clue of what options might be available to them. A passing &#039;financial consultant&#039; might knock on the door and mis-sell them a pension or timeshare. Too many found that within months perhaps a few years the redundancy money was gone and they had an employment gap with no specific activity and were bored and frustrated and unable to find work. Difficult for people who&#039;d worked hard often at technical and demanding jobs yet now their children doing less demanding jobs could earn more than they could.

The Thatcher years allowed people to sit around and lose hope and focus but the restructuring was necessary. The loss of so many experienced working people from the work force and the failure to take the opportunity to reorientate and empower them was a gross failure of governance.|IP-ADDRESS|77.188.114.70|MODERATIONFLAG|