Unions roll on industrial action while SEB plug their ears

"Hands up for industrial action"
Credit: JCSA Prospect

We're on a roll, folks!

It's been something of a strangeness in recent weeks and in the last two months that I've not really discussed the escalating public sector pay war between public sector unions and Charlie Parker's gang, escalating though it has definitely been, since I last covered it back in August. As we all know, since then, the climate at La Motte Street has gotten veeeeeeeery nice and tense as Parker's rhetoric has hardened, the unions have gotten more and more assertive, and the whole atmosphere among public-sector workers has turned poisonous as they're told that there's no money for a pay increase that actually meets inflation while The Bird and his sextet are on a thousand quid a day. Now, Der Kommandant von Jersey himself has taken a wee sojourn to Argentina, the workers are pissed, and, at a general meeting of hundreds of public sector employees on Thursday at the Radisson, industrial action received a ringing endorsement.

Whoops!

But wait.

It gets better.

Like I just said, our public-sector-sweeping boi is currently on a cheeky jaunt in the land of beautiful mountains, sweeping deserts and unreconstructed Nazis, Argentina. So, whose job was it to step in and uphold Parkerism? Deputy Chief Minister, minister for Education and chair of the States Employment Board, Senator Tracey Vallois, who, by some miracle, has been able to miss the point even more clearly than Parker has! She's taken to pointing out that "the vast majority of Jersey staff are paid better than their NHS colleagues" and "receive a healthy pension scheme to which the States contributes 16%".

Well, lar-di-da, Tracey. If that's the case, why on earth aren't staff flocking over to Jersey to fill our vacant jobs in healthcare, social care, or all the other giant gaps we have? Why aren't Frank the nurse from Croydon or Amelia the bone surgeon from Glamorgan queuing up for their new jobs in our wonderful healthcare system? I'd point it out, but Tracey does my job for me - "comparisons with the UK are difficult because of the varying costs of living".

So why bother making the point then? 

Jersey's healthcare staff are paid better than their NHS colleagues because living in Jersey is MORE EXPENSIVE. Our living wage is £10:20 an hour, the same as the London Living Wage (you know, the one from the city which is so expensive that over a quarter of its inhabitants live in poverty). Wages have been stagnant or declined in the island for two decades, living standards have dropped by 10% in seventeen years, while productivity and economic output in general have unsurprisingly dwindled. It doesn't exactly take an economics major to work out that comparisons to the UK are going to be useless, and she even says so. So why even make the point? Hell, why even respond in what looks like a deliberately patronising way? Is Tracey trying to wind them up? Doesn't seem like it - the letter is full of assurances of her concern. Does she not know that Jersey is far more expensive than the vast majority of the UK? Unlikely - you'd think someone able to get elected to one of the Island's most senior political posts would have at least an inkling about this kind of thing? Was her letter to the public sector employees the work of the office idiot on his lunch break? I'd like to hope the States were taking this even slightly seriously, but ever since their negotiators were too lazy to turn up to a meeting with union leaders, I've had serious doubts about even that.

You do wonder how they're planning on managing a strike when they can't even get a letter right.