Attitude of shambolic public sector ‘selfish’

It may interest Burton Brown (“Public Sector or Private — the Wealth Gap is the Same,” DD Nov 15) to know that my late father was a municipal electrician and that almost all my childhood friends were from families employed by one of the municipalities now incorporated into BCM, or by the SA Police, SA Post Office (before Telkom was created) and SAR&H (now Transnet).

As a child of the civil service, my assessment of the current selfish shambles is based on the professional pride that I saw my father and other public servants take in their work.

During my high school years in the late 1970s, schoolteachers had a justifiable grievance about how they were being treated by the then government.

The teachers distanced themselves from strike action. They were prepared to work to rule but, like the other sectors of the civil service, their moral code would not allow them to vent their grievances on the people they were meant to serve.

Compare that noble attitude to today’s selfish and selfcentred “civil service”. While the wealth gaps in both the public and private sectors do deserve intelligent consideration, they are not relevant to the topic. Public sector increases mean that the private sector — whom Brown admits have also not received inflation-linked increases — must pay more tax.

The public sector is not doing its job at the best of times, has an established record of disruption and destruction the rest of the time, and expects the embattled private sector to suffer on its behalf. That attitude is selfish, no matter what dictionary you use. — Dave Rankin, Cambridge