Articles with the Tag politics

When it comes to entitlement do some paid public servants not only make their mostly hardworking and often underpaid colleagues look bad with their petty venality, they even outdo many political representatives. Take this American public employee, for example:

In April, accounting clerk James Kauchis made a formal complaint to the personnel office of the county Department of Social Services in Binghamton, N.Y., demanding that he be compensated for a recent interrupted lunch hour.

Kauchis had missed lunch when DSS offices were locked down as police secured the neighborhood surrounding the site of the April 3 massacre in which a gunman killed 13 people and then himself. Although DSS had pizza and beverages brought in during the siege, Kauchis felt that wasn’t as good as a regular lunch hour.

[Binghamton Press & Sun-Bulletin, 4-14-09]

That’s venality at its most petty. A sense of entitlement starts small like that; you begin by having little or no regard to improving the collective conditions at your workplace. Those others don’t matter; why care? It’s you that’s important. Take everything you can get and then some, if the rules can be made to say you can.

Rationalise it to yourself by thinking ‘well I must be meant to have it if their rules make it possible”. If the others aren’t clever enough to do it, unlike you, then screw them. Once a civil servant like this gets some actual power they can interpret the rules to their own convenience. Funny, isn’t it, how the value of senior salaries and perks rockets when they do?

When they reach seriously senior levels and start to hobnob with the Great and Good rich and powerful, that sense of entitlement, always overinflated, balloons to a such grandiose levels it makes MPs claiming council tax back for the servants’ wing of their mansion look quite modest.

Here’s the cost to the public of funding just one British mandarin, Sir John Bourn, to live in the grand, lavish manner to which he made sure he became accustomed:

175 lunches and dinners since 2004 with permanent secretaries, directors of big accounting companies and defence contractors at the Ritz, Savoy, Dorchester, Brown’s Hotel, the Goring Hotel, Cipriani, Bibendum, Wiltons, Mirabelle and The Square. The bills, nearly all for two people, vary from £80 to £301. Many of the bills came to between £150 and £220. One bill for four people – two from the NAO – at Wiltons was £500. In the past six months, he has spent £1,651.56 on meals.

[…]

· Sir John and Lady Bourn took foreign trips with first class air travel to San Francisco, Venice, Lisbon, Brazil, South Africa, the Bahamas and Budapest. Their air fares and taxi fares ranged from £15,997 to Brazil and £14,518 to South Africa, to £2,238 to Budapest and £1,718 to Venice…..Over the past six months, Sir John has spent £16,998 of taxpayers’ money on mainly first class travel for himself and his wife.

The position which Sir John had to maintain? Auditor General, the man ultimately responsible for guarding the public purse and vetting every government expense account, from huge ministries to quangos to the regional police forces. The fox was in the henhouse and he was very well fed indeed.

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. A corrupt auditor’s much less likely to out politicians (who ultimately fund his department and his long lunches at Wiltons ) for their own financial misdeeds; and how can any voter expect transparency and honesty from our public servants when the guy policing them is himself crooked?

Politicians and mandarins alike advance the same self-justifications:

They’re important now, they have a public position to maintain.

“The auditor general justifies the dinners and lunches as part of the need for the NAO to keep in touch with a wide range of people, including companies that are doing business with government and the NAO.”

[Trans: I must live a lifestyle commensurate with those I now associate with, never mind if they are corporate privateers and dodgy arms dealers or I won’t be taken seriously. How can I schmooze properly if I can’t talk about what millionaires talk about?]

The government’s representative cannot be seen to lose face. It’s about the prestige of the nation.

[Trans: My socially insecure partner’s giving me hell, I really need that chauffeur for my spouse/trip to Barbados/new servants’ wing or we’ll never be able to hold our heads up at Waitrose/Glyndebourne/Sandy Bay.]

I take big expensive decisions. Therefore I should get big expensive perks.

[Trans: Everyone else gets rich from PFI deals. Where’s mine?]

Anyone with a modicum of common sense or morality can see how hollow these arguments are, but that certainly never stopped a mostly unquestioning media from swallowing spurious ‘explanations’ like these whole. One of the biggest fallacies is trotted out at every available opportunity and accepted as gospel truth by journalists:

I could earn more in the private sector.

[Trans: Please don’t make me, please don’t make me….

Only very few currently employed by government would earn more in the private sector, and that generally only because of inside knowledge gained while a civil servant or minister – the fabled revolving door.

Of course there is another way to make millions in the private sector.

Many senior civil servants get to take their own departments private, making themselves a fortune in the process. For example the top managers of the UK’s Defence Establishment privatised it and renamed the company QinetiQ, having bought the shares (that they valued themselves) at a a knock down price, just over half a million pounds. The day the stock went public they then sold them on to the Carlyle Group and some very recent former civil servants who had been on generous but moderate salaries saw their minimal investments rise in value by 20,000%. A report into the deal said:

“”We consider the returns exceeded what was necessary to incentivise them”

I think that means they were greedy. And if the National Audit Office (former Prop., Sir John Bourn) calls you greedy, then you really must be greedy.

But it was just words. The NAO didn’t take any action against them, or tell the government to negate the deal, or charge anyone with insider trading either. If it had been less elevated civil servants trying to make a tiny profit off the weekly tea money, I expect the story would’ve been different. That’s what I think is the hidden factor in entitlement, in the junior ranks at least.

Senior staff turn a blind eye to their and their peers’ corruption while coming down heavily on inferiors for minor transgressions, all the while cutting workers’ entitlements, whether to fair pay, time off, or even just a job – QinetiQ fired 800 people not long after the former bosses took the money and ran – which breeds resentment and a feeling that you should grab everything you can, while you can. Why not? The bosses use lax rules rules to profit – why shouldn’t they profit too, if they can find a handy loophole to do it with? And who can blame them?

No wonder it isn’t just politicians. It’s the whole system of government, entitlement’s the way it works. Constitutional reform won’t be enough. Fiddling with the rules until we think they can’t be fiddled with anymore is OK – until they are fiddled. Get rid of everyone suspect, perhaps? Wholesale firings are impracticable and smack of a political purge.

Whatever the reform, the same people operating the old system are likely to be the same in charge of any revamped one. The roots would still be there. Like ground elder corruption is hard to eradicate : if leave a little root in the soil, up corruption pops again, more vigorous than ever. Maybe the only thing to do is burn it out.