OPINION:Calling public servants inefficient is an attempt to divert attention from failures of free market, writes Dan Murphy
SADLY, WE are back at the point where public servants are characterised by some second-rate politicians with an insatiable lust for self-publicity and some self-important commentators as inefficient, overpaid, layabouts. In the same caricature, the private sector is characterised as a paragon of efficiency and productivity.
This is nonsense - a caricature worthy of the defunct satirical magazine, Dublin Opinion. Public servants pay taxes, have to commute to work, raise families and pay bills like everyone else. Like everyone else, they have to pay for creches, look after elderly relations and pay the same for their groceries. They will have to pay the income levy, increased VAT and the additional excise on petrol and their children's class sizes will also increase.
They feel a bit like Shylock, in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, who says: "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"
The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), hardly a hotbed of radicalism, carried out a detailed examination of the Irish public service this year which found that it has been, and continues to be, a positive force in our society.
It is worth noting the OECD team's observation that our public service is "doing more with less, relative to the size of the overall economy and workforce". If there is a criticism it is that, as the OECD report states, it is time for the public service to "communicate its many achievements".
The report builds on the fact that our public service is "on a sound trajectory of modernisation". Yet, blithely ignoring the detailed and serious study of the actual facts of the public service as set out in this report, some commentators persist in conveying an impression that the public service is not modernising, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
The report was inconvenient for these commentators as it made it clear that what they were saying was flying in the face of the facts. How did they get over this? Very simple: they assert that the OECD report was a whitewash. The way to do this was to disseminate a falsehood to the effect that the OECD team had intended to recommend that 8,000 jobs should be removed from the public service - or perhaps the Civil Service, which is less than one-eighth of the public service.
This falsehood was used to justify more attacks on the public service. Such populist attacks are nothing new. They seek, for ideological reasons, to distract from the failures of those who have brought about the recession. In this case, the whipping boys are public servants, but there have also been attempts to create hostility to other groups, such as foreign workers.
It is fascinating to see the direct relationship between the increase in the amount and virulence of the attacks on the public service as it becomes clearer that something rotten has been happening at the "commanding heights" of the private sector, such as banks and developers.
The purpose of the campaign against public servants is to seek to divert attention from the failure of the deregulated market so beloved of some of these right-wing commentators and, in the process, to seek to drive a wedge between workers.
Public-service pensions are a bugbear of these commentators. They never point out that public servants contribute to pensions by direct contributions (6.5 per cent of pay) and also by a deduction from pay in settling pay rates (12-15 per cent of pay).
The purpose of the attack on pensions is to divert workers in the private sector from securing better pensions. Public-service unions have nothing to apologise for in their efforts to secure good pensions for members.
Pensions in Ireland generally have to be improved if we are to avoid a situation where people will move from a lifestyle sustained by income from employment to poverty in retirement. Yet what has happened is employers have sought to worsen pensions in the private sector - and were doing so during the boom, not because they could not afford them, but to increase their profits.
This trend must be reversed in the interests of workers in the private sector and in the interests of taxpayers as the only port of call for pensioners with inadequate pensions will be the State. What is happening is that employers, by refusing to provide adequate pensions for their employees while working, are deferring that cost and ultimately, transferring it to the State.
Of course, there is a cost involved in providing good pensions and that cost has to be faced, probably by a combination of employers, employees and the State, but that is the only way to tackle it. Reducing adequate pension provision is of no value. We need to achieve an equality of a decent life for all pensioners, not an equality of poverty.
We must learn from the mistakes of the past. The god of deregulated markets has proved wanting. Lashing out at public servants and public service provision is no answer to this fundamental truth.
Dan Murphy is general secretary of the Public Service Executive Union and secretary of the Public Services Committee of Ictu