OPINION:Public servants are being made scapegoats through a campaign of misinformation, writes TOM GERAGHTY
IN RECENT times public servants have become used to being attacked and scapegoated. The latest manifestation is a concerted attempt to misrepresent their pay situation relative to the rest of the community. The publication of the Central Statistics Office (CSO), figures which appear to suggest that the pay of public servants is significantly ahead of the rest of the economy and subsequent ESRI comments that there is scope for cutting their pay, have generated an impression that public servants are paid more than private sector counterparts.
The McCarthy group even felt emboldened to stray beyond their terms of reference to lend weight to this growing campaign. However, the entire proposition has no basis in fact.
The ESRI comments relate to 2006 data. This is significant because, ironically, the second report of the benchmarking body – a report based on comparison techniques designed to do public servants no favours – dealt with some of the mythology surrounding these figures at around that time. That body commissioned outside expertise and, among other tasks, asked the experts to examine claims based on a CSO survey, the National Employment Survey (NES), that public servants earned about 40 per cent more than private sector counterparts.
The benchmarking report noted “. . . the NES does not allow comparisons to be made between public service and private sector jobs on a like-for-like basis . . .” It then went on to conduct such a comparison itself and while finding that there was what it called a “public service premium” in some cases, (and in some instances, this was on a significant scale), it also found that some occupations did not have one “or are below the private sector” and concluded that “there is little or no public service premium if comparison is made with private sector employees in large establishments” which, they noted, “account for a significant majority of public service employment”.
Unfortunately, this has not prevented the myth from gaining ground through constant repetition. The ESRI’s Alan Barrett referred to it so it was picked up by Jim O’Leary and then by Dr Garret FitzGerald and so on. The fact that it does not stand up to objective scrutiny gets lost.
The benchmarking body’s report is the only report that actually made like-for-like comparisons that identified types of work performed by public servants, searched for and identified outside comparators doing like work and then compared rates of pay, having regard to other benefits. No other body, including the CSO, uses that level of detailed job comparison data.
Also, in view of the fact that 100 per cent of public servants now pay a pension levy which rises to 10.5 per cent of pay, while, as the recent report by Mercer reveals, only 9 per cent of private sector employees have had cuts applied to their pay, the position of public servants’ actual take home pay has disimproved significantly relative to private sector counterparts.
This is not to argue for cuts to be applied to the remaining 91 per cent of private sector employees, but, rather, to inject some factual information into a debate that has been skewed by the misuse of statistical data.
As Siptu’s Manus O’Riordan has pointed out, public service workers’ pay increased in the three years to 2008 at virtually the same rate as the increase in pay for manual industrial workers. In the full decade up to 2008, the difference in the increases for public service workers and manual industrial workers was a mere 0.3 per cent per year, even though this period includes awards from the first benchmarking exercise designed to help public servants’ pay to “catch-up” with pay movements in the private sector.
Furthermore, in the six months since December 2008, the Consumer Price Index has fallen by 3.6 per cent, but with the application of the Public Service Pension Levy, there has been a de facto pay cut for public servants of an average of 6.8 per cent in that time. It is also worth pointing out that at 10 per cent of GDP, our public sector payroll costs are below the EU average of 12 per cent.
While the McCarthy agenda is driven by the country’s fiscal position, others argue that we need to cut pay rates generally. Dr FitzGerald in last Saturday’s column in The Irish Times suggested, again incorrectly, that pay rates in the private sector were falling. In fact, the Mercer report, the Hay Group and Ibec all suggest that this is not the case for most private sector workers. Those who argue for a general cut in pay rates might also be asked to consider that according to the OECD, Ireland has the 11th highest wage rates in the EU – 22 per cent below the average of the top 10 countries. None of this is put forward to suggest that there are no difficulties with our public finances. However, two complementary agendas threaten to undermine our efforts to haul ourselves out of recession. One seeks, as a matter of policy, to deflate our economy further through the advocacy of pay cuts; even though our current pay rates put us in the middle range of EU countries. The other is to suggest that public servants should bear the bulk of the burden for rectifying the public finances.
Our economic history in the last 20 years or so should have taught us that we can climb out of recession through consensus and a commitment to share any burden that arises. Scapegoating public servants will make any consensus impossible. Public servants, two-thirds of whom earn less than €60,000 per year, have been softened up as a target by a campaign of misinterpretation of statistics.
However, they have borne their share of targeted “pain” already in the form of the pension levy . Attempts to victimise them further in the form of yet more pay cuts are, simply, unjustifiable, by any measure.
An alternative within which public service unions will work with Government to restructure our public service organisations and to assist in the deployment of staff to areas of greatest need, in light of changed economic circumstances and reducing staff numbers, is on offer to Government, but not if pay and conditions are to be subjected to further attack.
We can turn our economy around together in a spirit of consensus or conflict will result from attacks on perceived soft targets.
Tom Geraghty is general secretary of the Public Service Executive Union and secretary of the Ictu public services committee