Best place for them

Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 02 November 2004 13:13.

One bright point of hope at last in the relentless march of statism and culture war: our civil servants are a weak and sickly bunch. Or possibly they are just lead-swingers, depending on your credulity. Or the lack of it.

A report published by the Cabinet Office has found that the average civil servant nabs two weeks of sickies a year. The trend is rising. In 2000 the average was 9.3 for women, 8.0 for men. In 2001, it was 10.4 days for women, 8.5 for men. Men are currently stuck on 8.5 days but the girlies have raced on to 11.3. I haven’t found figures for 2002. But in that year the three sickest government departments, apparently, were Transportation, Family & Community Services and, naturally, Health & Wellbeing.

The private sector is another story. The outdoor life certainly seems one of rude health. The check-shirted, blue-jeaned tough guys of oil and mining only succumb on 3.3 days a year. Builders, who in my experience believe the common cold to be a rumour, take 4.2 days.

The lash of low rates of pay, presumably, forces expiring hotel and leisure staff to work – except on 4.6 days a year. Across the board, the private sector average is about 30% below the public sector. I can’t help thinking, though, that the Human Resources types who monitor these things have never ventured onto an average British dairy farm or they would find the differential quite incalculable because dairy farmers do actually have to be buried – and, if that won’t do it, cremated - before they will stop work.

It comes as no surprise to learn that ministers have set a target – yet another – of a 30% reduction from the 1998 sick-leave total. They have decided in typical, arbitrary fashion that bureaucracy is, in fact, capable of emulating capitalism. I suppose if in the face of all the known facts you cannot bring yourself to believe in differing human potentials and in the ineffably superior efficiency and work ethic of free enterprise you will never, never learn.

If I was Gordon Brown I wouldn’t bother about investigating all this. If we can’t sack the lot of these people and slash our taxes the safest and best place for them is their sickbeds … or the pub … or the bingo hall … or the pier at Margate. I suppose it might rain.

Tags: British Politics

Comments:

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Tue, 02 Nov 2004 15:03 | #

An average of two weeks of sick days a year after a rising trend over the past few years? Hmmm ... I wonder if this statistic couldn’t reflect the arrival into the workforce of the soon-to-be expanding cohorts of unfortunate young who’ve lacked all traditional education, having received in its place only a pitiful radical secular multi-culti substitute which in fact is no education at all but a form of criminal neglect of the obligation to form and mold young people’s minds. Small wonder if the new generation thus “educated” develop a “take what you can get” mentality and “to hell with putting in a day’s work for a day’s pay”:

“The practical problem is that secular multicultural education is always bad, at least on any large scale, because schools of that kind can’t have educational goals that are more sustaining than pliability on the one hand and the effective pursuit of self-interest on the other. If the moral world consists solely of the conflicting purposes of various people, then you either teach children to do what they’re told or you teach them to get what they want. The results of such an outlook when applied to education are fundamental aimlessness, aggression, manipulation, boredom, stupidity, and general bad conduct.” (Excerpted from this log entry posted here yesterday.)

How can a child or teenager develop the personal integrity and responsibility which will make him, when full-grown, act with honesty toward his employer and society when, throughout his so-called “education,” he’s been prevented by PC, multi-culti, and radical secularism from even developing his own sense of identity? The answer is, only with great difficulty.

Posted by ernest young on Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:04 | #

In my misspent youth, I had the misfortune to find employment with the Min. of Ag. and Fish. Approaching my first anniversary , I was given a directive - by the local union rep. - to take my sick leave - or else!.

Never stayed to find out what the ‘or else’ implied.

That was fifty years ago, since then things do not seem to have changed that much, it would seem that the Civil Service was always the home of the lame and the lazy.

Posted by Guessedworker on Tue, 02 Nov 2004 21:56 | #

Hello, Ernest. Great to have you around.

Posted by ernest young on Wed, 03 Nov 2004 04:12 | #

Thank you - thought you may have need of a visiting grouch…