Taxpayers vs. Bureaucrats, Part XXXII

American taxpayers are not the only ones getting ripped off by lavish pay and perks for bureaucrats. The Daily Mail reports on a new study about public sector pay in the United Kingdom:

Public sector employees work nine years less than their private sector counterparts but are paid 30 per cent more, a bombshell report reveals today. Extraordinary research tells a tale of two Britains - a state sector awash with taxpayers' cash while the rest of the economy struggles to stay afloat. Public sector workers enjoy better pay than those in the private sector, as well as better pensions, shorter hours, and earlier retirement. Over their lifetimes, those in the private sector work 23 per cent longer - equivalent to an extra nine years and ten weeks - than public sector employees. This is thanks to a combination of shorter hours, more time off and earlier retirement. The findings explode once and for all the old idea that public sector workers have better job security and gold-plated pensions because they have lower salaries. ...The report, by centre-Right think tank Policy Exchange, also found that the chance of being made compulsorily redundant in the civil service is an astonishing 0.00007 per cent. Generous pension schemes in the state sector are now worth up to 15 per cent on top of salary, the report says, while public sector pay costs have soared by more than a third in real terms over the last seven years - three times faster than in the private sector. ...etween 1997 and 2007 public sector productivity fell, while productivity in the private sector increased by nearly 28 per cent - leaving the former only two-thirds as productive as the latter. Between 2002 and 2009, the number working in the public sector increased nearly five times more quickly than numbers in the private sector.