Madam, - Contrary to Stephen Collins's assertion (March 18th), recent research has not invalidated the findings of the benchmarking body and has not established that public servants are paid 20 per cent too much.
The research to which he refers merely looked at earnings for employees in the private and public sectors generally and found that public sector employees' earnings exceeded those in the private sector. Given the different mix of skills, tasks and responsibilities it would, quite frankly, be surprising if the earnings of both groups were to be the same.
The benchmarking body, on the other hand, engaged in the much more meaningful exercise of comparing actual jobs performed in the public service with jobs of similar responsibility, skills, etc, in the private sector and found that, taking account of all factors, including different pension arrangements, public servants were paid less, to varying degrees, than those doing like work in the private sector (and it is the "like work" point that requires emphasis).
To give an example, my union represents higher executive officers in the Civil Service who can find themselves in charge of millions of euro of taxpayers' money, managing dozens of staff, making policy recommendations and submissions, preparing briefing notes and draft replies to parliamentary questions for ministers, etc. To suggest that a person doing this job should have their pay compared with, say, an assembly line operator is nonsense and would be accepted as such by any reasonable person. Both perform important tasks but with quite a different range of skills, judgment, etc, and one might expect that this would be reflected in the relative pay of both. This is what the headline figure, on which Mr Collins places such reliance, actually amounts to in effect.
The next benchmarking body's report will reflect again on the relative position of people in the public sector and their private sector colleagues doing like work. Mr Collins's prejudices can enable him to have an each way bet. If the body finds that public servants still lag behind their private sector counterparts we can expect more ill-informed vitriol, while if they establish otherwise, he can write the old "I told you so", as we know that opinion columnists are never wrong.
- Yours, etc,
TOM GERAGHTY, Deputy General Secretary, Public Service Executive Union, Dublin 2.