As the government’s axe bears down on their salaries, allowances and pensions,
the public service’s plea for leniency can be summarised in one sentence:
“It’s not our fault.” Or, as Dave Thomas, the general secretary of the
Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants, put it: “Public servants
didn’t cause the economic crisis.”
It put the economist Brian Lucey in mind of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the
Fire. The associate professor of finance at Trinity College Dublin quoted
the lyrics on irisheconomy.ie: “We didn’t start the fire / It was always
burning / Since the world’s been turning / No we didn’t light it / But we
tried to fight it.”
“Well, no,” wrote Lucey. “It wasn’t always burning. It was lit with a devil’s
brew of benchmarking, low interest rates, SSIAs [special savings investment
accounts] and insane, pro-cyclical planning. And I doubt that the civil
servants and public-sector workers who gladly took the benchmarking and
purchased villas in Croatia were busy fighting it.”
His dismissal is typical of the cold reception that public servants are
getting as they try to stave off cuts of €1.3 billion in their pay and
pensions in the budget on December 9. With just over a month to go, the
unions, representing 350,000 public-sector workers, have gained little
political traction, and just about zero sympathy from the private sector.
The campaign steps up a notch this week, with a day of action on Friday. This
involves marches at 2.30pm in eight locations, including Dublin, Limerick
and Galway. While it sounds like an unofficial half-day strike, the real
thing will take place on November 24. An all-day public-sector strike is
being organised by the Impact union, and other unions are balloting their
members to take similar action.
Public-sector unions have been picking their steps carefully through the
minefield of public opinion, even commissioning professional pollsters to
measure the mood.
Impact, the largest of these unions, is spending €450,000 on a newspaper and
billboard advertising campaign. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) is
spending €1.3m. So why, given that public-sector workers had their pay
docked 7% by a pension levy earlier this year, is everyone still so
unsympathetic towards them?
Almost every week since April’s budget, some new detail or figure has been
leaked or published showing the enormity of public service pay and perks.
Even the government has been spiriting facts and figures into the public
domain, where they are seized upon on by the media and lobby groups and used
in the growing propaganda war between the private and the public sectors.
Perhaps the most damaging statistics were separate studies by the Central
Statistics Office (CSO) and the Economic and Social Research Institute
(Esri) showing that the public-private sector pay gap has widened since the
boom. The Esri, a state think tank, revealed that between March 2003 and
October 2006, the public sector’s lead grew from 14% to 26%.
The CSO showed publicsector wages rose over the past year, despite the
government’s attempts to rein in costs, and while the private sector endured
record unemployment and pay cuts.
Apart from the figures, there were damaging details that lodged in the
public’s consciousness. The report from Colm McCarthy’s committee, An Bord
Snip Nua, memorably outlined various allowances and perks enjoyed by
different groups of public servants. In An Garda Siochana, for example,
officers can claim 57 allowances. One of these is a “premium payment” made
“to members who are on leave and would ordinarily be entitled to claim
unsocial-hours allowance if they were not on leave”. In other words,
compensation for being on holiday and missing out on the bonuses their
colleagues were getting. That cost taxpayers €9m last year.
Another allowance is paid to plain-clothes officers “in lieu of the uniform
allowance, for maintenance of plain clothes”.
McCarthy’s committee had many other remarkable examples. Half of all teachers,
some 30,000, receive “management allowances”, costing €236m a year.
Officials in government departments who are assigned abroad get a “foreign
service allowance”, which is not taxable, nor subject to the pension levy or
the new income levies. It continues to be paid despite the cost of living in
most foreign countries being lower than in Ireland.
Every September, the comptroller and auditor general tots up how much
officials have made in overtime and special payments. During the boom,
nobody paid much heed to the figures, even as they exceeded €1 billion a
year. We were good for it. Last month, those figures were pored over, not
least by the Department of Finance. It was noted that half of the cost was
incurred in the health service, where almost 30,000 staff shared €216m in
overtime.
Drip, drip, drip came the damaging revelations. The unions’ PR campaign was
constantly undermined. First, it was Brendan Drumm’s €70,000 bonus as Health
Service Executive (HSE) boss; last Monday it was the news that one of his
executives has been paid more than €1.3m while on leave since 2003. Even the
six-figure salaries of trade union chiefs were thrust into the public
domain.
As John O’Donoghue resigned after revelations of his extravagant expenses as
ceann comhairle, it emerged that Leinster House’s 819 staff pocketed €5.5m
in overtime and allowances last year. The Oireachtas sat fewer than 100
days, but one official somehow trousered an extra €30,000 in bonuses on top
of his salary.
Another blow was the comptroller and auditor general’s report on the amount of
sick leave taken by civil servants.
With an impeccable sense of timing, it was the first review since the 1980s,
when the absence rate was 3.3%. Now, 5% of available working time is being
lost to “sickies”, with the average employee missing 11 days a year. In the
Property Registration Authority, officials are missing 16 days each on
average. As commentators gleefully pointed out, it is an absenteeism rate
that simply would not be tolerated in any part of the private sector.
Worse, more than half of the absences start on a Monday (32%) or a Tuesday
(22%), and “stress/depression” was given as the reason in 10% of cases. The
mercury in the public sector sympathy barometer promptly dropped another
degree.
This might not have mattered so much if the unions had been able to sell their
alternative strategy of how the government could deal with the shortfall in
the public finances.
Their two main recommendations — tax the wealthy and defer action until 2013 —
were rejected out of hand. Last week, an exasperated Brian Lenihan told the
unions they were “deluding themselves”. The finance minister was
particularly scathing about demands for a third rate of tax to be levied on
those earning more than €100,000 a year, pointing out that their marginal
rate would become 63%. The public sector unions “want to tax everyone else
to have higher salaries for themselves”, he sniffed.
With the government ruling out higher taxes, and given that deflation will
cushion any pay cut, the decision seems as good as made.
The unions’ last throw of the dice is to divert the cuts from salaries and
towards the allowances and variable pay that the country’s 350,000 public
servants enjoy. In theory, there should be plenty of flexibility here. After
all, the HSE operates a round-the-clock health service but its staff work
9am-5pm Monday to Friday and get overtime for working outside those
parameters. This means junior doctors can earn €100,000-plus in overtime
each year.
However, there are signs of tensions between the unions in this sensitive
area. Gardai and nurses rely heavily on overtime and premium allowances to
supplement their salaries, but most civil servants working nine to five
would not suffer. The “extra remuneration” bill in the 15 government
departments was about €50m last year, €30m of it overtime.
Another issue that union officials will raise at the talks table this week is
the claim that the government has underestimated the numbers who have
already left the public service through early retirement and career break
schemes, and the effect of a recruitment embargo. The estimate was 3,700 at
the end of September, but unions will say substantial numbers have yet to
leave from the big employment sectors of health and education.
There are dangers for the unions in adopting a strategy of negotiating in
Government Buildings while staging industrial action outside. “They are at
risk of polarising Irish society between the public and private sector,”
said Seán Fleming, a Fianna Fail TD. “Very few people in the private sector
who are concerned about their jobs are going to be able to take days off to
go and protest.”
Fleming also challenges another plank of the public sector’s defence, the
“we’ve suffered enough” line. Some workers in commercial semi-state agencies
have received pay rises and avoided the pension levy, he said. “There are a
lot who have taken no hit at all. I can understand why a lot of people are
still quite aggrieved.”
Nevertheless, at least trade union leaders are at the negotiating table with
the government, which is where they like to be. One Labour party figure said
that, above all else, “the trade unions need a process; they can’t function
without one”.
Tensions built up between the government and the unions during the spring and
summer when that process was effectively suspended, as the political machine
went into electoral mode with the local and European contests in June and
the Lisbon referendum on October 2. There was alarm in the trade union
movement about the government’s political direction, without any forum for
that alarm to be aired or for reassurances to be sought on the issue.
Now that they are back round the table, there is at least a prospect of
agreement.
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