Wage freeze and flexibility on the cards?

Chancellor George Osborne is due to announce the long-awaited (dreaded), already much-maligned spending cuts today (Wednesday).

Apparently a photographer snapped up a preview yesterday when Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander was carrying the Spending Review - two pages of which were visible to photographers.

Part of what it said was that a wage freeze and flexibility over hours would help minimise redundancies, but it also suggested that there would be 490,000 fewer public sector workers by 2014-15.

"Wage freeze and flexibility would help minimise redundancies". This should please those left wing union leaders, who surely would like to spread what wealth there is around their members and members of other unions, rather than campaign for higher wages for their members alone.

Thus, I'm sure we can expect some generous offers of how that will happen so that we can avoid redundancies and the misery that goes with that. (I think this is where I put a wink emoticon to show that I'm joking.)

In the private sector we just have to get on with it

It's a tough business environment out there at the moment.

No surprises, of course, with everyone cutting back in anticipation of "the cuts" that will undoubtedly affect all of us in one way or another.

In the private sector we just have to get on with it.

Which is why it is very frustrating to hear the unions perking up and threatening strikes and all the rest of it. It won't help the economy. In fact, at times, it sounds like petty politics. Yes, cuts will hit us ALL hard. But, despite what the unions make think, there's no divine right to a job and an income.

In the private sector we have to fight for every sale. We also have to fight to ensure our businesses keep going, hoping to expand them and create employment opportunities for others. Even if we can't do that, then every sale and every purchase we make as part of our business helps to grow the economy.

Strikes do not.