That's true enough - and I certainly wouldn't suggest that they have it easier than the public sector. I'd also add that one common claim of public sector unions - namely that the relative job security and good pensions enjoyed in that sector are a trade-off for relatively low pay (pensions, especially in a pay-as-you-go system, being after all a form of deferred pay) - may be true when the comparison is with big private-sector firms, as gillo points out above, but is less likely to be so with the kind of small-scale employment you're talking about.

That said, that's not what I was posting about. No one, that I've noticed, is demonizing people who work for small firms in the private sector. By contrast, much of the press public sector employees are currently receiving, from journalists and politicians, is either deliberately or accidentally misleading. When Nick Clegg describes their pensions as "gold-plated"; when a few fat-cat salaries get far more publicity than the millions of employees earning under £20,000; and when the "unsustainable" or "rocketing" cost of paying "unreformed" public-sector pensions is talked of as if it were a result of greed and a public sector expansion rather than demographics and a reduction in the public sector workforce, then I think it's fair enough to point this out.