On Saturday, 18 March
2017 I wrote a post entitled “Pay - how to dissatisfy child protection workers”.
In it I said:
You can’t go on paying children’s social workers and other public sector workers involved in child protection less and less and expect it to have no impact. You can have all the recruitment campaigns you want, but you will not retain staff if you keep cutting their pay in real terms.
In the last week,
there has been heated discussion in Britain about the cap on public sector pay,
and a slowly dawning recognition in some quarters, if not in others, that you
can’t keep paying people less and less in real terms without serious negative
consequences.
The Guardian speaks
of a damning government report that shows the depth of public sector pay cuts.
However, the BBC reports that
the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, is insisting that the Government
must hold its nerve over public pay and not give in to demands to raise the
cap. Other ministers are reported as holding different views.
There is a lot of
talk of the pay of police officers, fire fighters, teachers and nurses. I haven’t
heard anybody yet mention children’s social workers but they are public
employees too and they are also hit by the pay cap.
In old fashioned
English, they used to speak of doffing your cap which means in modern parlance
raising your hat to acknowledge or or to show deference to another.
I’m of the view
that the time has come for quite a lot of doffing, in acknowledgement of the
difficult work that child protection professionals and other public sector workers undertake.
Put simply, the
Government needs to pay people a fair rate for the job.
