[joe_mamba]

> A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.

Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.

[carlos_rpn]

I'm pretty sure they're "employed for life" because otherwise every new administration would replace as many people as possible.

Can you picture a company replacing 90% of their workforce every 4 or 8 years, all at once? Because that's what I think would happen if government employees could be fired as easily.

[selfhoster1312]

I don't know much about the UK, but it's really common here in France for public servants to be fired. Including for very wrong reasons such as being unionized. The accountability problem lies with the managers imposing meaningless KPIs (even in life-threatening scenarios such as hospitals and police stations) and high-level politicians who are parasites sucking off public money to destroy public services and give it all to their private-company friends who are going to employ them for very high salaries right after they leave the public service, a practice known as pantouflage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantouflage

[harvey9]

It is somewhat an exaggeration. The civil service and quangocracy can make redundancies if they really try.