The only low-paid public servants are the cleaners
LANSDOWNE HOUSE is a bit of an eyesore – one of those forbidding, brutalist, pre-cast concrete monstrosities that went up all over Dublin in the 60s. And yet, as we found this week, all human life is there. In the freezing small hours of Thursday, you might have seen civil servants from the Department of Public Expenditure And Reform slinking away from the building, on their way to report the bad news to Paschal Donohoe. Nearby in the darkness you might have spotted representatives of 19 public service unions getting into air-conditioned saloons, their pockets bulging with draft ballots on industrial action.
Talks on public sector pay had broken down at 3am when the unions said no to an 8.5% pay hike and sent Paschal to his room to think about what he’d done. But they did not, we’re led to believe, break down irrevocably. Judging by the unions’ spin since then, they seem to have good reason to believe Paschal’s going to cave, and they may be right. But more on that in a moment.
First, the other extreme. The same building – address of the Workplace Relations Commission – gave us a second revealing story this week, offering a glimpse of life among people who would not know themselves if they had a steady weekly wage, never mind a 39-hour week, paid sick leave, extra money for anti-social hours, holiday pay, parental leave, regular index-linked salary increases, and – most luxurious of all – a job for life.
The WRC has ruled on the case of a migrant worker who, as a chef in a Chinese restaurant, was earning €6 an hour. He worked 50 or 60 hours a week for €300, he said, and was given breaks of only five or 10 minutes at a time to eat. The man told the WRC his case was by no means unique.
‘There [are] many others who worked in similar circumstances who could not do anything… They [came] to Ireland on borrowed money and [are] dependent on their employers for their work permit and accommodation,’ he said.
OF COURSE we knew that though. We know about the exploitation of migrant workers, who are doing all the cooking and washing and mopping up and hod carrying and ladder-climbing and food delivering that Irish people aren’t doing. And we know it’s not just migrant workers either. You don’t have to be fresh off the boat to be exploited.
The country is full of people slaving for cowboys. People, especially youngsters, working in hospitality, construction, private healthcare, retailing, domestic service, often don’t know on a Tuesday if they’ll be working on a Wednesday, and can be asked to work extra hours with no warning and no overtime. Health & Safety doesn’t even come into it. Businesses suppress their own responsibilities under employment law by engaging them as casual labour, so they get no protection as employees and no PRSI is paid for them. Revenue is clamping down on this, to be sure, but it’s still going on. And to top it all off, they’re being roared at by jumped-up gobshites of bosses. I’ve seen it myself, and I’m sure you’ve seen it too.
Still and all, it’s not often you see these two extremes setting each other off like this in the same week. On the one hand, the case of an individual – but not unusual – worker on less than half the minimum wage with no time off. On the other, the case of 385,000 well-cushioned civil and public servants refusing an 8.5% offer to keep them sweet.
The unions want 12.5% because of inflation, which must be affecting them disproportionately for some reason. They’re sore because their last pay increase was eaten up by the high cost of living so they want all taxpayers – whatever they earn – to make up the difference. Bear in mind that average public-sector wages are higher than private-sector wages as it is. The Central Statistics Office tells us that average private-sector weekly earnings in the third quarter of last year were €843.40. In the public sector they were €1,125.92.
But we might look at the median wage instead of the mean, as it’s less likely to be thrown off by payments to top bankers and departmental secretaries-general and what have you. In 2022, median public-sector annual wages were €52,288; they were €37,286 in the private sector.
Hardly anyone in the public sector makes less than the average industrial wage – except, tellingly, cleaners. Certainly there are those who start out on less, but in the knowledge that their salary will go up without fail after every three years’ service – and as they will never be fired, each three-year wait will come to an end, as night follows day.
AND consider the terms they’re on. A radiographer, for instance, gets over 50 quid an hour when they work outside their normal hours, and that’s just Monday to Friday. If they were asked to submit to the barbarism of working on a Sunday, they’d be paid almost €75 an hour. That’s just so someone can take an X-ray – take, mind, not read – when you’ve been so disobliging as to break a leg outside office hours. It might be unfair to pick on radiographers but they do give you a helpful snapshot of what’s going on inside, if you will.
The pity is Paschal Donohoe will probably capitulate here because they have him over a barrel: there’s an election in the offing and the Government doesn’t want an ugly spat with our finest. But it will be a grave mistake if he doesn’t demand performance guarantees in return, so we get something back. He might start with co-operation on working hours, for instance, so you could break a leg whenever you liked, and he might even raise the admittedly radical principle of firing incompetents.
After all, the public service is costing us a bomb. The least we might expect is that it works for the actual public.
MARY CARR IS AWAY