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Pay statistics ‘distorted’ to create ‘smokecreen’ for City bankers’ pay

21st January 2010

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 Telegraph, as they are weekly earnings for all employees in the sector.
• the ONS statistics used by the Telegraph are those which exclude bonuses. Including bonuses gives an annual earnings figure of £23,868 for the public sector and £23,244 for the private sector – a difference of £624.
• there are currently a number of long term pay deals in place in the public sector covering millions of workers designed to provide budgetary stability and address the recruitment and retention issues.

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? – not the bankers.”

ENDS