Pay stats “distorted”

Media concern over
the rates of public sector pay is ‘a smokescreen’ to distract from the
high-level of City bonuses, Unite, the largest union in the country, said today
(Thursday, 21 January).

Gail Cartmail, Unite Assistant General Secretary for
the Public Sector said that the right-wing media was ‘distorting’ the pay
picture to attack the wages of nurses, local government workers, and teachers
to obscure ‘the continuing obscene bonus culture still rife in the City’.

The Daily Telegraph reported
that earnings data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) which showed
that in the three months to November the average public sector worker was paid
£23,660 a year – £2,132 more than the average pay of a private sector worker.

But Unite argues that The Daily Telegraph has not properly represented
information released by the ONS as its article does not take into account the
following factors: it is difficult to make a ‘like for like’ comparison between
jobs in the private and public sectors, as for some jobs the public sector is
the only or main employer.

There
has been an increase in part-time and short-time working in the private sector,
due to the recession, compared to the public sector. This will have impacted
upon the ONS figures quoted by the paper, as they are weekly earnings for all
employees in the sector.

Gail Cartmail said: ‘Having ‘a go’ at a nurse
earning £25,000 a year, while failing to thoroughly examine the bonus culture
that is still delivering outrageous salaries to City traders is completely
wrong. It is a smokescreen created by certain sections of the media.’ ‘It is
the City that bears a heavy responsibility for the economic crisis, not the
hard-pressed teacher working in a deprived inner city school. But guess who
pays?

25 January 2010

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