[alchresearch]

Excuse the source but something just doesn't sit right with this phrase with me.

We will not be starved back like the miners

In bad taste? A bad choice of phrase in Yorkshire?

[ab6262]

me neither hardly a veiled threat,yes in bad taste and pretty stupid just about sums up all union mentality....especially Unison.....but if they strike they deserve all they get, get with the programme people and cut your cloth accordingly and we might ,just might get out of this mess the country is in!!

[Mecky]

Oh look, the DM thought police. Good on him I say. Don't let anyone push you around otherwise you will be pushed around all your life. Get your gun.

[Tony]

The world has too many prawn sandwiches and tofu wraps for the public sector to starve.

The man's an idiot.

[harvey19]

I think he needs to look very closely at how few miners there are today if he is using them as a reference point.
No set of workers are secure.

[L00b]

That's a poor, populist and rather crass analogy: miners were striking to save their livelihood (and, in their vast majority, all they knew to do and had to look forward to), not amendments to their pensions arrangements.

I will hazard a guess (...dangerous ground around these parts...) that miners had the public's sympathy en masse for that reason, and am yet to be convinced (read: am very highly skeptical ) that the planned "chaotic strikes" will be as popular as union leaders claim, this time around.

As for the Unison President invoking "their (poor hard-done by) brothers Greece and Ireland", considering how public sector pay and perks evolved in these 2 countries throughout the 00s (particularly Ireland!), that really is taking bad faith to stratospheric levels. There's a reson why the Irish public sector at large took a 15% paycut (yes, you read that figure right) last year, without so much as a raised eyebrow: they knew full well how good they'd got it up to 2009.

[Wildcat]

The changes the Tories are bringing in are an ideological attack on the state and state provision of services. The analogy works perfectly when addressed to public sector worker's who are being outsourced and made redundant.

[harvey19]

Originally Posted by Wildcat

The changes the Tories are bringing in are an ideological attack on the state and state provision of services. The analogy works perfectly when addressed to public sector worker's who are being outsourced and made redundant.

Is Labour supporting the Unions and strike action ?

[mj.scuba]

I don't understand it tbh, how many miners ever starved?

[L00b]

Originally Posted by Wildcat

The analogy works perfectly when addressed to public sector worker's who are being outsourced and made redundant.

No more than it does when addressed to private sector workers who have been outsourced and made redundant over the last 2 decades, and still are to this day.

And who since found new employment/have retrained/set up their own business/etc.

Noone is owed a job. Be it from private or public employers.

[harvey19]

I think you'll find most redundancies are voluntary.

[Obelix]

Originally Posted by Wildcat

The changes the Tories are bringing in are an ideological attack on the state and state provision of services. The analogy works perfectly when addressed to public sector worker's who are being outsourced and made redundant.

I think you mean it's a counterpoint to the ideological expansion of the public sector and state attack on free enterprise and business that Labour ran for thirteen years.

The reason why it was a bad idea, and why it needs sorting has been know for centuries..

You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it - Jefferson