Did anyone else in addition to Clameur de Haro pick up on the snide little dig from the Jersey Evening [sic] Post’s Elaine Byrne in her reporting of the winners of the Christmas Lottery?
In her “you have to be in the finance industry to win anything in Jersey” intro, La Byrne couldn’t resist, could she, doing a little resentful biting of the hand that feeds, conveniently forgetting which sector of the economy it is that predominantly generates the tax revenues needed to fund public services. Perhaps she needs reminding that governments on their own can provide nothing without first extracting the financial wherewithal from private citizens and firms through taxation.
Possibly she’s one of those who likes to propagate the myth that Jersey suffers from a class divide between the finance sector and the rest. Unfortunately, this fallacy is more widely held than it should be.
What it does is to deflect attention from the real class divide in Jersey, which is the divide between those employed in the public sector – enjoying salaries in many cases on a par with private sector counterparts carrying more responsibility, plus the added benefits of job protection, security of employment and taxpayer-funded pension arrangements which the private sector can only dream about – and those in the productive, wealth-generating private sector of the economy struggling to cope with the downturn, and having to accept pay cuts and job losses as the price of survival.
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4 comments:
On the rockface line, such as cleaners, manual workers, teachers, etc, salaries are not excessive, although the States statistics unit are only giving average, not median, making this difficult to spot. When you move to Chief Officer level, the salaries are much greater. If you are the MD of Web, you are on a par with Barack Obama!
Can yoiy tell me name of cd from which you took that track of the Swedish Boogie pianist ?
Hi Anonymous, apologies for delay in answering your query.
The audio track is off the Johan Blohm CD called Reconsider Me: you can buy it direct from his website www.johanblohm.com.
Good listening!!
Tony, your point about States' labour cost statistics quoting the average rather then the median is (as usual) pertinent. Subject to checking, one suspects though that those statistics are for basic salaries, and that actual earnings, including all add-ons and allowances etc., are considerably higher than the private sector counterparts.
And that's ignoring any considerations of whether conflicts of interest arise from the publisher of the data also being the relevant employer.
But, as you will appreciate, it's not just a question of current monetary earnings - when you factor in, or even try to monetise, the implicit security of employment and job protection, and the over-generous pensions, you reveal a significant advantage over the private sector equivalents.
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