Public Service pay deal - Government must control public purse

THE incineration of the vital research documentation behind Ireland’s lucrative benchmarking pay deal for public sector workers must rank as one of the great wage negotiation scandals of all time.

Predictably, though designed to bring them into line with their counterparts in the private sector, the deal has seen public servants race ahead on the pay scale, though this is strongly denied by the IMPACT union, which has more than 55,000 public service members.

Nonetheless, the generosity of benchmarking is borne out by statistics issued yesterday by the CSO showing, for instance, that gardaí now earn an average of almost €67,000 a year, including €15,000 overtime. That is more than double the average industrial wage, which stood at €32,432 in December 2006.

According to the most up-to-date figures, the average public sector wage, excluding the health sector, was €46,728.76. The average weekly pay for a garda before overtime was €1,000.46 in December and when overtime was added it rose to €1,286.01, an annual salary of €66,872.

Unsurprisingly, prison officers were the next highest earners after the gardaí, with an average pay of €59,962.

The CSO report does not take into account the salaries of more than 100 top civil servants who earn between €150,000 and €200,000 and who are set to get further handsome increases within months. Neither is the lucrative remuneration package for government ministers or TDs’ pay included in the latest statistics.

There is bitter irony in the fact that public servants are far better paid than the vast majority of their paymasters, the hard-pressed taxpayers who have to pick up the tab for increases to civil servants, teachers, gardaí, engineers, planners, craft workers and general employees. Furthermore, public service pensions, which are guaranteed, inflation-proof and pay-linked, have aptly been compared to mini-gold mines.

Is it any wonder that ISME, the independent business organisation, has called on the Government immediately to address the “anomaly” of public sector pay?

Pointing to a 44% gap between the public and private sectors, the business group is highly critical of what it calls a “surreal” situation where a sector of the economy, which is already better paid than their counterparts in the private sector, are currently lining up claims for a shorter working week, a scenario where people will effectively be “paid more for working less”.

It is hard to deny the logic of the ISME argument that higher pay means higher taxes, whether they are disguised as ‘charges’ or stealth taxes.

As reflected in the CSO statistics, the pay balance has been tilted heavily in favour of the country’s 250,000 public servants, not counting more than 106,300 workers in the health service.

The cost of funding the benchmarking deal is imposing mounting pressure on taxpayers and on the business community.

Among its key proposals, ISME wants government to keep public spending, particularly the public sector pay and pensions element, under control by curtailing it to a percentage of GNP. It also wants value-for-money audits to be conducted in every department of government.

Moreover, it wants the next administration to ensure that increased productivity is achieved before granting any extra payments or reduction in hours.

It will be interesting to see if the new government will have the gumption to renegotiate the controversial deal so that genuine productivity can be exacted from those reaping handsome pay awards from benchmarking, a process famously described as an ATM machine.