I hesitate to suggest this to readers of the New Statesman, many of whom toil in the public sector, but government employees have never had it so good. Financially, they are entering a golden age.
For years, doctors, teachers and civil servants have endured being patronised by their private-sector friends who live in bigger houses, drive swankier cars and go on fancier holidays. The pendulum, however, is swinging back.
This is not about wages, although public-sector pay is growing almost twice as fast as private-sector pay - 4.5 per cent against 2.6 per cent, according to the latest official figures. While medics, teachers and soldiers are getting 4 per cent-plus this year, many in telecoms and computing have had their pay frozen. Even in the City, rewards are shrinking.
The top public-sector jobs are starting to catch up with the private sector. The Department of Trade and Industry wants to pay the next chief executive of Consignia (aka the Post Office) £500,000 - a 128 per cent rise on the salary of the present incumbent, John Roberts.
Nor is it about job opportunities, although prospects again look brighter in the state sector than in commerce. While British Airways, British Telecom, UK Coal and Logica are among dozens of private-sector companies dumping jobs, parts of the public sector are recruiting aggressively. The vacancies pages of the Guardian (the favourite hunting ground for people in healthcare, teaching and local government) look fatter than those in the Financial Times and Sunday Times (accountants, traders and industrialists).
No, the real reason that public employees should be smiling pityingly at their private-sector counterparts is pensions. It's not that public-sector employees' retirement benefits have got any better (with the one exception of MPs, who are shamelessly attempting to beef up the formula on which their pensions are based). It's that private-sector workers' pension benefits are getting dramatically worse.
It is hard to emphasise enough quite how fast pension prospects in the private sector are sinking. Company after company is dumping its final-salary pension scheme for new recruits in favour of cheap and cheerful money-purchase schemes. The sums in probable lost benefits are staggering.
While the middle classes bask in the rising value of their homes, many of them have not yet noticed that the value of their pension benefits is moving just as fast in the opposite direction. Final-salary schemes pay out an agreed percentage of the employee's final salary, regardless of how long he or she lives or what happens to investment returns.
Money-purchase schemes merely pay out an annuity bought with whatever the employer and employee have managed to accumulate along the way. Rising longevity and falling stock market returns have sharply slashed the income annuities will now pay out.
Every week sees another private-sector employer closing its final-salary scheme. Dixons, Marks & Spencer, British Airways, Sainsbury and Abbey National are the most recent companies to call time. The killer blow is that employers are not only shifting the risk from themselves to their employees, they are also taking the opportunity to slash their own contributions at the same time.
In the public sector, by contrast, the final-salary scheme remains sacrosanct. A middle-ranking career civil servant whose final salary is £60,000 will retire on £40,000 a year, index-linked. His male counterpart in a private-sector, money-purchase scheme would have had to accumulate a lump sum of about £617,000 in his pension pot over the course of his career to buy an equivalent income for life at the age of 65. A woman - who has longer life expectancy - would need to have built up a pot of £701,000.
The other, mostly unremarked, aspect of all this is that most state employees' pensions are unfunded. There is no money being put into the kitty. It is taken as read that taxpayers 20, 40 and 60 years hence will foot the bill. It is the kind of off-balance sheet accounting even Enron might blush at.
The Financial Services Authority was moved the other day to warn that the looming pensions crisis was so serious that many insurance companies could go bust, because we are living longer and their actuaries have not adjusted their sums enough. Exactly the same challenge faces the Treasury. It won't go bust, but its future liabilities grow with every month added to life expectancy.
For the moment, employees in the private sector aren't complaining about bankrolling the big increases in public spending and rewards for state employees. There is a guilty feeling that state employees have had the fuzzy end of the lollipop over the past 20 years and that it's high time they got a decent lick.
But if public services do not improve, and as the truly dire retirement prospects of younger private-sector workers begin to sink in, that warm philanthropic feeling could quickly turn to resentment.
