Private sector props up country (again)

Did anyone notice that there's a strike on today? No, I didn't either.

Apparently, over a million public sector workers have walked out, over an increase in their pension age from 60 to 65. As a result, schools, leisure centres, refuse collections, council services, transport links and hundreds of other ‘critical' services will be disrupted. Unions proclaim proudly that it may well be the biggest stoppage in the UK since the General Strike of 1926.

So while I toil away at work earning enough to support the members of Unison, T&G, GMB and Amicus (it's quite a responsibility having so many dependents), I'd like to take a quick break and make two points:

First, the one thing that unions have never been good on is having a sense of perspective. Does the raising of the pension age for SOME workers (mainly women whose payout still starts five years earlier than for men), realy merit ‘the biggest organised industrial action in living memory', as one union offical put it this morning? Is it worth shutting schools and denying the rest of us the meagre services that these people actually provide just to keep a discriminatory policy in place that should have been revoked 20 years ago?

Second, I was surprised to hear that there might be up to 1.5m people involved in the strike, mainly because I can barely believe that there are that mainy council workers in the first place. What do they all do?! I can only imagine that they must be employed checking that we don't put rubbish in public bins (because they then need emptying, which is a bit too much like work), or knocking over cemetary headstones (to make sure that the ASBOed-up little nippers don't come to any harm when they're graffiting them)

Anyway, life goes on, mostly thanks to the many millions of people in Britain employed in small businesses. We're still a nation of shopkeepers, after all, but I'm getting increasingly fed up with public sector workers wandering into my shop and nicking ten quid from the till. Especially when they ought to be busy telling me that I can't build the extension that I want, or blocking off roads to install potholes.

Hmm. Maybe that strike isn't such a bad idea after all.

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