Employers and unions were at odds today over official government figures showing that public sector workers are paid on average 8% more than their private sector colleagues.
The spat came about after the Office of National Statistics published its latest snapshot details of UK Plc’s employment profile.
Apart from telling us that the number of people employed in the public sector fell by 37,000 between September and December 2011 to hit 5.94 million – the lowest figure since June 2003 – it also said that public sector workers were still being paid more than their private sector peers.
While average pay for the private sector was £458 per week for the November 2011-January 2012 quarter, public sector wages were more like £476 per week, or if financial bodies were not included in the total, £466 per week. This amounts to an average private sector salary of £23,816 per annum versus £24,752 for public sector workers: a differential of 8%.
After politely acknowledging that pay scales for similar jobs in both sectors had not been compared directly, employers’ lobby group, the CBI, echoed the government line on the need for local pay. It said: "It is clear that public sector pay is still considerably higher than pay in the private sector…We need to ensure that public sector salaries reflect local labour market conditions by putting pay decisions into the hands of individual employers at the local level."
But the largest public sector union, Unison, retorted that the headlines masked "the grim reality of low pay and the ongoing pay freeze for hundreds and thousands of people working for public services".
It claimed that the public sector had a much larger proportion of highly-skilled and qualified workers, which included teachers, surgeons, doctors, planners, surveyors, social workers and senior civil servants, which skewed the figures.
The union also pointed out that many low paid public sector jobs such as cleaning and catering had been privatised. This meant that, while people may apparently work in the public sector, they were, in practice, employed by the private, factors which had raised average public sector pay levels and lowered those in the private "without anybody being paid any differently".
Dave Prentis, Unison’s general secretary, said: "Don’t let anyone be fooled into thinking that public sector workers are enjoying high wages. There are a lot more highly skilled, older and well-qualified staff working in the public sector that skew the figures."
