Summary:The majority of public sector workers will receive no pay increase under the Report of the Public Service Benchmarking Body.
In its report, published yesterday, the body recommended pay increases for just 15 of 109 grades which it examined.
However, there are a number of other posts in the public service which were not examined by the body but which are linked to those receiving increases and they, in turn, will also get similar rises.
In general the increases are confined to more senior levels in the Civil Service, local authorities and the health sector.
The largest increase has been awarded to principal medical officers, a public health grade in the health service, who will receive 15 per cent. About 200 other public health doctors in posts linked to the principal medical officer grade will also receive the 15 per cent rise.
Senior nurses at director and assistant director level in some hospitals will receive a 10 per cent rise while the grade of radiography service manager II will get 9.2 per cent. Senior executive officers in local authorities will receive increases of 5 per cent as will health service general managers/ functional officers and emergency medical technicians.
Principal officers in the Civil Service will receive increases of 1.1 per cent. TDs, who are linked to the principal officer grade, will also receive this increase.
However, for tens of thousands of lower and middle ranking civil servants as well as gardaí and teachers, there will be no pay increases at all.
The report will be hugely disappointing for about 40,000 nurses who agreed, rather reluctantly, to take their case for a 10 per cent increase and a number of other claims to the benchmarking body as part of the settlement of a seven-week dispute last year.
Only a relatively small number of staff nurses working in the intellectual disability sector are likely to benefit from the report.
The benchmarking body was charged by the Government with examining pay scales in the public service vis-a-vis those in the private sector.
However, after a two-year analysis it concluded that "in general public service salaries compare well with the private sector".
It said that a comparison with private sector posts combined with a discount of 12 per cent which it applied to take account of the value of public service pensions, showed that only a small number of posts had salaries below private sector rates.
The report said it was clear that pension arrangements in the public service were significantly more valuable than those in the private sector. It said that public service pensions increased in line with salaries while those in the private sector moved in line with rises in the consumer price index or less.
It also said the public servants had a defined benefit pension scheme while many private sector employees did not have pensions at all and an increasing number were covered by defined contribution schemes.
It suggested that, in general, pensions cost most public sector employers about 20 per cent of staff salary levels. It said the comparable rate for the private sector was about 5 per cent.
"If comparison is confined to private sector employees who have pension arrangements, a rate of around 8.5 per cent would be reasonable," it stated.
The report also said it was unsurprising that the small number of grades for which it recommended salary increases were at the more senior levels.
It said that in the private sector there was a greater differential between the salaries of junior grades and those of senior grades than in the public sector.
"The narrower span in the public service leads to the situation referred to where junior grades have remuneration which compares well with the private sector but pay gaps with the private sector begin to emerge at some higher grade levels."
The benchmarking body said it appreciated that it may "seem intuitively unfair to some that no increases are proposed for the public service grades with lower pay levels while increases are recommended for a few of the more highly paid grades".
"However this reflects pay practices in the private sector," it stated.
