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and I wondered why Union membership would cost me £25 per month??



Their salaries are often boosted by healthy pensions and perks such as rent-free homes, a report claimed.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance labelled the 38 union bosses pocketing six-figure salaries hypocrites, given their lives of ‘well-paid luxury’.

Bob Crow, head of the transport union the RMT, takes home £105,679 a year.

The average Tube driver earns £40,000 a year and station staff £26,000 but Mr Crow wants his members to launch a ‘class war’ in the wake of a two-year public service pay freeze.

While the average civil servant earns £22,850 a year, Mark Serwotka, head of the PCS union which represents them, earns £111,112. The average teacher takes home £32,630 annually but NUT head NUT Christine Blower takes a salary of £124,483.

Derek Simpson of the Unite union lives in an £800,000 grace-and-favour house with his second wife while taking a salary of £120,328 from his members.

Matthew Elliott, of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘It is hypocritical for firebrand trade union leaders to be calling for strikes and higher taxes while they themselves live a life of well-paid luxury. It is small wonder they aren’t worried about the tax burden or the national debt when they are so well-off.’

The Trade Unions Congress said it was the TPA that was the secret organisation. ‘Not a single penny of any union general secretary’s pay comes from the taxpayer. If the TPA really spoke for ordinary taxpayers, they would be asking hard questions about the directors of companies who have made themselves mega-rich through the privatisation of public services and PFI deals,’ it added.

And a spokesman for the PCS union said: ‘Mark’s salary is no secret. Our members are certainly made aware. This is not new information.’

The PCS Union has over 320,000 members which means its financial turnover is in excess of £38.5M a year, a salary of £0.11M for the head of a business of this scale is not untoward.

Derek Simpson will be paying a hefty tax bill for his £800,000 house, whilst it may be provided gratis, it is still an employment benefit.

Considering the PM's salary is £142,500 and his "membership" is 61 million people, I'd say that the salaries of unions is somewhat excessive.

They are similar salaries to local authority chief execs; having members isn't the same as the responsibility of being an employer although I do agree that running a large organisation does command a fair salary.

There are a lot of financial fringe benefits to being a PM, I would doubt his annual income is less then £0.25M and could easily be double that!

Yet another post on union bashing, whats the problem with union bosses being on those sort of salaries and any other benefits that go their way, are they, because they are Union leaders expected to be on the same wages of their members whilst bosses of the biggest companies can earn exorbitant amounts that is obscene and still tell their workers they must have a pay freeze. If any salaries should be examined they should start with heads of the big industries, followed by sportsmen, civil service, the entertainment business, the list is endless, oh and people in IT

I wouldn't say it's union bashing, more a constructive debate on salaries. Anyone earning over £100k and works for or with the public sector is likely to be questioned at some time by the press.

What pisses me off is that the public sector is sufferning because of the behavoir of the banks and private sector. How much public money was used to bail out the banks? figures suggest that the overall cost could be up to £1.5 trillion.

I actually spent some time in the back office of one of the major high street banks in its hey-day a few year ago and saw first hand how they operated. Corrupt as fook.

Each personal advisor was a adwarded a comission for each product they sell, if that be a loan, credit card, mortgage, insurance etc. The counter tellers would only pass businesses onto certain personal advisors in the back office that they were mates with. This created a really bad atmosphere to work in.

Each personal advisor (PA) was under constant pressure from the branch manager to sell as many products as possible regardless if they were of any good to the customer. If the PA didn't meet their targets they'd be out.

Loans & credit cards were common product sales and the PAs themselves knew that the loan payment protection insurance wasn't worth the paper it was written on, but they still sold it as this was a major source of comission.

I actually saw ALL the details that they kept on me on their computer. The whole thing was geared up to assesing risk and the ability to quickly sell me other products should I be unfortunate enough to walk into a branch and meet a teller.

I don't have credit cards and choose to keep some savings should I need money in an emergency. This gives me a good risk rating on their computers. Everytime I come to the counter "do you want a credit card? you're entitled to a loan". This drives me mad and causes a scene in the bank everytime they ask me.

I shouldn't get annoyed with the teller tho as it's the way the bank is run, being comission focused. The blame rests with the government for not regulating them enough. Maybe they were scared to do it? There isn't an excuse now as everybody is feeling the pinch and bankers should be no exception.

The public sector has always been an easy target and yet when the unions try to protect our services and peoples jobs the propaganda machine in this country kicks in, the sad part about it is some people believe it and the union and its members become the bad guys. People should remember these services are our services and cuts cost jobs, it may well save taxpayers money in wages only to cost taxpayers money in benefits, so where is the point.
As for the banks, they are and should be held responsible for a lot of this mess and that's where the deficit should be clawed back from. They have been responsible for many years and its about time they were made to pay back all the monies they have cost the people of this country through mis selling,etc,etc.

I seem to remeber that Gordon Brown sucked up to the banks for years,all you heared year after year was the city, the city. Amazing what short memories some people have as to where a lot of the problems started.

Whatever Gordon Brown may have done, you need to go back a lot further than when he was on the scene, The banks for many years have only ever thought of profit and more profit, regardless of what cost to the economy and regardless to what effect it had on the people and their lives. As Neil said in an earlier post, bank workers were put under pressure to sell various financial services to the public, regardless of whether the customer was able to accommodate such services, the list is endless, credit cards handed out like confetti, the mis- selling of pensions, exorbitant bank charges, and not forgetting dodgy dealing in the city.

And the last goverment joined in by borrowing and more borrowing, they even dreamed up the PFI so as to keep a lot of the borrowing off book. We will be paying through the nose for a long time to come for those deals. Well actualy some peoples children will as some of use will be well dead long before the PFI debts are payed. If the Tory's had brought in the PFI system for building schools and hospitals there would have been murder but Blair and Brown sweet talked it through as the best thing since sliced bread.

And when new schools and hospitals were getting built we didn't hear any opposition MPs refuse or ask for them not to be built in their constituency. When did you see a Tory MP stand up and say, don't build that new hospital in my constituency, its putting us in debt, the people i represent can go without. There are some things we have to go into debt for and i would say schools and hospitals are acceptable. Victorian buildings may have been acceptable in your day for health care and education but not anymore, mind you in your day they were still fairly new,

Greed and competition know no limits. If you think about bank products and the behavoir of the likes of Northern Rock, the competition in the banking sector was huge. If an individual bank didn't offer a good deal, home owners could go to a competitor to get a better deal, price comparison websites and brokers allow people to easily compare a range of products across a number of lenders. Moneysupermaket was founded to do exactly this; provide brokers with information on mortgage deals.

Nothern Rock offered a 125% mortgage, this is madness and was one of the major factors in their downfall. 24% of their customers had this deal.

My point is that the government did pretty much fook all to regulate this behavoir. Businesses will typically slit their throats to offer a better deal that their competitors, that's fine if they want to risk their future but these failures have hit the public purse when the banks were nationalised.

There wasn't really an option, the government had to bail out the banks or risk the progressive collapse of the economy. The banks are relied on for savings and loans that keep the economy going.

As for Icelandic banks, it pissed me off that people were crying about losing ALL their investments. What monkies did they have managing it?? An investment strategy is all about managing risk, you don't put all your eggs in one basket! My employer reported loosing millions at the time of the collapse, but in real terms it was only about 1% of their total fund, Why? because they had spread the risk across a portfolio of investments.

The banks are a major source of income for the government and perhaps they didn't want to piss them off, but I believe that there are two ways of making unpopular decisions:

1) Gradually pick away at it as Margaret did with the unions or
2) Wait for it all to turn to shit to provide you with an execuse to sort it all out and "get tough".

It's a shame the labour government chose the last option!

As far as mortgages go, not one government in recent times has stepped in and tried to protect the consumer from the greedy and sometimes corrupt financial services and lenders. This developed into many people losing their homes or a lifetime of struggle to pay for them. This has not nescersarily been down to people losing their employment but down to the financial services, Some of the deals on offer could only lead to disaster for the borrower.
On getting my mortgage in 1973 it was uncomplicated and simple, i went to a building society and asked if i could be considered for a mortgage. They asked a few simple questions, followed by proof. they then, based on the answers and proof told me exactly how much they were prepared to lend me, At that time i earned £33.59p per week, they didn't take any earnings of wives into account. On my earnings they were prepared to loan me no more than £4,100. The equation was simple, 10% deposit and you were not allowed to pay back more in a month than you earned in a week.
I actually had my eye on a house that i fancied at a cost of £4,295.00 and the building society told me to go away i couldn't afford it, none of this, well if you do this and you do that we will lend you it, it was a strict no, you can only go to the limits we have set. Not long after that in my opinion the corruption set in, a work colleague who was on exactly the same wage as me was allowed to borrow £9,995.oo. to buy a house, 100% mortgage with an endowment and taking his wife wage in to consideration. Also it was over a 30 year term. I know we are all responsible for our own actions but what chance does the man on the street have when they are dealing with what is bordering on corruption of the financial services who are on big fat bonuses, whatever the cost.

I have recently taken out a new mortgage to get another house and the advisor told me that I was putting to much of my own money down and that many lenders wouldn't be interested in only loaning me £33K!!

When I went to pay of my current mortgage the fuckers didn't want to except the cheque and said why don't you put the money in one of our high interest accounts. What a load of crap to say this to me!

Financial markets are funny things but at the end of the day somewhere along the line there is a risk and requires an appropriate risk management strategy. I would like to make some comments about things mentioned above, these are not justifying anything but are to to add some points for consideration.

125% mortgage - why not? As a rule of thumb, property (which generally is considered a safe investment for long term) doubles in value every ten years, so in a 25 year mortgage the equity will be 565% of the original value, this roughly equates to reaching 125% in 3.3 years. I would have thought this a reasonable risk, after all you would expect a better return than 25% in ten years in any investment product let alone 25 years.

Before the days of endowment mortgages, inflation was also high, sometimes above 10%. If you took out a repayment mortgage that stretched you, because they had constant repayments, every year you got a pay rise somewhere near inflation which meant every year the repayments effectively got easier. One of the main reasons that people are struggling now, is because we have low inflation!

There is no such thing as "no risk" where finance is involved.

If you take out a mortgage, the mortgage company agree to have the property as equity, that is what a mortgage is. If you cannot cope, you should have the choice of walking away from the property and the mortgage WITHOUT PENALTY, the mortgage company (by definition) have agreed that risk.

It is annoying that the financial companies have gradually transferred more and more risk to the consumer - and all governments have supported this. The companies are experts and the consumers are not, clearly the experts should take the higher level of risk.