Sir, – Alan Eustace’s analysis (“If you think public sector workers have it better, that’s because we do”, July 23rd) of why public sector workers have it better than private sector workers fails miserably.
The answer is not, as he imagines, because public sector workers are more unionised. The real answer is twofold. First, politicians do not mind being generous to public sector workers because they are not using their own money to pay them.
Second, politicians derive indirect benefit from their generosity with taxpayers’ money: they win the votes of many of those who benefit from their generosity. In contrast, private sector management normally pay workers out of their own resources, and they do not gain the same indirect benefit from being generous as politicians do.
Indeed, Eustace confuses cause and effect. Unions thrive in the public sector precisely because of the factors just noted, because they will always win there, as would the workers even without unions. They take credit where little is due to them.
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In contrast, unions do not thrive in the same way in the private sector, because the workers there realise that management faces far more limitations and will not easily concede, even to the most militant of unions. – Yours, etc,
DR DAVID WOODS,
Department of Classics,
University College Cork
Sir, – Alan Eustace paints an unduly rosy picture of public sector employment.
His argument sits uneasily with the recruitment and retention crises affecting teaching, An Garda Síochána, the Defence Forces and the health service. In the last of these alone, €903.4 million was spent on agency staff last year (“Carroll MacNeill plans in-house HSE ‘agency’ staff to reduce payouts to outside companies”, June 17th).
If public sector employment were as attractive as Eustace suggests, there would be no shortage of applicants for teaching, nursing or policing. Instead, many trained professionals are leaving for opportunities abroad or moving to the private sector, where pay and conditions are often more competitive. – Yours, etc,
SEAN KEAVNEY,
Castleknock,
Dublin 15.
