A bit of whistle blowing

Well I'm afraid I can't keep my mouth shut any longer! In fact I was left really furious yesterday morning when I heard a news item on the radio about the main civil service union banging on about "protecting the rights of civil servants' redundancy entitlements".
The leader of the union was saying that 'most of our members are only on national minimum wage'. That's a lie for a start, I spent seven years as a civil servant and I don't think anyone in our office of about forty or more people across all grades was on the national minimum wage. Those with families and earning under a certain amount also received extras like child tax credit and working tax credit so were nowhere near the breadline.
What the union want to protect are the redundancy packages that were built into contracts many years ago (the mid 1980's I believe) where someone being made redundant would receive so many YEARS salary depending on length of service. Most of these people by the way, are currently receiving pretty good salaries, some even exceed the national average wage which is quite high. Even people employed in private companies don't get those kinds of 'golden handshakes' for losing their employment regardless of how long they have worked for a company.
The civil service pay scale was a mystery to me because some of the wages in our grades didn't ever get to the top of the grade regardless of how long you had been there or how well you performed. It seemed to be down to whether or not your superior liked you and put your name forward and then it had to go up through goodness knows how many managers (many of whom had never heard of you) before someone decided whether you should receive more money!
A few years ago when I was working as a civil servant the powers that be wanted to cut the number of civil servants by thirty thousand and there was quite a buzz in our office as some of the people that had worked there for twenty years or more since leaving school, worked out the enormous payouts that they would receive if they took voluntary redundancy. The figures were mind boggling and strangely enough, none of these people were particularly good at their jobs despite having worked for DWP for so long and some of them were downright lazy. These are also the ones who will receive the largest pensions too because the 'final salary scheme' was closed when I started work for the DWP. Anyway, nobody was made redundant because a couple of months after that they were taking on more staff due to the economic downturn.
I never found the union to be much good anyway because all they were interested in was fighting with the government about our wages and they weren't even very good at that. When we wanted them to tackle the management about our poor managers and bad working practices, they didn't do a thing despite crowing that they were 'fighting for us'.