Should NHS workers get a pay rise?

ChuckMountain

Since you didn't answer my previous question to your quote below about how an example of these current day measurements, I am struggling to see how you are added anything other than repeating yourself about increasing everyone's wages each year.

How do you propose to stop inflation and ensure that we don't have a class of public servants that continually fall behind the curve in terms of pay.

The question on the poll as IronGiant states is flawed, it applies to all staff and the amount is relatively high compared to inflation.

If you go overboard with more performance management you end up spending more time on that (like teachers) than patient care.  As others have said its not easy to put measures in place.

For the record I don't believe everybody deserves a pay rise, those lazy, under-performing people can't rest on the laurels of others but those doing their job correctly do deserve to keep pace with inflation.

Bl4ckGryph0n

I’m not going to go into the details of modern day performance management when it is so clear that you are lightyears behind and very negative in your approach about that. It seriously isn’t worth my while to educate you about that free of charge. Just use a bit of your imagination as to how you can make the quality of care an element of it as well.

And the moment we start using emotive language like “deserve” we are no longer in a rational discussion. Ofcourse people “deserve” this and that, that isn’t the issue.

Tell me how do we keep on paying for that year after year? Ofcourse symptoms need to be treated but without dealing with the cause this is never ending.

Please do let me know; who is going to pay “my” increase to pay for this increase?

ghrh

The same stands for most NHS workers. Your wife will eventually be in the same situation where another colleague will outperform her but will be paid less than her. That's fine. Will she be paid a magnitude of times more than her colleagues like you see in the private sector? No, but she will not care. It's not all about money you know and i am sure your wife appreciated the acknowledgement for her efforts from colleagues and students.

ghrh

Remind me how you measure compassionate care?

nheather

The public sector staff that are not getting decent increases are those at  the top of careers ladders.

So the bleeding heart liberals should concentrate on those.

Now of those there will some unfortunate people who are unfairly stuck at the top of band but the majority of them are there because of one or more of the following

1) they are not good enough to be promoted to a higher band
2) they don't want promotion (for whatever reason, don't want the extra responsibility, don't think the pay increment is enough, don't want to lose overtime, don't want to move to a different office - but the opportunities are there, they just aren't taking them)

Bear in mind that the bands are designed to overlap because you should be capable of promotion about halfway through the band.  So those that have reached the top have passed promotion (for whatever reason) for a number of years.

And before anyone dies in a ditch protesting about low salaries, they should look at the salaries of those that are stuck at top of the band compared with their role, expertise and experience.  I think if you did that you would conclude that many of them are actually well paid.

So those stuck at top of band are just getting 1% payrise - congratulations, because where I work they would be getting 0%.

Yes it would be nice if we all got pay rises that tracked inflation but we don't and if we did it would just fuel inflation and it would spiral higher and higher.

And before anyone jumps down my throat, I agree that there are those that are stuck at top of band through no fault of their own and I think they should be addressed as special cases.  But we need to stop the blanket policy that calculates pay based on time-served.

Cheers,

Nigel

Jezza99

I think also more to the point, those calling for a blanket public sector pay rise need to explain how it should be funded. Because there only 3 options, we increase tax, increase borrowing, or redirect spending from elsewhere such as foreign aid.

Personally I'd be happy with option 3. Increasing taxation is one of those things that people say they would be happy with, but funnily enough never vote for. Increasing borrowing, when we still have a deficit of circa £50 billion is just socialist magic money tree territory.

ChuckMountain

You haven't had a rationale discussion with anybody on this thread yet, just posted criticism or trolled further questions.

Very negative and clearly light years behind as an example, really you don't know on the basis of two posts in this thread.  And sorry your argument of not worth my time is a classic wind up\troll one.

You don't need to fund your pay rise you can stay on what you got paid in the 70's that should work

rustybin

Your wife should go and work for an academy. They can pretty much pay you what they want. There are bands, but they're fluid.

The Unions don't control pay-scales and to my knowledge never have. They create pay-scales they urge schools to adopt. The Government sets the pay-scales in maintained schools after consultation with Unions / independent agencies. Interestingly, most Private schools adopt the same pay-scales as the State sector. Strange they would do that if they didn't have to.

What you're describing hasn't been strictly in place for a number of years.

And a friend of mine who did a career change about 5 years ago from Journalism to English teacher started further up the ladder as a result of his English background.

As a career changer myself, I went from lowly classroom teacher to AST to Deputy Head in 7 years - more than doubling my salary in the process.

nheather

But that is not true, at least not at the Private Sector employers I know.  Position and renumeration is not dictated by time served.  Of course there is some correlation as in good times everyone gets a payrise.

But progression and payrises in the Private Sector is the result of ability (and networking - which stuffs me) rather than time served.

Where I work, when it comes to payrises the company will look at its overall financial performance and decide a base percentage for pay rises, let's say it is a good year and they have 2% to spend.

They will then look at the performance of each of the staff to decide how best to spend it.

So Jack and Jill, are same grade in the same role.  Jill has worked her socks off but not ready for promotion yet.  Jack has been particularly lazy this year and has not performed well at all.

The management team will assess both, knowing that they have 2% to play with and a performace factor of between 0.0 and 2.0.  They decide to assess Jill as a 2.0 so she gets 4% and Jack as a 0.25 so he gets 0.5%.

The following year there is a promotion opportunity placed on the vacancy board.  Jack and Jill both apply, Jill gets it, Jack is interviewed but is not really in the running.  Jill gets a promitional pay rise of 10%.

Jack will see Jill pulling away from him, even though they started together on the same day.  He will be bitter, in denial, he will say it is postive discrimination yada, yada, but eventually he will come to terms that it is down to him.  He will either acceot and cruise, leave and become someone else's problem, or buck his ideas up.

That is how it works in the Private Sector that I know.

Cheers,

Nigel

Bl4ckGryph0n

I’m sorry but that was a reaction purely to what you wrote. I simply don’t understand why you would want to leave quality out of a performance measure; and thus dismiss it.

And yes that is definitely not worth my time to educate you if you can’t even begin to imagine how you can have effective performance management that doesn’t impact the quality of care towards patients/clients etc.