As no doubt every paper will note, the gap between pay in the public and private sectors is now the widest in ten years according to the Office for National Statistics.
No doubt the right wing media will use the statistic to suggest profligacy by the state. I won't.
The reality is that the state is paying its best qualified staff 5.7% less than their private sector equivalents, having adjusted for gender, where the job is, and so on.
So, if the differential is not at the top then it has to be somewhere else - and it is, at the bottom. As Richard Exell at the TUC points out, the lower paid are better treated by the state than they are by the private sector. And that's good news. It means those in greatest need are paid better. It means fewer benefits are paid. It means, and lets not overstate the largesse because low pay is still low pay, that the beneficiaries of a more enlightened pay policy are the right people.
So when the right wing start shouting about higher pay in the public sector remember what they're calling for. They want:
- more people on minimum wage
- a bigger pay gap between top and bottom in society
- a bigger part of the overall pot of cash earned in society to be profit, going to the already well off
- children living in poverty
- a society where more benefits have to be paid because employers don't pay enough
- increased subsidies for the business models of so many major employers who don't pay enough in wages for their staff to live and rely week in week out on the state to subsidise their business by paying their staff for them.
The state does not get this entirely right - but the average pay differential ratio - bottom 5% to top 5% in the public sector is 4.6 and it's 5.6 in the private sector, a sector where minimum pay is much more likely because unions are under-represented.
And that's nothing to shout about. In fact, it's exactly the wrong direction of travel.
But what the right wing media will be saying again is that it's time to dumb down to the worst level that the private sector delivers and there's only one answer to that, which is 'no way'.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Fourth para from the bottom, ‘state’ not ‘staff’, Richard (that dictation software at it again) but otherwise good to see you preempting the nonsence that will now spew forth from likes of the TaxPayers Alliance and their ilk, and their continuing attempts to drive everyone apart from the elite back to serfdom.
By the way, I never had a chance earlier in the week to say good luck with the book.
Thanks and corrected!
But the report does burst the broad myth that public sector workers get better pensions than the private sector because they accept far lower salaries.
Well, actually it seems to support it to me
Remember far too many low paid employees have no pension provision at all and at higher levels of pay the difference may well be pension related
Actually where like for like is found (and it is difficult to compare public and private), the public sector earns less. A big reason for the difference is that thepublic sector employs far fewer cleaners, shelf stackers etc – traditionally low paid low skill jobs. What it does employ is doctors, judges, generals etc. The Public sector employs, realative to size, more graduates. If you read the Income Data Services report, that notes the difficulty in comparison
http://www.pcs.org.uk/download.cfm?docid=9DB00553-87DA-4656-8CED13D7238AC76F
What its conclusion is: in like for like jobs, the starting point for the public sector is equal or slightly above the private sector. by the time you get to the mid point of scale, the public sector is falling behind, and the gap remains or even grows, as you go up the pay scale for a job.
Another big reason for the gap is the policy of outsourcing low pay jobs (such as cleaners). The loss of the lowest earners pushes the Public Sector average up, while the Private sector, who now employs them, has their average pulled down.
Please note that many civil servants outside Whitehall do not recognise “£25,000” as a salary in their range. The Admin Officer grade tops out at approx £20-22k (after 7-10 years in grade, time and amount department dependent). AOs do the vast majority of day to day work – as an AO for HMRC I was knocking on doors to collect tax, phoning people to negotiate payments etc. The next grade up – EO – is the lowest management grade, or for more complex work.
The starting wage for a Prison Officer is £14,500, plus a £2,500 ‘shift disturbance allownace (ie £50 pw for having to do nights, bank holidays, weekends etc). They tend to get compared to Security Guards for wages. Who do you think has the most demanding job?
Thanks
You don’r mention: a reduction in the £170 bn deficit. Ultimately, deficits have to be paid for as the Greeks have discovered, and the Greek problem is widely acknowledge to be a consequence of overspending by the Greek public sector.
The cause of the Greek deficit is completely different to the UK one. Additionally, how does exposing the myth of ‘cushy’ CS jobs have anything to do with the deficit – are you suggesting all public sector should be cut further, when the deficit is nothing to do with the costs of the public sector? HMRC has already lost 30000 jobs in 6 years, and is set to lose 10000 more (a total of 40% of the workforce). This despite tens of billions of tax going uncollected due to short staffing – in 2007 the Accountants’ professional bodies were asking for the cuts to stop, due to the very fact that it allowed tax avoidance.
The deficit is due to having to throw money at the banks, not the civil service.
Agreed
Well the news that another council (Shropshire) is planning to sack and re-hire its workforce on greatly reduced terms will no doubt be celebrated by the Taxpayers Alliance as a step towards pay parity. The council has been left in an unenviable position by budget cuts but this can’t be the right way to treat working people. I’m fear there will be much more of this to follow.
http://www.personneltoday.com/articles/2011/07/06/57749/shropshire-council-issues-redundancy-notices-to-all-6500-staff.html
Is there any way of checking the figures? Many public bodies don’t actually have any ‘public sector employees’ doing the cleaning and the catering.
The low-wage services are all contracted-out to the private sector and in (say) a hospital that contributed to the public-vs-private sector wage statistics, the public-sector statistics would be contributed by the medical, technical and admin staff, and the private-sector statistics would receive a hefty contribution from the contract cleaners.
This is, I think, a likely case of double-counting.