Pay must be affordable, however worthy the job
Do you think nurses should be paid more? Of course you do. Who wouldn’t? They work long shifts, clean up nasty messes, and yet manage to remain cheerful and friendly. What about soldiers, who stand ready to do violence on our behalf? How can we put a price on their courage? Or police officers? Or teachers?
Now ask a different question. Is it right to be borrowing £1billion a week from future generations in order to fund our present lifestyles? Except it’s not really a different question, is it? It’s the same question, asked in an adult way.
Yes, nurses and soldiers and teachers – most of them, at any rate – could do with a pay rise. So could Uber drivers and fitness instructors and call-centre workers. The difference is that, when it comes to state employees, calling for more resources is not just a form of virtue-signalling. It has actual consequences. Politicians know that they will be judged on public sector pay as if it were somehow their own money that they were spending. They don’t want to look stingy.
Result? Government employees are paid, on average, £67 a week more than private sector workers. A report by the Office of National Statistics shows that, while the gap has narrowed slightly over the past two years, the average central or local government employee still earns £599 a week before tax, against an average private sector wage of £532. To repeat, I’d like all wages to rise – and, over time, they will.
One reason that their rise has been sluggish of late is that we are still weighed down by a colossal debt. And one reason that debt is colossal is that Gordon Brown splurged on public sector pay during the good years, ensuring that, catastrophically, we were already running a deficit when the credit crunch came.
If we want wages to rise across the board, we can’t keep squeezing the workers who generate government revenue so as to fund those who consume it. When the Treasury is back in surplus, public sector pay rises will be more affordable. But it has to be that way around. Ask the Greeks.
It’s not a difficult concept. I spoke to a group of Year Eights and Nines in a local school last month, and they had no problem grasping that a) we are spending five pounds for every four we raise and b) their generation will be stuck with the bill. They were, their teacher told me afterwards, shaken by the figures. Yet we politicians shy away from spelling out those figures to their parents.
Lots of people can be said, in a vague sense, to “deserve” higher salaries, but the relevant criterion here is affordability. In the private sector, wages find their own level. In the public sector, ministers must set that level arbitrarily. Being human, they tend to err on the side of higher spending. As the ONS figures suggest, contrary to almost universal belief, they are still doing so.