Research from Policy Exchange claiming that public sector workers earn more than their equivalent in the private sector is fundamentally flawed, said UNISON the UK’s largest union. It is completely untrue that all public sector workers earn more than all private sector workers. And not all public sector workers have private sector counterparts.
Independent Labour market experts have recently proven that, when all relevant factors are taken into account, the mythical “public sector pay premium” melts away to nothing. Income Data Services report* shows that figures used to claim “premium” fail to control for ethnicity, travel to work area & most importantly of all, responsibility level when the more reliable pay benchmarking method is used, the “premium” disappears.
It is matter of fact that most of the lowest paid workers in the public sector such as school and hospital cleaners and cooks, porters, home care workers and residential care workers have been outsourced to private companies. They may be employed by the private sector but work in the public sector and counting them as private sector obviously skews the true picture.
The public sector also includes a raft of highly skilled jobs that are not represented in the private sector such as judges, lecturers, doctors, army generals and senior civil servants.
Dave Prentis, General Secretary of UNISON, said:
“When you start with false assumptions, your results are equally flawed. The idea that there is a public sector pay premium is a myth and dressing it up with dodgy statistics still won’t make it true.
“It is risible to suggest that national pay bargaining has caused any pay gap, especially when public sector workers have had a three year pay freeze and are suffering from a 1% pay squeeze.
“We know that hundreds and thousands of public sector workers earn the minimum wage or just above and that means real hardship for families struggling to pay their bills and put food on the table.
“Setting up workers in the private sector against those in the private is a nasty trick designed to cover up the impact of the Government’s austerity agenda. The real pay difference is between those at the top and the bottom - the bankers and financiers who are still raking in the bonuses and dodging taxes at the expense of us all.”
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