Public pay deal must give most to those who are really squeezed

“What do they expect us to live on?” one striker on the picket lines asked The Irish Times this week. “Nobody can survive on the wages we’re getting.”“I think it’s important to say this is for everyone,” said another. “The Government are just squeezing us so hard with the cost of living and yeah, we need more money just to survive.”It was a refrain heard through the extensive and largely positive media coverage of the strike (RTÉ seems especially keen) on Wednesday: it is impossible to survive on public sector wages. Workers have been hammered by increases in the cost of living. They can’t afford to live.This is a perhaps understandable exaggeration to make a point, though it is also another example of how moderation is disappearing from our political debate. Public servants are not unable to survive, obviously; they may be short of money, but they are getting by. However, one thing that has been absent from much of the debate is what exactly are public servants – teachers, nurses, gardaí, civil servants and so on – actually paid? Are they all as badly off as the coverage might suggest?READ MOREIt is certainly true that there are many low-paid workers in the public service who are struggling to get by. They have seen their living standards squeezed and – for younger workers – have little prospect of owning their own home and building the life that they might aspire to. But is low pay endemic across the public sector, in the way that the strikers seem to believe it is?[ ‘My pay hasn’t gone up – and everything else has’: Public sector workers have their sayOpens in new window ]This year’s budget estimates show that the State directly employs 403,000 people funded by the exchequer this year, for which the wage bill is €31.2 billion – giving an average of €77,400 per head. Of course that is a clumsy way of looking at it, and it fails to take account of lots of things. But it tells us something, all the same.Let’s look at some individual sectors. According to data from the Department of Education, there are 43,451 primary teachers at the end of June, with a total wage bill of €3.96 billion, giving an average of more than €91,000 annually.Letter writers, hold your pens – this does not mean that a typical primary teacher is earning this much. There are principals who earn more, and young teachers who earn a lot less. Teachers may receive allowances and top-ups for good reasons, though they tend not to shout about this (understandably) during pay negotiations. The primary schoolteachers’ union, the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, cites a figure from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for average pay as €70,629 in 2025.For secondary teachers, the total number is 35,707 and the total pay bill is €3.08 billion, so the average figure is €86,000 – again subject to the caveats entered above for primary teachers. The OECD figure for average secondary teacher pay is €69,747.What about doctors and nurses? The total figure for nurses and midwives employed is just under 50,000, with a total pay bill of €4.4 billion; an average of €88,000 a year. For doctors, the total bill for 15,631 medical and dental staff is €3.1 billion, giving an average of €198,000. [ Stephen Collins: Unsustainable pay increases for public sector workers will put Ireland’s stability at riskOpens in new window ]No, this does not tell us that a typical nurse on the ward earns nearly €90,000. Lots of nurses earn less, and some on higher grades earn more. The averages don’t tell us everything. But they don’t tell us nothing, either.For gardaí, there is less rooting around in Government budget figures required, as the Central Statistics Office compiles quarterly figures that clearly identify the earnings of gardaí as a distinct category. They show consistently that gardaí are the best paid part of the public service, with average weekly earnings and average weekly paid hours in the second quarter of this year of €1,833.73 and 43.2 hours respectively. It should be said that one of the reasons for these comparatively high garda earnings is that gardaí tend to do a lot of overtime.Let us leave aside for now three other very important aspects of public sector pay: the value of guaranteed pensions, which are so expensive as to be nowadays unbuyable in the private sector; the value of job security; and the pay premium that many public sector workers enjoy over their private sector counterparts.Instead, consider another aspect of employment largely confined to the public sector: the system of automatic increments (ie increases in salary), which means that workers are rewarded for getting older, rather than better, at their jobs. These are not, I regret to say, the same thing. Teachers, for instance, have a 25-point scale; nurses have a 13-point scale.[ The Irish Times view on the public sector strike: mutually agreed obstructionOpens in new window ]The people in the public sector who are squeezed the most are younger workers who are low on the increments scale, and who have to contend with high rents and housing costs, worst in Dublin. A city where teachers, nurses and gardaí can’t afford to live is a disaster. But the system operated by the unions and the State works to the disadvantage of younger public servants and the advantage of their older colleagues. A flat percentage increase in pay benefits the older public servants more while their younger co-workers struggle.It follows that the people who should benefit most – or maybe exclusively – from a new pay deal are younger public servants in cities. Older public servants high up the increments scale do not need the help as much as they do. Whatever the total amount of the pay deal, the pay increases funded by it should be targeted towards those who need them most. The increments system should be reformed. The unions should seek and the Government should agree a Dublin or city weighting. That would be a real demonstration of one of the unions’ favourite ideas – solidarity.