Unseen and under valued?

When the PCS newspaper arrived this week, out fell this little leaflet! The PCS is one of the unions for the Coastguard Service and represents volunteer and full time Coastguards.

Some might remember the 'strike action' that some full time Coastguards took over their pay and to be fair whilst the action stopped, the campaign for better pay continues.

So it was a little odd that the union decided to use a picture of our mobile, and we believe Tom! We think it was over 6 years ago as we haven't had the Landrover for that time, what we can confirm is that Tom has put some weight on! Who took the picture, well that again remains a mystery.

So unseen and under valued? Well to be fair yes in a way, having done a fair amount of hours in July mostly on accident prevention and PR, the great British public still do not understand how or what the Coastguard do, a typical question " so where's your boat?" answer, do you mean the lifeboat? "yes" no that's the RNLI, oh so what do you do? .....and so on

So unseen yes until you want us and despite our efforts this remains a hard thing to over come, as a group of dedicated volunteers for a Government Agency we can not really do more than we are already, in July the team put in a massive 420 hours, that works out at just over 37 hours each team member or an extra weeks work on top of every ones normal working week, with 13 in the team we just can not be everywhere.

Undervalued, personally not, ask the people we have rescued or the other services we work with? Pay and conditions for our full time staff may be an issue but to be honest I believe at a local level we are appreciated.