Official figures revealing public worker wages has risen since last year have crushed the case against pay cuts in the sector, it was claimed today.
Business leaders said the average 3.2 per cent salary jump was further evidence public and civil servants were living in a ¿parallel universe¿ while everybody else was being crucified by the economic crisis.
But Impact, Ireland¿s largest public sector union, said the Central Statistics Office (CSO) figures were already out of date and did not take account of the pension and income levies.
They also accused the Government of instigating a divide-and-conquer approach to workers by creating a rift between public and private sectors.
The CSO revealed average weekly earnings in the public service - excluding the health service ¿ rose from €942.81 to €973.09, up to June this year.
Pay rises were steeper in some areas, including in the civil service, which saw a 4.7 per cent rise, and in defence, where earnings were up by 4.3 per cent.
While average salaries in the Garda rose slightly by 0.6 per cent, they actually fell by 3.1 per cent when overtime is taken into consideration, according to the report.
The CSO also revealed that 2,700 fewer people were working in the public sector in June compared to the previous year.
Mark Fielding, chief executive of the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Isme), said the pay rise gave the lie to public sector arguments against cuts.
¿Public sector unions are now in danger of losing any bit of goodwill at all towards them,¿ he said.
¿We have a situation here where the country is almost bankrupt and we have a public sector blind to that fact and wanting to hold on to what they have - it is just untenable.
¿They really need to join the real world.¿ Mr Fielding said he agreed it wasn¿t public sector workers who were to blame for the economic crisis but insisted it wasn¿t the fault of private sector workers either.
The reality now was that cuts were needed across the board and the public sector could no longer remain in a ¿parallel universe¿ immune to the crisis, he claimed.
Public sector workers are earning on average 25 per cent more than their private sector counterparts while none of the 174,000 people who have joined the dole in the last year came from the public sector, according to Mr Fielding.
¿They need to get a dose of reality,¿ he said.
Fergal O¿Brien, senior economist with employers organisation Ibec, said that although numbers in the public service have fallen, the pay bill jumped around 2 per cent in the last year compared with an 11 per cent cut in the private sector.
¿Obviously there is clear divergence still between what is happening in the public sector in terms of controlling the pay bill versus what¿s happening in the private sector,¿ he said.
¿There¿s no question that the public sector pay bill must be reduced.¿ Mr O¿Brien added that the latest public sector absenteeism figures revealed room for talks with unions over how to cut costs while avoiding slashing wages.
¿If there¿s real engagement from the public sector unions, in terms of looking at productivity issues, looking at overtime, looking at allowances, government could probably find the savings it needs,¿ Mr O¿Brien said.
But Niall Shanahan, spokesman for Impact, insisted the CSO figures were now ¿historical data¿ which did not include the hit taken by public workers with the pension and income levies.
¿We are talking about a 7.5 per cent pay cut (from the levies) that is not factored in to these figures,¿ he said.
¿That¿s a decline in income.¿ Mr Shanahan accused the Government of trying to drive a wedge between public and private workers to make it easier to impose further wage cuts.
¿Part of that agenda is to pit public sector workers against private sector worker,¿ he said. ¿This year has been dominated by that agenda and it is tearing people apart. Workers and those who lost their jobs are being told there is a premium for those working in the public sector which must be penalised now in order to correct the economic situation.¿
The Impact spokesman said the union accepted cost-cutting changes needed to be made but said Government will not sit down with them to hammer out alternatives.