Taxpayer getting a lubeless arse-fucking again.

Whether it's coming out of council tax or coming out of central government funding (paid for by general taxation), this isn't what those taxes are being paid for.

Local authorities across the country are allowing hundreds of their employees to devote all or part of their working week to union, rather than council, duties - while their salaries are paid from public funds.
A survey of 77 English councils by this newspaper found that they spent around £11 million last year on the salaries of individuals who were employed by the councils, but in fact spent their time on trade union duties.

Despite having had a dig at some of them I don't have a problem with unions as such. Free assembly, associate with who you like, nothing to do with me. I wouldn't join an organisation that tells me whether I'm allowed to work depending on what the rest of the members want but I wouldn't want unions banned or anything, even the completely insane ones that seem hell bent on putting their members out of work. And I certainly don't have a problem with unions having full time staff just like any other large organisation providing, and this is quite important, it is the union that pays for them. It is the union members who supposedly benefit from there being a union that should be covering this, not Mr and Mrs Smith of Wisteria Avenue who've just sent of cheques for their ever increasing council tax and telly licence - oh yes, they're fucking at it at the Beeb as well as councils. In fact it's all around the public sector.

The system, known as "facility time", also operates in Whitehall departments, the NHS, the BBC and other areas of the public sector - meaning that the true extent to which taxpayers subsidise trade unions is actually far higher.
The disclosures come at a time when the public sector unions are preparing to fight spending cuts and threatening strike action.

Why not carry on paying the bastards while they're on strike, then? It's not like it makes any difference when they're not doing anything for the poor fucks paying their fucking wages when they are working.

Critics argue that the payments are "sucking money away from vital services" while freeing up union funds to be used for campaigning.

Which is true of course, but besides the point that union costs are supposed to be paid with member subs, not working people's fucking taxes.

The Town Hall payments are made under local agreements struck between each council and the unions that are represented among its workforce.
In some cases, council officials who are also union representatives are paid by the council to work full time for the union.
In other cases, councils allow members of their staff to spend a proportion of their working week on union matters, while continuing to pay their full salaries from council funds.

Even that's fucking unacceptable. We're not talking here about a few hours a months lost to personal emails, solitaire and surfing the web, we're talking about people spending some or even all of their working hours working for an entirely different organisation to the one at which they're theoretically employed. Can you imagine such a thing in the private sector? Can you imagine someone being paid to do nothing at all for the company that pays their salary but instead spends 40 hours a week working for an organisation that might well prevent any work being done by anyone at all if it gets pissed off?

And even if it happens, and for all I know workplace law might even force it on companies in some places or circumstances, that's the companies problem, not Joe Public's. If Joe doesn't sell to it, buy from it or have shares in it there's no real problem for him, but that doesn't apply when this goes on in the public sector. That's because Joe and everyone is threatened with violence if they don't pay the taxes that are being drained to pay the salaries of people who are, for all practical purposes, union employees.

Somehow the wrongness of this situation seems to have escaped both the unions and the councils (ooooh, there's a fucking shock).

Councils and unions insist that the arrangements are good value for taxpayers as they ensure that industrial relations remain cordial.

That's not the point, you thieving fucking cunts. If you took it all down the fucking casino and doubled your the taxpayers' money each and every time without fail, even if you had some precognitive gift that literally meant you couldn't lose, you'd be correct in claiming that it was really good value but it wouldn't have given you any fucking right to have done it in the first place.

... Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, the UK's largest public sector union, said: "There are more than six million public sector workers and all these staff have the right to be represented.
"If trade union stewards are going to represent staff properly, they need time away from their usual jobs to do it."

Fine, don't have a problem with them being properly represented providing, as I mentioned earlier, it comes out of their unions subs instead of the taxpayers' pockets. By all means hire full time staff but do it on your own budget. If being represented is so bloody important to them and so valuable they should be more than happy to cough up the necessary. Let me spell it out for you.

IT IS NOT YOUR FUCKING MONEY!

Do you understand Dave Prentis? Is the message coming through, unions? Can you get that through your tiny brains, councils? Are you picking up what I'm laying down, NHS, BBC, LEAs, GMB, FBU and all the rest of the alphabetti spaghetti brigade?

IT IS NOT YOUR FUCKING MONEY!

It's not your money to spend as you please, okay? It's not your fucking money at all. Bad enough that there is no real choice but to pay, bad enough that so many end up paying not just on behalf of others but also for the foolhardiness of others, but if you can't restrain yourselves from spending money taken by force, ultimately taken at fucking gunpoint, on things outside the remit for which it was paid then there really cannot be any further argument: taxation is indeed theft.

And you bastards are thieves.