What news from the economy? What indeed… November 17, 2009
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics.trackback
Ms Quinlan [Chairman of ISME] said cuts were necessary in public-sector pay and numbers. “Partnership has driven up pay in this country through the benchmarking process, and it’s been very detrimental to small businesses.
“We’ve seen . . . where businesses have been cutting salaries right across the board, and yet we have to listen to David Begg coming out and saying no private-sector salaries have been cut. That’s just a joke. It’s just wrong.
Well, I doubt David Begg was so stupid as to say no private sector salaries have been cut, but since she’s not offering any evidence about salary cuts across the board – and to date the CSO does not support her contention perhaps the jokes on her. Indeed a partial survey – partial in the sense that it is limited and we don’t know what sectors were surveyed – by Watson Wyatt, a consultancy firm, released last week shows that of the 100 companies surveyed in Ireland by it:
Significantly, 26 per cent of Irish firms surveyed had introduced pay cuts, more than twice the EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa)average. This also represented a 50 per cent increase on the number of Irish firms who reported salary cuts in a preliminary survey carried out by Watson Wyatt in May 2009.
It’s intriguing to note that WW only surveyed 700 firms in total so if Ireland comprises 1/7th of the total one wonders how that impacts on the numbers. And it also finds that Irish companies had…
…the highest rate of workforce reduction among EMEA nations, with close to 80 per cent of Irish respondents reporting changes to their organisational structure and 61 per cent reporting lay-offs. This compared to an EMEA average of 48 per cent reporting redundancies.
61 per cent seems very high. Again, how representative all this is is difficult to say. But the pay cuts figure is a long way from ‘across the board’. And:
The survey also found that pay freezes have been more prevalent among Irish employers than in those in other EMEA markets, and firms said they expected this trend to continue in to 2010. Some 75 per cent of surveyed Irish companies already had a pay freeze in effect and a further 14 per cent expected to implement one within the next 12 months.
The average pay increase predicted by respondent Irish companies for 2010 was zero.
Almost half of Irish respondents reported that they would pay out lower employee bonuses for this performance year, and up to 35 per cent claimed they would not be paying any bonuses for 2009.
So just under 2/3rds of Irish companies surveyed said they would be paying bonuses this year. Hmmm. Some 3/4′s were implementing pay freezes (albeit bonuses were still being paid, nice that given that bonuses tend to be for certain sectors inside employments)…
Meanwhile this news from Industrial Relations News, and published on the 11th of this month. Curiously, unlike reports from the ESRI on the very same topic, this hasn’t hit the Irish Times. Now why would that be? The heading is…
Public/private sector wage gap ‘prone to oversimplification’ – CSO
And in an accompanying report Colman Higgins notes that:
The latest of many recent studies of the private/public sector wage gap shows that when personal and protective services are excluded, the gap is significantly smaller.
The study – conducted by Patrick Foley and Fiona O’Callaghan of the Central Statistics Office – also found that when the size of the enterprise was included as a variable, the gap was significantly lower.
Do go on…
They argue that this highlights the issues around trying to establish a definitive figure for the public/private sector wage differential, pointing out that рany type of regression analysis that attempts to directly compare earnings across the public and private sector is prone to oversimplification. The estimates they found, using the Blinder-Oaxaca decompositionу method, varied from 11.5% using unweighted data, to 15.9% using weighted data.
So, what are the headline figures?
They calculated a public sector premium based on excluding personal and protective services because groups such as the Gardai, prison officers and military personnel have no real comparable occupation in the private sector.
The impact of doing so was to dramatically reduce the average public-private wage gap, which using the ordinary least squares (OLS) method reduced for males from 7.2% to 2.7% The size of this reduction was even greater when using weighted data.
2.7%? Reduced further when using weighted data?
Equivalent figures for females showed a reduction from 12.7% to 11.5% and for both male and female the reduction was from 10.0% to 7.1%. The larger gap for male seems to reflect the largely male workforce in the public sector personal protective services. It seems that overall, about three percentage points of the general public sector pay premium can be attributed to this factor.
I think the female figures are very very interesting. And I can think of a few reasons why that might manifest itself, none of which reflect well on the private sector.
But don’t stop there…
Also, when large firms in the private sector are compared with public sector employers (which are almost all large), the pay gap is significantly lower. This large firmу effect reduced the public sector pay premium by about the same five percentage points margin across a range of calculation methods and different weightings of data.
Public service unions have argued in the past that pay comparisons should be made on the basis of large private sector firms rather than all private sector companies. However, small business advocates would argue that all private sector companies support the public service through taxation, so the relevant pay gap is that which covers all companies.
I find the argument as to whether large or small is more reflective of the public sector a bit odd. It seems to evade the point that the PS is different, that’s it’s structured, organised and shaped to different ends than the private sector. None of this is immutable. But I find it also odd that people would try to compare PS employments with all private sector employments including smaller ones. Having worked with the former and in the latter and in larger private sector organisations my own sense is that culturally and in structure the PS in the main is more similar to the latter. How could it be otherwise?
Meanwhile…
Pay comparison surveys with top private sector posts п such as those undertaken by the Review Body on Higher Remuneration – have been the main method of determining pay for top public sector posts for some years, and without those, this discount would apply at a much lower level.
However, if the predicted pay cuts in the forthcoming report from the Review Body materialise, this situation is likely to change in the very near future.
Do they mean that PS wages will generally dip well below the private sector?
By the way, I have searched fruitlessly for the same high profile treatment in the Irish Times of this report as ESRI reports which have come to the opposite conclusion. You know, a front page of the website piece, main body of the paper article, etc… etc…
Irish Economy, to its credit, progressive-economy and Michael Taft have referenced it… but of our paper of record to date… Nothing I can find up to yesterday morning.
Here’s the thing. I don’t expect beyond certain terms the Government not to justify its own course of action (and that point was rightly made in a comment last week), that’s what Governments do, albeit it might be useful – as well as being accurate – for the Government to accept that there are other alternatives but that this is the one it has fixed upon. Then perhaps the alternatives might have some chance of being articulated so that the public, of which the Government is representative, might have some chance of coming to their own decision as to what is the best course forward. Chances are that that might well be a position supportive of the Government. That’s the way things go in democracies.
I do however expect that the media might give the same billing to the CSO Report that it – breathlessly – has to every ESRI Report that has been produced. It’s not that I think the CSO Report is the last word on this matter, but I do suspect that the continuing lack of an absolute read on the public sector private sector pay gap indicates that this is far from as cut and dried as some of the more enthusiastic proponents appear to believe. Indeed this tallies with my own experience that wages between both sectors vary depending on what and where. That it doesn’t appears to demonstrate that the media itself is complicit in shaping a very particular world view as this situation unfolds. Whatever our view on these matters that – surely – is problematic.
That a lot of the so-called ‘premium’ comes from employers out in the private sector not treating women on an equal basis is just confirmation of what has been suspected for a long time.
Do you think that the IT might like to give some attention to that, or have all the feminists at the paper been muzzled under the current editorial management?
@EWI
No doubt there’s a bit of that, but its very simplistic to play the discrimination card to explain the entire gender differential.
To really understand what’s going on, you’ve got to consider the large-scale feminization of several public sector professions that pay above-average wages (specifically teaching, nursing, therapist-ing, and increasing doctor-ing also).
You’ve also got to consider the higher state parental subsidy received by public sector workers. Not that such subsidies are a bad thing in themselves, but the state has chosen to treat its own employees substantially better than the fairly minimal maternity benefit it pays as of right to private sector workers. Another possible approach would have been for the state to fully cover the salaries of every new mother for a shorter period, as opposed to paying a full salary to every public servant for 6 months but only providing €280 a week for private sector mothers (with the vague hope that their employer will make up some or all of the difference).
So – if you arbitrarily remove a section of the public sector, and compare it to an arbitrary section of the private sector, the average salary gap is reduced?
Reduced – but still tilting the expected direction. Not particularly compelling, particularly if (as every other comparison between sector salaries omits) the public sector pension premium isn’t taken into account.
I’ll hold with my view that the most compelling measure for where we are in relation to private sector wage cuts is the recent figures for income tax revenue – well down on expectations – and from a body that should be well informed as to what the impact of the pension levy and private sector lay-offs should have meant to their projected figures.
In terms of articulating alternatives to the govt economic plan – there’s nothing stopping anyone shouting from the rooftops their particular alternative – the notion that there’s some form of suppression of ideas at play is a tad paranoid. I do find it interesting that Labour, despite all the concern over the precise formula for where to spend and where to cut, accept the need for the 4 billion in cuts. Occam’s razor comes to mind. No doubt Labour are a sell-out, and lackies to the bland orthodoxy etc, but its hard to see the electoral bonus in proscribing much the same nasty medicine as all the centre right parties – it’s as if they haven’t found a viable alternative themselves, and god knows it’s in their interest to do so.
The public sector/private sector is a false dichotomy. (The essence of the argument is that teachers, guards, nurses, firemen and social workers are overpaid because shop assistants get €8.65 an hour.) The main reason why Ireland’s national debt almost doubled from 2008-2009 was the massive borrowing needed to finance the Aug 2008 bank guarantee scheme. (It’s there in the C&AG annual report, the parts NOT highlighted by the press.) It was a monumental error, one where Ireland publicly broke from the rest of Europe on strategy and decided to “go it alone” in dealing with the banking crisis. The reasons why Ireland did that became very, very clear over those twelve months. Fianna Fail broke with Europe not to save the economy, but to save Fianna Fail’s financial backers. Unless Ireland takes the ONLY sensible option open and lets banks like Anglo Irish die, while at the same time providing a solid financial base for those banks which actually live and work in the real economy, it doesn’t matter how low the government and the other employers in the country cut wages, it aint going to balance out the bank guarantee scheme fuckup, nor, indeed, NAMA.
Ireland’s about to start taxing children and the poor in order to pay for Seanie Fitzpatrick’s ivory back-scratchers. Now for the chorus: the public sector is overpaid, we need to suck more money out of a shrinking economy to order to keep it moving, blah, blah blah…
@WbS
On the enterprise size issue, have you followed any of the debate on whether the public sector enterprise size data is worth the paper its written on?
Apparently there are only two non-third level educational establishments in the land. One’s called “primary” and the other is called “secondary”. Its a wonder they didn’t go the whole hog and just make a single enterprise return for the entire public sector, call it State Inc. or summat.
BTW also, I enjoyed your characterization of the fine time we’re having of it in the private sector, what with our bonuses and frozen pay and all. Quick someone call the Equality Authority, I’m feeling all vilified, and I dunno, demonized and stuff?
Seriously, as I’ve said before private and public sector earnings contract in very different ways, with the former being a highly chaotic response to changing market conditions (comprising a mix of job losses, 3 day weeks, lost overtime & bonuses, and some core pay cuts) whereas the latter is a nice clean number like an average 6.9% pension levy minus an average 3% increment. The nice clean number is of course much easier to visualize. Doesn’t make the private sector carnage any less real though.
The first round of benchmarking took the pspp into account; the second round of benchmarking (0% for most people) took the pspp into account; the ‘pensions levy’ took the pspp into account. How many times are we going back to that particualr well?
Croc, I think you have that backwards … the first round of benchmarking ignored the pension, whereas the second round took it into account in the form of a madey-uppy 12% discount.
I say “madey-uppy” because in order for that discount to have made any sense, the public sector would have had to have fallen a further 13-14% behind the private sector during the period 2003-2007.
We can argue the toss about enterprise size premia and the likes, but there is no data anywhere that shows a relative drop of 14% in PS earnings between 2003-2007.
@Conor
The essence of the argument is that teachers, guards, nurses, firemen and social workers are overpaid because shop assistants get €8.65 an hour. Come on Conor, you can do better than that.
Aside form the divide between Public and Private sector workers I worry about the divide inside the public sector between so called frontline and the rest. Surely we all do a needed job.
Making invidious comparisons between average salaries in the private and public sectors is merely a propagandist ploy in the war on workers’ living standards. A comparison that would be relevant would be to compare the salary of the chief executive of AIB with that of an AIB janitor. But is this the public or the private sector?
What might be more relevant would be comparing Irish public sector salaries with UK ones. But that just highlights another salary gap.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/1110/1224258481010.html
It is depressing EWI that one of the most significant factors of a disparity between public and private sector, the fact that women in the PS are actually paid better than their private sector counterparts has not been picked up. A small point from the report (P.2):
In a European context Lucifora and Meurs (2006) shows that the hypothesis of a constant wage differential as implied by the OLS, Blinder-Oaxaca and PSM methods is rejected. Using quantile regression they show that the public-private wage gap is sensitive to the choice of quantile and that the pattern of the premia varies with gender and skill. They conclude that in France, Britain and Italy the public sector is found to pay more to low skilled workers than in the private sector while the reverse is true of higher skilled workers. The effects are more evident for females.
That’s true (in the context of that study) of France, Britain and Italy. I’d presume there’d be few enough who’d seek to redress that situation.
Actually it’s a really fascinating report, and there’s lots of interesting data.
@ alastair. I think it’s best to read the report before stating definitely that it’s an arbitrary selection. Here is a paragraph from P.15 which explains the authors criteria:
Furthermore, in the Irish context, there are a number of occupations within the public sector that really have no comparable occupation in the private sector, and vice versa (most noticeably Gardaí, Prison Officers, and members of the Defence Forces). To highlight the consequences of ignoring this lack of comparability in some occupation sectors, this study also estimated the public-private wage gap on a sub-sample excluding personal and protective services employees. The impact of excluding this sector was to dramatically reduce the average public-private wage gap, especially for males (from 7.2% to 2.7% using OLS). The size of this reduction was even larger when the analysis was conducted using weighted data.
As for the premium, as you know McCarthy recommends that the public sector pension is about to be transformed from DB to DC. We know that already the PS has had a levy introduced over the last twelve months for precisely the purpose, according to the Government, of dealing with that premium. We also know that there will be PS wage cuts at the next Budget in three weeks time. So what, if we indulge in some joined up thinking, is the premium worth today as against twelve months ago?
Re income tax revenue, it is indeed down. You know yourself why that is as construction has slowed massively, jobs have been lost etc. No surprise there and in no way ‘evidence’ that somehow private sector wages have been cut across the board. Private sector wages could go up (as indeed in some areas they have) while revenues could fall due to lay-offs. You may well hold the view that there are widespread pay cuts. But the CSO and the reports I’ve noted including Wyatt, etc to date point to the opposite being the case. If you can provide me with evidence of a similar standard I’ll naturally accept it.
As regards suppressing ideas. I’m suggesting that dissenting viewpoints are marginalised or when articulated are dismissed. This IRN/CSO piece is fascinating in that despite headline stuff for the ESRI pieces that said the opposite there’s still nowt in the IT about it. Now if the subject itself is the crucial thing then you’d have thought the IT would have had some coverage of it. If not and they seek to support a consensus then it’s entirely understandable why they would choose not to cover it. Or perhaps there’s some alternative explanation? Because at precisely the time the IRN report came out they were happy to flag the Wyatt study.
In the media the consensus has been pushed to the fore and of course Labour follow my leader on this, because they’re pilloried every time they go off-message as with their notion that wage cuts/welfare cuts don’t have to constitute part of the ‘solution’. Again the word is expedient. And really, seriously, in a society which has gone through twenty years of right of centre economic policies in terms of taxation, etc, where the left has historically been weak as kitten, do you think that Labour is going to announce a strong left of centre programme now – when they probably are terrified that either FG or FF will claw back whatever percentile of the vote has gone to Labour.
@ PJ, I have indeed and I’ve read your contributions on Irish Economy and Progressive-Economy. Got to say I’m unmoved by that argument (BTW I was very taken by your reference to electrical contractors because as it happens I’ve worked very close with electricians during my career and also as you know with teachers. Both are important jobs, but they’re fundamentally different in the nature of the interaction of the actual work and neither is just reducible to supposed similarities of pay bargaining).
As for organisation size coming about in two different ways whether public or private. I’m not sure of what explicatory power you believe that has. We know because we see it in various areas that monopolistic arrangements exist in the private sector, indeed we know that the propensity is towards monopolistic outcomes without some degree of regulation. We know because we see it that company sizes don’t necessarily increase simply due to commercial success. Often one company is subsumed by another due to the second taking on a third, and so on. I’ve seen that directly myself on numerous occasions. And to an extent so what whether company size increases due to one specific reason or another? Larger organisations whether public or private have more stable and codified HR practices. Hardly surprising given that larger organisations have to deal in a less informal way with employees and find that structuring tends to deliver optimal outcomes. How does that gift us with a rigid formula on such matters.
To me this seems to be an argument simply to try to elide PS and private sector employments. It’s cute, but again unconvincing.
All the time it is necessary to return to the basic point, the private sector and the public sector despite some overlap at the edges are not the same, that their functions, inputs and outcomes and so forth are radically different. I’m trying to think of a state where the approach you present us with is taken in terms of determining wages / conditions and I’m at a loss.
BTW, I’m sure you’re being humorous, but I know more than enough people in the private sector who’ve lost their jobs this last year and a half – and since as someone on contract I’m facing a not dissimilar situation in the future it’s not really, and I don’t want to come across as po-faced or in any sense by stating this seek to undercut your argument, that funny.
@ Tomaltach… maybe so, but it’s hard not to feel that there’s an element of what Conor points to when we hear ideas such as that posited by PJ above about size of enterprises, completely missing the point about institutional culture, nature of work, etc. Remind me again, what is the point of the exercise?
re comment 9, remind me again what the respective costs of living are in the UK as against the RoI.
@WbS
All the time it is necessary to return to the basic point, the private sector and the public sector despite some overlap at the edges are not the same, that their functions, inputs and outcomes and so forth are radically different.
This may well be very true.
But surely the incomparable-and-immeasurable-quantum-of-public-service argument was discarded in order to reap the benefits of benchmarking? Hard to credibly put that particular genie back in the bottle.
Of course if that is the case, and for the record I was no fan of benchmarking in the first place and ain’t much of one today, then as soon as the economy lifts I presume we’ll see the wages increase in the PS? And given that the economy will lift sooner more likely than later…
Is John O’Hagan genuinely a professor of economics at Trinity? I realize that that link is to what is presumably just an opinion piece from the IT, but to claim, as he does, that the case he advances strengthens both the legitimacy and moral force of the argument for pay cuts is laughable, especially when it contains lines like:
“Yes, of course the so-called fat cats in the banking and building sectors must also be made pay their fair share, but this is a different issue.”
and
“Besides, and regrettably perhaps, many high-wealth individuals are highly mobile and can leave the country.”
Whereas, of course, when those of us who aren’t responsible for the country’s parlous economic state actively resist paying “our share,” we’re acting selfishly and therefore, by his logic, immorally.
Maybe economists just have a different definition of “fairness” to ethicists.
The cost of living is radically different to what it was a year ago. And even before that change, it’d be hard to argue that the cost of living differential warranted such divergence in salaries (across the board btw – this wasn’t purely a public sector issue).
The notion that you can remove the army and guards from a comparison because there’s no real equivalent in the private sector (though the Airport police do come to mind – and they’re on similarly good salaries to the gardai) makes as mich sense as removing bankers because there’s no equivalent in the public sector. We all know that there’s many jobs that don’t have a mirror in the other sector – that doesn’t mean you can just ignore an arbitary (yep – discounting the guards make no more sense than ignoring the bankers) sector to get you to a figure that looks a little less stark.
Can’t see why it doesn’t make sense to try to work out equivalencies by removing atypical examples. I suspect having attended community policing forums and spent many hours down the Larkin Centre on liaison groups with the Gardai that you’re not entirely serious about the comparison with the Airport Police. Or at least I hope you’re not.
Except that the guards are no more atypical a job than any other you might choose – the only reason they’re removed in this scenario is because they skew the figure a particular direction. You might just as easily select hairdressers, traffic wardens, ice cream van drivers or bankers. There’s no logic to it at all.
[i]Re income tax revenue, it is indeed down. You know yourself why that is as construction has slowed massively, jobs have been lost etc. No surprise there and in no way ‘evidence’ that somehow private sector wages have been cut across the board.[/i]
Most of the construction jobs went many months ago, the unemployed register hasn’t had an unusual surge in the last couple of months, and you would expect the revenue to factor in those known job losses (along with the public sector pension levy etc) into their projected income – indeed Brian Lenihan was clear as to the cause of the slump (income tax 13% down on the expected figures for the last three months) –
[i]Asked by Labour’s Joan Burton why the tax take would fall €2 billion short of his predictions last April, the Minister said that due to wage reductions, half of all income earners were now out of the tax net. He also said the percentage paying tax at the top rate is down from 21% to 10%.
The Minister also said that unemployment figures for the end of October would show that there was no increase in the Live Register, and he did not accept that unemployment would grow to 500,000. [/i]
This IRN/CSO piece is fascinating in that despite headline stuff for the ESRI pieces that said the opposite there’s still nowt in the IT about it
It says the opposite to the ESRI?
Not by my reading – it says that if you tweak the figures you can get to a different result. I doubt the ESRI would dispute that. The underlying averages remain the same if you apply the original criteria – this IRN piece doesn’t dispute that – let alone claim the opposite to be true..
Pedantic stuff to be honest and not worthy of you. You know precisely what I’m saying. If a report indicates a very narrow gap, then it seems perverse that those who are exercised when a large gap appears not to at the very least consider it, particularly since they’ll publish the Wyatt stuff.
The report doesn’t indicate a narrow gap – it indicates that you can take an undisputed average gap of value x and reduce it by altering the nature of what you’re comparing – on the entirely tenuous and arbitrary grounds that this well paid group are a special exception to the rest.
The report uses a clearly defined, not arbitrary methodology, one which if you read the literature review is used in other states for precisely the same purpose. By all means consider it arbitrary but that I’m afraid leads to the danger of ignoring the research that one disagrees with and only accepting the research one agrees with.
I’m not ignoring anything – I’m stating that the removal of the guards salary makes no more sense than the removal of any other job that hasn’t a clear mirror in the other sector – if the logic makes sense for the guards then you need to follow though on every other non-comparible job too. Otherwise you’re engaged in an arbitrary distortion of the figures. This report doesn’t attempt to argue the underlying gap between average public and private salaries because there isn’t anything to dispute in regard to that figure. The fact is that the guards are a component of the public sector salary picture, just as the bankers are one of the private.
The methodology that’s clear and defined, can be so, but entirely groundless – if they’d selected circus clowns rather than the guards as the exception to the rule would you be quite so sure that the methodology had value?
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2009/1113/1224258725507.html
In which Bernadine O’Sullivan points out that the public sector pensions premium was so comprehensively taken into account in round two of benchmarking that IBEC declared itself satisfied. Since when there has been the ‘levy’
Given that IBEC estimated the public sector pension premium to be about 30% of salary at the time, you have to wonder how satisfied ehey would have been at a discount of 12%. I think Bernadine O’Sullivan protests too much – what IBEC did say at the time was:
[I]The report of the Public Service Benchmarking Body brings reality into pay settlement in the public service at a time when the economy is facing more uncertainty and employment growth is slowing.
Unlike the report of five years ago, it acknowledges the state-backed pensions enjoyed by public sector employees. As public sector workers do not face competition, it is only fair that their pay be properly matched against those who do. As we seek to restore our competitive edge in the world and protect jobs and living standards for all, pay moderation is essential.[/I]
‘Given that IBEC estimated the public sector pension premium to be about 30% of salary at the time, you have to wonder how satisfied ehey would have been at a discount of 12%’
‘Estimated’ is right.
And do you realise you have used the words ‘IBEC’ and ‘satisfied’ in the same sentence?
They (IBEC) have been allowed to write the forthcoming budget, but with dreary predictability they’ll be back on December 16th to do more anti-Public service whinging. If every public servant in Ireland was actually paying to come into work, IBEC would be complaining that they were wearing out the carpets.
I’d probably be accused of being pedantic if I pointed out that it was you, not I who tagged that ‘satisfied’ descriptor on to IBEC.
I guess we’re both in agreement that IBEC were certainly not satisfied with the degree of premium ascribed to the public sector pension in benchmarking – and that Bernadine O’Sullivan has a rather distorted recollection of their position.
Her identification of the Buckley report as a key element in distorting the public service wage structure is instructive – and seldom heard elsewhere.
‘If every public servant in Ireland was actually paying to come into work, IBEC would be complaining that they were wearing out the carpets.’
Exactly.
Did anyone have the pleasure of hearing Jay Bourke and another spokesman for the hospitality industry on Matt Cooper yesterday? Bourke argued that no-one goes into his trade for the money, it’s because they love food- an art form as he described it. But…the minimum wage was killing trade and anyway a lot of the kids they employed didn’t need that kind of money- they were on summer jobs.
Roughly translated, the people who were charging through the roof for food and wine are having a hard time because people are finding things tough. Please let them cut wages, employ immigrants for fuck all and make a profit, pleeeasse. We get the same whinging from the SINDO, from Sean Dunne (they’ll never take my kids- we don’t fucking want them Sean and you too Gayle, get back to the gossip column and do some work)
There has been a determined effort to make working people pay for a crisis created by bankers, builders and tax exiles. Alistar and the rest of you economics nerds can argue on but the fact is there is a national strike next Tuesday and with a bit of luck a chance to serve notice on this government. Bring it down.
I’m no economic nerd – I just know that there’s no argument for retaining a preferential salary arrangement for one section of society – public servants – when the other options are worse.
We’re involved, like it or not, in divvying out from a smaller kitty. Guards, nurses, teachers, politicians, clerical officers, et al have done pretty well so far, but now it’s a reduction in their salaries or the dole and public services. I’m clear where I stand in that dilemma.
The strike on Tuesday is going to serve notice on no-one – it’ll serve to antagonise a few more people all right.
I’m intrigued that you don’t address a clear issue of gender disparity which is evident in the PS figures. That unfortunately raises problematic aspects of the private sector.
As regards the strike the unions involved cover both public and private sector and there will be representation from both areas because… there’s people in both areas who have considerable questions about the economic direction of this country which goes a considerable way beyond a clearly diminishing, nowhere near as great as stated (and in some cases entirely appropriate as regards gender) and historically atypical preferential salary arrangement (albeit the benefits that balanced that atypical aspect are now in the process of being whittled away so where that leaves PS workers in the future is an interesting story).
The gender pay gap is interesting alright, but pretty much a distraction in the matter of where to make cuts when the money isn’t there. I’d guess that the mechanisms for dealing with pregnancy and child-rearing are better in the public sector – one obvious matter being the provision of subsidised creches – the subsidy carried by the taxpayer of course. Now I’m all in favour of subsidised creches across the board, but that isn’t the current reality, and it does beg the question of another PS premium that isn’t factored into basic salary comparisons.
Given your expert knowledge of this topic I enthusiastically anticipate your telling me how many subsidised creche places are there available for those who work in or with the PS and why it is that none of the children of my co-workers whether on contract or proper PS employees are in such a facility? Perhaps you could then tell me how many PS subsidised creches there are in Dublin and how many places available relative to the number of workers in the PS. And once you’ve done that you might tell me how much of a premium such a service is given the numbers able to avail of it, how much of a drain it is on the public purse, and how precisely that should impact on public sector wages.
Or let me cut short your answers as I respectfully propose that in this you are simply making this stuff up of the top of your head…
And let me explain why I’ve come to that conclusion. I work with the public sector on contract. I was eligible in principle through my work in one establishment to have a place for a child – pretty much the only perk I get since I’m not eligible for a PS pension etc. But, curiously my child isn’t in that creche. And there’s a very good reason why not.
The government, not the unions, not PS employees (in the sense the push didn’t come from them), wanted to introduce the CS Childcare Initiative in order to put a gloss on their family friendly work/life balance policies in the early 00s and as a pilot scheme in order to generate a broader public and private response a number of sites were put aside close to or in Depts. The service was provided by private companies who were tendered to get the best deal possible – they don’t pay rent since the facilities are on Departmental property – no more or less an outrageous subsidy than in companies you and I know of who provide creche facilities.
Here’s a link which outlines the scheme…
http://finance.gov.ie/viewdoc.asp?fn=/documents/equality/circ2801.htm
And the following is is from the Value for Money Report on the Childcare Initiative available here http://www.finance.gov.ie/Viewprnt.asp?DocID=5540&StartDate=1+January+2009.
Role of the Department of Finance
The Department of Finance has a central role in implementing Government policy and
in advising and supporting the Minister for Finance and the Government on the
economic and financial management of the State and the overall management and
development of the public sector. In formulating this advice the Department is guided
by its mission which is ‘to promote a growing economy which will deliver a high level
of sustainable employment, social progress and living standards’1. The Department’s
Statement of Strategy 2005-2007 outlined seven strategic priorities for the
Department, one of which is the enhanced management of the public service,
including equality. The Civil Service Childcare Initiative is one element of this
strategic priority.
And here:
The Civil Service Childcare Initiative
In Budget 2001, the Minister for Finance allocated €12.7m for the provision of 10-15
crèches for the children of civil servants throughout Ireland. The allocation was part
of a major initiative by the Government to improve childcare provision and increase
the number of childcare places available in Ireland. The absence of quality childcare
places which restricted the participation of women in the labour force had been
identified as a constraint on Ireland’s economic growth. The provision of childcare
places was identified as an important mechanism for mobilising under-utilised labour
resources.
And here:
In addition to the absence of quality childcare places, two other important elements in
setting up the Initiative were:
(i) to contribute to the equality agenda and increase female participation at
higher executive officer level and above; and
(ii) to improve work – life balance policies of the Departments / Offices which
help employees to combine employment with their family life, caring
responsibilities and personal and social life outside the workplace.
Here it notes that this was part of a broader agenda on this matter.
At this time, the Civil Service Childcare Initiative was part of a wider Government
policy to increase the number of childcare places including, in particular, major
increases in the rates of child benefit, substantial extra funding for the Equal
Opportunities Childcare Programme (2000-06) operated by the Department of Justice
Equality and Law Reform and changes in the taxation system such as capital
allowances to support investment in childcare facilities.
And here:
The CSCI must also be seen in the context of the importance of an employer having
excellent childcare policies as detailed later in this section in Box 1, as well as
measures to support the wider national strategic objective of improving childcare
policies to support children and family-friendly work life balance, which were also
announced in Budget 2001.
There’s more on that, but all it takes is a moment to try to read this stuff. Interestingly some of the rationales provided for it purely from the CS perspective are eye opening…
1. Make it easier to recruit staff
Childcare makes recruitment easier in two ways. Firstly, the offer of better working
conditions is an incentive to join an Agency or Department. Secondly, developing support
services like childcare promotes diversity and widens the pool of available labour.
Ignoring these issues would mean missing out on two pools of talent – people who need
childcare in order to work, and those whose skills are in high demand and so can pick and
choose for whom they work
2. Enable the Civil Service to retain staff
Childcare is part of the package that will make Agencies and Departments a better place to
work and so provide a more consistent workforce. It is only part of the solution: pay,
conditions of work, flexible management and opportunities for career progression need to
be in place too, but staff members who have settled childcare have an extra reason for
staying in posts.
3. Help deliver a more diverse workforce and so a better service
Childcare helps a broader range of people to work. In particular it supports women in the
workforce. A number of employers most concerned about recruiting women have
introducing childcare support.
4. Promote return from maternity leave
Support with childcare enables and encourages mothers to return to work after maternity
leave. Baby places are in short supply in general so a workplace nursery helps maternity
returnees directly.
5. Reduce absenteeism
The Civil Service has set targets to reduce absenteeism. Childcare responsibilities are a
cause of absence, but organisations with childcare support report lower sickness levels.
Reliable childcare means that staff can take less time off work and emergency childcare
allows those who experience childcare difficulties to come to work.
etc…
And how many places and creches have been provided in this scheme?
The review identified the following trend in outputs generated by the CSCI:
• 209 new childcare places (including the 23 existing places in Mount Street)
have been created as a result of the CSCI since 2001.
• 5 new crèches built since 2001. (Mount Street was already in operation prior
to the CSCI.)
• 3 of these crèches were opened in 2003 – Marlborough Street, Athlone and
Ennis which provide 39, 36 and 36 childcare spaces respectively.
• Sligo opened in 2004 with 37 childcare places.
• Backweston opened in 2005 with 38 childcare places.
• One new crèche is due to open in Cork in early 2008 with 135 additional
childcare places.
Now the actual costs of the one closest to my work place are slightly higher than the non PS creche I send my child to in the community I live in.
But, and here’s the problem – the clue being in the first bullet point of the last quote from the VFM report above.
The services are very limited in number. I didn’t send my child to the PS one because the waiting list was near infinite – how could they be otherwise given 209 places overall, and it operates – entirely reasonably – on a first come first served basis. I’m glad they’re there for those as have them, but there are nowhere near enough places given the demand for them. Why would that be? Because it was a pilot scheme. An experiment. Now, by all means argue that we should cut the scheme and put those private sector workers sub-contracted by the state and able to make a profit through this employment out of work to save money.
But the state as an employer and as a motor of social change had every right to try to introduce such a scheme and consider how it worked (in the UK there is a long standing tradition of public sector creches run in partnership with private sector businesses) and indeed should be forwarding precisely these sort of schemes (and precisely the same principle applies in terms of maternity benefits, where it is a typical dynamic of progressive states to provide for their own direct employees such benefits and then extend them across the society through legislation in tandem with the private sector or more often in the teeth of opposition from the private sector).
I don’t see any premium there. Not when only 209 children out of all the children of CS and PS workers can avail of the system.
But I’ll leave it to the recommendations of the VFM report to indicate where the future lies…
1. In light of the increased numbers of childcare places being provided privately
and the costs involved, that the Civil Service Childcare Initiative as a crèche building
programme should be wound up following the completion of the crèche in Cork.
2. Consider establishing an appropriate body to monitor the operation of the
crèches or to transferring responsibility for the crèche programme to an alternative
appropriate Department / Office.
3. The development of any future workplace crèches should be a matter for the
OPW in consultation with the individual Departments or Offices concerned and
should be based on detailed needs analysis and consultation with the local County
Childcare Committee as well as other public sector employers in the area.
Departments should also give careful consideration to the ongoing management issues
which arise in the operation of the crèches.
4. The sub-head for capital expenditure under the initiative should be transferred
to Office of Public Works (OPW) from which all routine maintenance costs and minor
capital costs would be paid.
5. Existing crèches should continue to be managed under the CSCI crèche
management programme and operated by private operators under licence.
It takes but a moments research by anyone unlike myself who isn’t directly acquainted with these issues to discover the outlines, implementation and ultimate fate of the scheme. A moment to discover that far from some monstrous perk this scheme had a clear social purpose and could only be taken up in that implementation by a tiny minority of CS/PS employees.
Re the gender gap. No, it’s not interesting. Nor is it a distraction and nor is the issue of making cuts relevant to it. From the figures and the work done elsewhere quoted in this study and elsewhere it is clear that the simple fact of paying women equal salaries – something that it is admitted does not happen uniformly (or indeed near uniformly in the private sector) does incur an additional cost. This makes the PS more expensive by some yardsticks. This accounts for a portion, by this study and others a significant portion, of any gap that exists. Unless you propose to increase a disparity I’m fairly certain that that is one gap that can’t be closed.
Did I say that subsidised creche provison was available for all PS workers? Nope.
Is it the case that subsidised creche provision is available within the PS – and that subsidy is paid for by the taxpayer? Yes.
Typical Dublin full-time creche costs – 900 – 1200 euro a month.
PS subsidised Dublin full-time creche costs – 650 euro a month
You don’t see a premium there?
Your mates may not have got their kids in, but I know those who did – the premium was most welcome.
There’s also the different rules that apply to maternity leave. PS workers are entitled to full pay for 26 weeks maternity leave, plus the statutory maternity benefit (should they qualify). Private sector workers get maternity benefit too (assuming they’ve enough stamps paid at the right time), but their maternity benefit goes to their employer and is deducted from whatever payment their employer can afford for the duration – which may indeed be nothing, as there’s no obligation to pay during maternity leave. Now, some employers simply can’t afford to carry six months of salary for non-productivity, but those who can and do continue to pay full pay can’t offer the same benefit as the PS does – full pay, carried holidays, and DSFA maternity benefit.
How long did it take you to come up with that and how could I possibly have inferred that you trotted out yet another ill informed comment which you did? By my reckoning I’d say there are perhaps 350 to 420 odd parents who happen to work in the PS who avail of this premium. I’ve pointed out the rationale for the scheme, an experiment by government now concluded, the fact that siting it in departments saved money. Which you ignore. Really this is sad stuff alastair, it really is.
BTW, your mates like mine could also avail of the community creche scheme if they got in. That’s about 660 per month. An outrageous subsidy to the community – eh?
As for maternity leave, now it’s simply getting worse. You’re arguing that there’s something wrong with progressive maternity leave initiated by the state and hopefully expanding societally (and it has in the sense that the state led and the private sector has followed).
You know, for all your supposed contrarianism when it comes down to it on almost every level you just align with the most unreflective and undigested conservative line, time and time again.
Name-calling just looks petulant on you on you.
Community creche schemes aren’t subsidised by the taxpayer, and are open to all within a community – not just PS workers – that’s quite a different scenario – and not really a premium of a particular sector now, is it?
And in relation to ‘concluded experiments’ – it’s an ongoing arrangement, and continues to provide taxpayer subsidised creche places, available only to the one sector. Another 80 place creche in Mahon, Cork was added to the PS-only scheme in 2007.
1: You make incorrect statements as regards some sort of PS premium on childcare which it takes a moments work to discover exists for 350 to 420 parents out of many thousands of CS workers and is not a universal scheme but rather a pilot one introduced by govt. for a specific social end. You articulate a reactionary opinion on maternity care and a supposed indifference to issues of gender.
In light of that there’s something a tad disingenuous about making statements calculated to draw a response and then complaining when observations are made and conclusions drawn from those statements that they’re petulant or name-calling. I’m saying it as I see it if it seems reactionary or conservative. I have no idea whether you have deep held convictions on these specific matters, if so it’s hard to see any evidence of actual engagement on any level with the facts, so perhaps a lot of this is simply about stirring it up.
Given that don’t expect me to take your opinions on this topic too seriously. But what I do take seriously is that in the absence of any considered effort by PS workers who read the CLR to fight their case (or even just to deal with the saloon bar stuff so much of this debate appears to consist of), and the only contributor here who attempts to do so on any near consistent level is Crocodile, somebody has to put up the facts as distinct from misrepresentations.
2: Community creches not subsidised by the taxpayer? Sadly the facts say otherwise. Community creches were and are subsidised by the state in almost precisely the same way as the CSCI ones. They were initiated as a part of the Equal Opportunities Childcare Programme, mentioned in the VFM Report.
Let’s look at how that worked:
The Equal Opportunities Childcare Programme operated under three sub-measures to meet its aims and provides grant assistance in the form of:
• capital funding for both community/not-for-profit groups and for private providers;
• staffing supports for community/not-for-profit groups in disadvantaged areas;
That was the situation up until 2006. From 2006 it was the National Childcare Investment Programme that took up the reins – it’s currently closed to new applicants.
EOCP had specific staffing grants… i.e. subsidy. The terms of NCIP were as follows:
Capital grants to develop childcare facilities are available to childcare providers in both the private and community sector.
….
Community/not-for-profit sector applicants may apply for grant assistance towards the capital cost of developing a childcare facility based on a demonstrated childcare need in the area. The level of funding will be determined by the number of places the group proposes to provide and several criteria based on specific local need. A maximum grant of €1.2 million is available under the programme, subject to a maximum cost per place of €24,000. Applications will also be assessed based on the sustainability of a project.
So the Department gave capital grants to community groups to do so and in some instances built new buildings to house them, or incorporated them into the plans of community centres. Originally the Minister for Children through various bodies directly paid staffing grants directly and fees were very low but post 2007 Brendan Smith, the then Minister, ordered that the subsidy go towards lower income and unemployed parents and this is paid directly to them and then handed over to the staff in the form of fees instead of staffing grants to the latter. So the capital costs remain a state subsidy as indeed do part of the fees. This means that the catchment in terms of parents has widened out because the creches can’t survive just on low income/unemployed parents without a larger direct subsidy through other parents paying the entirety of the full whack and have therefore had to open up to other parents, which one can see as either a good or a bad thing. Personally I am strongly supportive of social mixing but there are questions about the primary role of such creches being diluted. I’d go for a happy medium, but that throws up contradictions too.
But even if you’re not on social welfare the rates in our local one at €660. Which is on parity with the CSCI ones (and arguably means that parents with children in the community creches who are not on social welfare are having their costs subsidised to a much much greater extent than the PS parents who pay the full effective cost of having their children in a creche on Departmental property given that the state must pay full capital costs and contribute at least to some of running costs and subsidise those parents unable to pay full rates whereas in the PS creches parents simply pay for all fees ex capital costs and running costs – which would be in part defrayed by the fact that these are sited in state buildings).
And so much are they subsidised that the the fact that Minister for State John Curran is currently ‘reviewing’ CDP (Community Development Projects) and accepts his ‘review’ will lead to closures of creche’s, meals on wheels and after schools projects.
3: After the initial spend which was a capital spend on refitting the PS locations costs are borne by the parents through fees. Whatever subsidy is extant simply because it exists in a building which is already purposed for other tasks. Note that the report seeks value for money on them. Fees may well rise to commercial ‘norms’ albeit that would an artificial and entirely cosmetic rise simply to satisfy critics like yourself given that the creches themselves constitute the most minimal usage of resources and that they are an important and continuing token of the importance govt. places on this area. It’s simply absurd to argue that the provision of 209 places is representative of some sort of PS ‘premium’ which is what you did in your original comment unvarnished by any excepts and howevers and buts. Just like you said that community creches weren’t subsidised by the taxpayer immediately above.
4: I’d strongly suggest that you actually read the report which came out in 2008. It specifically noted Mahon was under construction. Indeed it said:
In light of the increased numbers of childcare places being provided privately
and the costs involved, that the Civil Service Childcare Initiative as a crèche building
programme should be wound up following the completion of the crèche in Cork.
The building scheme has concluded. No more are to be built. In train ones continue to exist but subject to the conclusions of the VFM report. Conclusion 6 reads as follows.
6. Future license agreements should provide for a fixed amount payable each
year to the operator to include all running costs agreed to be payable as per licence.
5. Here’s something for people to chew on… an IT article from this time last year…
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2008/1216/1229035762704.html
The reality is that many children are spending all this time in childcare, so it must be of the highest quality. Yet, despite the unprecedented boom years, this country is bottom of the EU league for spending on childcare and early education.
Just 0.2 per cent of national income (GDP) is invested in such services, while Denmark, Sweden, Finland and France spend at least 1 per cent of GDP on them.
I’d welcome any spending, where ever, community, public sector or private in order to bounce up numbers of places As noted in the same IT article…
The closure of the Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education, announced in the 2009 Budget cutbacks, was a small but stark example of where political priorities lie. Yet there is plenty of evidence from other countries that State investment in quality childcare and pre-school education pays off economically, never mind socially and morally.
Dr Orla Doyle of UCD’s School of Public Health and Population Science told a recent conference that well-designed early childhood interventions in the US have generated returns to society of up to $17 (€13) for each dollar spent.
Playing catch-up in providing childcare places to meet the economy’s need for more women in the workplace, State investment has been concentrated on capital grants to increase supply.
The National Childcare Investment Programme 2006 to 2010 promised 50,000 new childcare places.
There was a belief that increased supply would somehow drive down the cost to parents. But a sector that goes to the heart of family life and the raising of the next generation can not be left solely to the crude economics of demand and supply. And since salaries make up at least 70 per cent of a childcare provider’s cost, with many of those staff on the minimum wage – and obviously basic staff numbers being non-negotiable in any regulated creche – costs to parents are never going to go down.
And finally as regards the subsidisation of community creches…
Meanwhile, community childcare creches have been convulsed over the fall-out from the Government decision at the beginning of the year to change their system of funding. Instead of subsidising staff salaries in community creches, the grants were redirected to parents on welfare.
(BTW on a broader point, this morning I found a seven page ‘discussion’ on P.ie about this topic. In those seven pages not one person pro or contra referenced the documents I have above. What a pointless waste of time for everyone concerned – and that includes you my friend PJ).
Once again – I didn’t say there was universal provision of the subsidy within the PS – it is unique however in that it’s a taxpayer childcare subsidy that’s closed to all but the public sector. Feel free to set up the straw men and knock them down, but it’ll be for your own entertainment rather than enlightenment.
Community creches are as you finally note – are no longer subsidised by the state – there’s a subsidy available for some parents in recept of social welfare that they can use for community creche purposes, but there’s no subsidy to the actual creche. And when there was a subsidy provided to those creches, they couldn’t close their subsidy to a particular sector. I’m not sure how you believe they’re remotely similar scenarios.
Regarding ‘ill-informed’ – when you claim that the said creche subsidy is an “experiment by government now concluded”, that rather clashes with the reality that the “experiment” is ongoing, and as of 2007, growing in scale.
Once again – I didn’t say there was universal provision of the subsidy within the PS – it is unique however in that it’s a taxpayer childcare subsidy that’s closed to all but the public sector. Feel free to set up the straw men and knock them down, but it’ll be for your own entertainment rather than enlightenment.
Anyone reading your original comment on the public service provision “I’d guess that the mechanisms for dealing with pregnancy and child-rearing are better in the public sector – one obvious matter being the provision of subsidised creches – the subsidy carried by the taxpayer of course.” would get precisely the opposite impression that this was some sort of generalised provision. So ‘obvious’ that there are 209 places across the entirety of the CS.
Community creches are as you finally note – are no longer subsidised by the state – there’s a subsidy available for some parents in recept of social welfare that they can use for community creche purposes, but there’s no subsidy to the actual creche. And when there was a subsidy provided to those creches, they couldn’t close their subsidy to a particular sector. I’m not sure how you believe they’re remotely similar scenarios.
Community creches are directly funded by the state and the taxpayers through the grants to parents who use them. To suggest that they’re somehow not funded by the taxpayer or the state is abysmal. I’m simply pointing out that you were wrong when you stated otherwise.
Regarding ‘ill-informed’ – when you claim that the said creche subsidy is an “experiment by government now concluded”, that rather clashes with the reality that the “experiment” is ongoing, and as of 2007, growing in scale.
There has been no expansion on foot of the VFM report. The VFM Report published in 2008 and written up in 2007 concluded that including Cork there were to be no more creches introduced and that they had to be self-sustaining. No new places have been introduced since on the scheme, the creches have increased fees subsequently. It’s black and white in the report – which you clearly haven’t read – I can’t say anymore.
This mania you have for having to believe yourself right in every instance is highly entertaining, but really perhaps you’re better off at P.ie or somewhere like that. I’m not going to waste my time any further.
Mania eh?
Community creches don’t get any subsidy – some social welfare recipients get a grant towards to use of community creches. That isn’t anything like a direct subsidy, paid for by the taxpayer, and yet only accessible within one particular sector.
There’s a pretty wide gulf between a taxpayer contributing to a means-tested grant for creche provison for a social-welfare recipient in a creche that anyone within the community has access to (numbers allowing), and a closed shop taxpayer subsidy for those who may well be able to afford alternatives, but are lucky enough to find themselves (numbers allowing), in the ‘right’ sector.
@Wbs,
Actually I think some of the points raised by Prop Joe regarding enterprise size are relevant. I take your point about cultural factors too.
But I find it remarkable that now, when so much of the evidence shows a public sector premium, there is no limit to the arguments that can be mustered to invalidate comparisons with the private sector. When the equation was the other way around I don’t recall guards or teachers saying, sorry, we cannot be compared with anything in the private sector as we are unique. In fact, I clearly remember teachers bemoaning that their pupils went on to earn much higher salaries than those who taught them, and that this couldn’t possibly be right.
To be frank, this whole debate is degenerating into a march of the absurd versus the bizarre. I mean when I hear people talking about the uniqueness of the job of garda I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. By that measure we are all in ‘unique’ professions or jobs.
If there is absolutely no basis for comparison then how do we set the salary of a garda? Or do we argue that since they potentially save lives that their jobs have specially high monetary value? That road leads directly to absurdistan.
@Russell Beardsmore
You have trotted out the old line about the bankers and builders. That one is getting a bit tired at this stage. I heard a representative of a teacher union on the radio the other day and when it was put to her that the bulk of the carnage is in fact in the private sector with some 160,000 job losses in a year, she responded ‘well, it was the private sector got us into this mess in the first place’. That response is grotesque. What, hairdressers, car salesmen, publicans, and engineers caused the crisis. That’s an insult to those people who this time last year called themselves workers but are no longer so.
It is truly Orwellian when people with a mindset to make remarks like this then talk about solidarity. How can she possibly hope to stoke anything but hostility with this kind of mindless injury.
And how many times have we heard the union leaders say ‘we didn’t create this problem’. Then its back to bankers and builders.
Bankers broke the banking system and we are paying dearly for it. But they didn’t create our structural fiscal crisis. That is a child of reckless economic governance and while the bulk of the responsibility lies with government there is no way to hide that the social partners push for unsustainable policies – like too rapidly increasing spending and gutting the income tax base. Here the unions were fully complicit. But now all of a sudden Jack O’Conor is saying there was never any such thing as partnership – they weren’t partners. Talk about accountability and denying your legacy.
So this crap about builders and bankers and private sector causing this crisis is equally as wrong as it is to say that the ‘public sector’ caused the crisis. The teacher was no more culpable than the engineer : and no less.
Tomaltach, the premium clearly is nowhere near as extravagant as those who make the most noise about it claim. Such a premium looks as if it simply won’t exist post December 8th this year.
As it happens I think Gardai actually do perform an unique societal function. As do others in the public sector. I think the social role of those functions is of vital indeed central importance in a functioning society in a way that other positions aren’t. This isn’t to say that the guy who was out at the house sorting out the networking this evening when it went down isn’t, or isn’t worth the money paid to sort it, but it’s a different sort of value. As is my job and probably yours as well. And while that value doesn’t mean that they deserve exemplary wages and I’m far from starry eyed about almost all of them it does, to my mind, mean that I’d be loath to begrudge them many of the supposed ‘privileges’ that they get.
I’m not, for the record any of the above (bar 3rd level which frankly is a doddle compared to 1st and 2nd level and is vastly overpaid in the main and there I suspect alastair and I are of one mind).
@WBS,
I think the uniqueness thing is a dead end. It is hard to imagine a modern society functioning without electricity. Hospitals, Transport, Modern life couldn’t exist. But that hardly makes every employee of ESB or Airtricity somehow special and unqiue. The service they deliver is truly essential to our lives. But it would be stupid to suggest that because of its importance, employees in electricity should be paid more. The same applies to health and security. Like every job – we should pay what it requires to get a job done – not going below certain minimum conditions that society broadly agrees on (though I’m obviously not suggesting we should be trying to run a healths service on minimum wage).
So the uniqueness arguement for me is pure bogus and bordering on sentimental. And if, as I clearly don’t accept, a certain job is unqiue thereby rendering comparisons impossible, how should it’s remuneration level be set?
I think that’s a view I’d simply disagree with. If you cannot see that the social role of the Gardai et al is such that it is of a qualitative difference from the examples you and I offer then I suspect we’re speaking different languages. Again no one disputes that all in a society have a part to play, and I’m neither arguing for a labour elite or for massive extra remuneration. But Gardai and many other PS workers can only be generated in the context of the state. Private enterprise which is more ephemeral simply cannot and does not have the capacity to implement them.
I’m intrigued to know how close a knowledge do you have of the work of the Gardai, etc. I’ve sat on community liaison meetings, know Gardai, etc and to be honest what I know from these is that the job is potentially (and often actually) dangerous, multi-faceted, has an enormous social component in terms of dealing with societal situations in the context of communities both urban and rural.
I never said that private sector WORKERS caused the crisis, they did not, their bosses did; and it’s not a line, it’s a fact bankers and builders did cause it.
But along with a few thousand other people I have a strike to organise; toodle pip old bean.
http://www.tribune.ie/article/2009/nov/08/why-we-need-a-national-strike-and-why-it-wont-happ/
Brendan was wrong that it wasn’t going to happen but right about all the rest.
‘When the equation was the other way around I don’t recall guards or teachers saying, sorry, we cannot be compared with anything in the private sector as we are unique.’
If memory serves, the ASTI was against benchmarking for precisely this reason and withdrew from ICTU around the time of their last strike.
What truly sickens public sector workers is the elaborate framework of media manipulation that has been erected to support the notion that they, along with developers and bankers were the beneficiaries of the boom, at the expense of plucky little entrepreneurs.
Bottom line: benchmarking was first little, then nothing. Next week’s strike is not to give the message: ‘we won’t contribute’ but the message: ‘we’ve contributed already; now pick on someone else.’
@Croc
If memory serves, the ASTI was against benchmarking for precisely this reason … benchmarking was first little
The figure of 13% pops into my head, along with an infamous simile involving an ATM.
Hardly little, nor resisted.
That of course was the INTO and Senator Joe… not entirely fair to paint his comment onto everyone. By the by I was no fan of the ASTI position on ICTU.
My memory of the beginnings of the first bench-marking round is that some sectors of the public service (particularly Guards and teachers, but other sectors as well) were very suspicious of bench-marking at first as they felt that any comparison between themselves and other sectors was a bit bogus (an opinion I would largely agree with).
But they were brought round by the leaders of the Unions telling them basically Benchmarking would be a bonanza for public service – of course Joe O’Toole put this argument in famously crass terms.
So in a way there is karmic justice in the PS workers getting it in the neck with calls for reverse benchmarking – they shouldn’t have given in the insistent GOVERNMENT demands that this was to be the way the pay-round was to be handled in the first place.
But it is unfair to imply that the bench-marking system was something dreamt up by the public service Unions who for some reason were determined to compare their pay with private sector workers. That wasn’t the genesis of it at all – and actually the fact that public sector workers (particularly the lower paid ones who did least well out of it) feel they got nothing extra out of bench-marking than they would have got out of a normal pay round explains the bitterness of many of them now, faced with a media seeming to take as gospel that they got more than their due because of this fiendish plot of a private-worker-robbing “benchmarking scheme”.
That’d pretty much sum up my feelings about benchmarking entirely Logan.
I remember when our heroine Sarah Carey was once listing the crimes of Fianna Fáil she casually mentioned that they ‘gave’ benchmarking – as if it were in some way undeserved or gratuitous, rather than a long-overdue and partial redress.
The infamous ‘ATM’ statement by Joe O’Toole has certainly earned a place in business-page demonology. It will appear, in due course, in his obituaries.
Is the CLR going to have coverage of the one-day strike next week?
Just on this issue of comparisons between pay in public sector in the UK as compared to Ireland.
Once again the devil is in the details. Generally PS pay in the UK is lower. But in London there is ‘London Weighting’ which means anyone working inside the M25 is given a top up in salary to offset the increased cost of living and working in London.
I can’t give you any statistical evidence I’m afraid (I doubt any exists) but my mother is a CO in the Irish civil service and I know quite a few people who work in equivalent jobs here in London. Their pay is broadly similar.
“The infamous ‘ATM’ statement by Joe O’Toole has certainly earned a place in business-page demonology. It will appear, in due course, in his obituaries.”
Of course all of us at CLR hope such articles for Joe and McCloone are a long way off.
Should also say in my experience of living in London this past 5 years I have found it to be only slightly more expensive than say… Athenry.
@WbS
So how does anyone decide how much Gardai, in all their multi-faceted specialness, should actually be paid?
If they can’t be compared to their private sector compatriots because that’s not-for-like, neither apparently can they be compared to their colleagues on European police forces as the cost-of-living is so astronomically high in this country, then how does one come up with a fair and affordable number?
They can’t be paid an infinite amount, I’m sure you’ll agree. And the more they’re paid, the less of them we can afford. So were do we draw the line?
I’ve a feeling your answer would be along the lines that their pre-levy compensation sounds just about right, and woe befall anyone who considers tinkering with that magic number.
It’s not like for like, and you’re correct, our cost of living is a central element.
As it happens I’d argue that given the circumstances the post levy situation across the PS is probably there or there abouts.
But again, I look forward to the reverse reverse benchmarking that can be but a short few years away.
Well, one reason for paying gardai more than the bare minimum you can get away with is to attract the type of recruit who might not normally be attracted to the police as a career. Young people often choose careers on the basis of prestige, and it was made abundantly clear from, say, 1990 til very recently that public service careers were for losers, because by the only measure they were told counted (money) they couldn’t compete.
A friend’s wife is a careers councellor in a middle-class school who used to report her frustration that youngsters who would have made wonderful teachers, nurses and guards would countenance nothing but medicine or financial services. When she asked them why, they’d look at her pityingly: they might end up like her – small car, no skiing holidays.
In a country where, we’re told, you can’t get anybody to run a bank for less than seven figures, who wants to get spat at by junkies or sworn at by teenagers for a living, there’s a premium?
Or of course as the Ed Walshes and PJs want, you could pay what they pay in England, and end up with their policing and educational standards.
unless there’s a premium
@Croc
I bet Frank McBrearty wishes we had a little more of those English policing standards in this country.
The point is not to pay the very least we can’t get away it, rather to avoid gratuitously over-paying, as this damages the service that can affordably provided. In the particular case of the Garda, this is done in a particular under-hand way, what with tax-free rent allowances for non-tenants and the likes.
BTW I don’t think your wife’s friend, the careers guidance teacher, has really got inside the heads of the kids at all, if she thinks its all driven by money. Has she checked out the points for primary teaching lately? Or compared the demand for software engineering courses to journalism/media studies? In one of those areas there are many well-remunerated opportunities and in the other there are only a few, mostly badly-paid, jobs available – no prizes for guessing which is which. So it not all about money, its more a complex mix of motivational factors including money, status, lifestyle, coolness, security, Mammy-approval, and a bunch of other intangibles.
There’s been no shortage of applicants for the guards though – 8.6 thousand in 2005, and 9.1 thousand in 2006 – presumably the height of celtic tiger delusion.
@Wbs,
Yes, I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to differ on the nature of the PS. You mention that the gardaí and other PS workers can only be there in the context of the state. I cannot see how the fact that society deems a service more appropriately to be provided by the state means anything in terms of remuneration or conditions? I simply don’t see the connection. You mention the job of gardaí as being multi-faceted. True, policing has become far more complex and challenging over the last 30 years. But that is true in just about every profession. You rightly say it can be dangerous. Yet construction is far more dangerous in terms of deaths, and society via the state has not deemed it appropriate to compensate people extra specifically for doing dangerous work. Perhaps the state takes the view that safety is only an issue for its own employees. But even if a danger premium could be justified for the Gardai, it should only apply to those on the beat. But as we’ve seen in the garda allowances, if you didn’t qualify for allowance A, you’d qualify for allowance B which is provided simply for those who don’t get allowance A! Hideous!
There is of course one thing truly unique about the gardaí: they are the only group in the state who are permitted to restrain our freedom to the point of applying lethal force if necessary. But I don’t see why that justifies anything extra in terms of remuneration! The bigger picture of providing a effecitve, modern, accountable, police force hardly can be reduced to pay. It would be absurd to suggest our police force is more effective now than it was in 2002 simply because the PS go substantial pay rises.
But more generally on your argument about the special nature of PS employees. The more I think about this the more painfully I fail to comprehend it. Why is a teacher who works for the state more ‘special’ than one who doesn’t. Or the same for a medical professional? As a society for a wide variety of reasons we have our state provide the bulk of health and education serivces. But why that merits special conditions for their employees I cannot fathom. Once upon a time Eircom employess and Aer Lingus employees were state employees. Most people would agree it is absurd to argue that this fact in itself meant they deserved special treatment.
Tomaltach. ‘Every profession has become more complex and challenging over the past 30 years’. That’s truly a terribly weak argument. For your average office or warehouse bound worker in a private sector employment it really hasn’t changed in the way that it has for many many public sector workers positioned at the interface of state service provision and a society that has ruptured radically. A shop worker doesn’t face the same challenges as a Garda (and I’ve worked front of house in fast food been there done that, it ain’t the same). A programmer in a private firm doesn’t face the same challenges as a nurse or a doctor in A&E (and a GP while moving close to the latter still isn’t quite there). A warehouse worker doesn’t face the same challenges as a teacher. As for ‘professionals’ (a term I’ve always felt was utterly self-deceiving on the part of those using it)… well, an architect or solicitor doesn’t generally face the same challenges as a CWO. And why would they, beyond the interface of retail at the lowest end of the employment hierarchy, a place I’ve been myself in the past and serving burgers on O’Connell St. at 12.00 am is no joke.
In each of those instances I’d argue that you could pretty much as of a necessity give a degree of a premium to the relevant worker in the PS for the nature and scale of the challenges they face.
I’m no uncritical booster for the Gardai, but I’ve seen hard working committed individuals in the Gardai having to deal with a role that encompasses social work, engaging and dealing with drugs usage, poverty, etc, etc. I’d be a bit concerned that this is treading far too close to price of everything value of nothing argument on your part.
The public sector is non-profit seeking. It can only exist in the context of the state. The role of the public sector workers is a social role. That role necessitates a broad and expanding range of interactions that are not replicated by other actors in the society, and in particular in the commercial world. Wiki oddly enough touches on this… that these ‘are roles so essential to modern life that for moral reasons their universal provision should be guaranteed and they may be associated with fundamental human rights’. There are grey area the ‘services of general interest’ catch-all used by the EU, and examples which have swung between public and private sector, and in some instances back again. But the notion of a public service ethos distinct from other sections of the commercial areas of society is neither new, nor particularly profound, and ironically is much better developed in the US than it is here or in the UK, at least in some areas.
Your counter example of a teacher who works for the state not being different (I’d avoid the word special) to one working in a private institution. Well, given the range of challenges the former faces in general terms given that they work usually in non self-selecting and fee charging contexts where students are either more directed (as in some of the top up institutions or in exclusive schools which due to their class position tend to have more motivated parents in general, not specific, improved facilities, and so on) I think its safe to say that they will find they’ve in general (and there will be exceptions to this) a tougher time, that the social role of their tasks will be wider, etc. A private consultant or doctor will depending on exposure to the public side have a radically different time to a colleague working in the public area. Have you been to an optician recently? Or the Blackrock Clinic? Or indeed any private medical institution? And then been to a public one? The rationing effect of money, even the calming effect, is quite striking. As indeed is the clear distinction between a non fee charging school and a private school. But more centrally those teachers/doctors/Gardai/civil servants/etc working in the public sector are working for the public/societal good and that is the ethos and goal of their organisations and institutions. Those working outside of it have different goals. These aren’t minor rhetorical quibbles. These are fundamental distinctions and are recognised as such and have been for the last century, by states, sociologists, etc.
None of this, let me repeat, is an argument for massive remuneration. Contrary to PJ’s assertion that he thought I’d set the clock back to before the levies I’ve actually noted that I’d put it after the levies. I think that it makes sense for PS workers to fund their pensions as best as is possible, but to a limit. I think that given the levies, the general tax increases and the specific public sector cuts coming up, even if I put aside the deflationary effect of all this – and God knows it’s going to be a savage Christmas on the retail front, what on earth are ISME and the SFA thinking of – that there’s something inequitable about the latest push to wage cuts (and I think back to FitzGerald jnr’s of the ESRI’s point about how given that the data was not of systemic wage cuts across the private sector it was wrong to implement them in the public sector).
However, I think a public service ethos can and should accommodate a flexible response from workers in the PS in terms of wages etc particularly during times like these but that it is also about recognising that certain relatively small premiums are a reasonable reward for what they do and that these will on occasion marginally dip above private sector salaries (perhaps during the bad times economically) and may on occasion dip below them (during better times economically). Or, to put it another way, something not dissimilar to the status quo ante prior to benchmarking – although I believe there was a very strong case for bolstering the wages of all lower to some middle income PS workers, a case that remains today.
Clearly the PS workers don’t need a pay cut – they need beatification.
Whatever you’re drinking – I’ll take a case.
It’s worth noting that the public sector premium ‘dipped above’ private sector salaries during the biggest boom we’ve yet seen, and remain ‘dipped’ above, now that we’re in the dog house. That’s pretty consistent ‘dipping above’ in a context where the money’s run out and it’s the dole and public services that’ll bear the brunt otherwise.
@WbS
Your characterization of a private sector populated by burger flippers and shop workers made me smile.
Of course I could point to the massed ranks of low-skill clerical officers, but I’d risk getting an earful about the nobility of the humble stapler and photocopier, latter-day equivalents of the hammer and sickle
Seriously, there’s a wide spectrum of skill-levels and general usefullness in both sectors. Cherry picking comparisons of the most sympathetic examples of the one with the least admirable examples of the other doesn’t really advance the debate much.
But I do agree on the oddness of those areas were the private and public sectors meet and compete. Even more striking than the Blackrock Clinic, is the scenario in one maternity hospital were the women who’ve “gone private” walk past the public & semi-private waiting areas on the way to their consultant’s rooms in the back. Each tier being ever-so-slightly more salubrious than the last, but all fairly tatty in their own way.
Now if we all viewed the HSE with the same sort of affection as the Brits obviously hold for their NHS, then of course we’d see a much smaller take-up of the private option. But that sort of esteem has to be earned with excellent service provision, which simply didn’t happen when the money flowed.
Beatification, alastair?
Respect will do.
And an end to people who don’t know the first thing about my job telling me how to do it; to millionaire bookmakers on radio shows questioning my right to defend my pay and conditions; to the private sector employees who sneered at my paycheque for two decades now deciding I’ve been overpaid all along.
Whatever you’re drinking, WbyS, I’ll buy you one.
You can have all the respect that your quality of work deserves. You just can’t expect to hang on to the same salary when the kitty’s run dry.
And turn off that telly – you’re obviously too sensitive for the sort of rude opinions it tends to promote.
PJ, that was short hand not meant to be a representative take on the entirety of either public or private sectors.
Let me tell you about my private sector experience. I’ve turned burgers, worked in retail on the shopfloor, worked in former public sector companies in clerical and admin, worked in three person companies. Worked in larger import and distribution and retail companies employing upwards of 250 people at locations across Ireland North and South. I’ve worked for multinationals that employ thousands across Europe. I’ve even worked, and whisper it, for one of the most hated corporations by the left. Didn’t rile me, like most of the others there I carried in my Guardian rolled up as did all my coworkers
I also found, when I was made redundant by them after some years working for them that they were much more generous in terms of the severance package and unbidden than any other employer I ever had. So I retain a certain respect for said corporation and its founder. I spent seven years as a director in a consultancy that employed and continues to employ upwards of 90 people both full time and on contract. I’ve been a sole trader and I work currently on contract.
So, you’re realise I’m very very well aware of the massed ranks of clerical staff having been one including memorably at one point for London Underground. And that means that I have not merely every sympathy for them in the private sector but as with pensions etc it incenses me that the unions don’t make more effort to engage with them and to ensure universal provision, that employers won’t shoulder their burden and responsibility or recognise that a universal state provision would be good for them in lightening that burden, government won’t do sod all, because I’ve been there, and feck it at my age I could easily go there again.
And can I say I entirely agree, as I more often than I’d like do, with your last two paragraphs.
‘The kitty’s ‘run dry”?
Well, well. The little phrase that says so much. Goodnight. I’m off to watch some telly.
I’m sorry – are you suggesting that the state isn’t borrowing heavily because revenues have dried up? Stop the press!
There is of course one thing truly unique about the gardaí: they are the only group in the state who are permitted to restrain our freedom to the point of applying lethal force if necessary.
I’m leaving the rest of this particular sub-thread until I have the time (and the inclination), but I had to step in about this particular point, which seems to me to be too aggravatingly wrong to let sit even for a day.
The vast majority of Guards (famously) don’t have recourse to lethal force, unlike other police forces (and indeed their RIC colonial forebears); if you care to to ponder it for a moment, you’ll realise who does bear that responsibility.
That’s a typically conceptually dishonest spin on what I wrote. I doubt there’d be many PS workers entirely entranced with my notion that the levies are most likely here to stay and that I’d be prepared to see them stand or my implicit point that pay cuts might be part and parcel of a public service ethos at times as I made clear in my comment to PJ earlier in the thread and in the body of the post. There really is no point engaging with you, it’s all bluster and superficial readings of whatever comes your way – eh? I’m done here too.
tbh – if you think that a 4% adjustment (making a premium pension that little more costly) is anything other than fiddling while Rome burns, then there is indeed no point in engaging with you. Everyone needs to reconcile themselves with 2004 style revenues in the absence of new export revenue streams, and salaries to match.
Saintly PS workers too.
Nice to know that at least part of my week is all for the social good, as opposed to all that unchallenging money grubbing that takes up the remainder.
Everyone needs to reconcile themselves with 2004 style revenues in the absence of new export revenue streams, and salaries to match.
I think you’ve mistakenly typed “everyone” when you (and IBEC, ISME etc.) may be thinking instead of *workers*.
I think I’m best placed to know what I’m thinking, cheers. The reduced revenues will impact on everyone reliant on those revenues. Workers included.
@Wbs,
I fully agree with your description of the PS in terms of universality and that it is non-commercial. As a society – even broadly speaking, as a European community – we have deemed many of these as fundamental and that they should be available to all (though often the promises have fallen short of the ideal) But that says nothing to me about paying the service providers any more or less.
I understand your dislike of the term ‘professional’: it is vague and open to interpretation. But when I said other professions have become more challenging I really wasn’t talking about stacking shelves or flipping burgers. No disrespect to those who work in warehouses or fast food. I was hoping to compare people who take it upon themselves and are fortunate enough to have the opportunity, to aquire higher value skills that enable them to contribute in a more sophisticated way. (Please let’s not get sucked into the semantics here where we end up equating a brain surgeon with a labourer).
You mention the case of the programmer. Well, let me say a bit about how the SW engineering and telecoms worlds have changed. 30 years ago the majority of people in this sector worked for large companies like IBM, Ericsson, Nortel. And back then jobs there were as close to permanent and pensionable as you can get in the private sector. Now they are hugely volatile. Take what has happened even since the recent recession began: Ericsson has closed its Dublin design office, Nortel networks have gone bankrupt and have started laying people off in Galway. Microsoft and IBM have had layoffs. So in terms of career and job security there has been a dramatic change.
In terms of the work itself. Again, dramatic change. In Ericsson 15 years ago the picture was that big companies (like Ericsson) sold to big monopolies (like BT, Eircom) making big profits. Projects typically took 3 to 5 years and if it overran it overran. BT wouldn’t particularly care if there was a bit of slippage since they had a captive market. Now the whole industry has been turned upside down. BT is in a vigorously competitive market so the likes of Ericsson are under huge pressure to deliver to short times scales with no over-run. And even in Ericsson’s game there are more competitors – with the convergence of internet, phone, and computing, and tv technologies. So now: projects are very short, very high pressured, companies switch technology often, sometimes rendering skills obsolete. One is continually running in order to stay with the flow.
Add on top of that the dramatic forces on that industry due to globalisation. Texas Instruments employed 1000 people in the south of France in 2002. That year they opened an office in Bangalore india. There are nearly 2000 employees in Bangalore now, while the French office has lost 250-300 employees.
Taken together the picture in Telecoms and Software Engineering has been one of radical change in the Industry with huge consequences for those who work in these areas.
Tomaltach, in my day job I work in a not entirely unrelated area where there is a premium on ever-changing software etc. My situation is one where I have considerable contact with commercial third parties in requisitioning materials, ensuring that projects are completed, that sub contractors are satisfied and have to manage both the technical, time and project management and budgetary aspects of the role. It’s actually a job I very much enjoy, but I wouldn’t describe it as uniquely challenging either when I entered the field two decades ago or now. It has changed in that time but not beyond reason. I don’t have to have as specific a specialist knowledge as your example does, but it would be considerable and in-depth in specific areas. I can speak to people with experience of project management back twenty thirty years in various sectors and they’ll say that it was always thus. Some had massive challenges, others didn’t. That in effect one was always running to stay with the flow. And globalisation works in many ways. This was a sleepy enough economy, but for Irish people like my father and many others who had to leave to go to in his case Germany and the UK and for others the US and work with companies seriously engaging in a continental and transcontinental competitive market it wasn’t a picnic.
And this is after all the nature of capitalism. I don’t mean that in a glib way, but where is the security in any private enterprise. It simply doesn’t exist and it didn’t when I worked from an MNC in 1990 in London and was made redundant for the first time within a couple of years because the arm of the company I was in was sold in an acquisition. In that context while not dismissing challenges I’m dubious that they’re somehow new across fifteen years. Anyone working in London or NYC in the late 80s or 90s as I was will know that that was the tenor of the time there, and probably always was in advanced industries.
To go slihgtly off point I have some experience of teaching both at second level and PLC and more recently in third level. No disrespect to the me who does job number 1, but there is no comparison with the challenges faced in teaching at first and second level – at least if one does it properly and is conscientious about it.
In relation to third level however I’m considerably more equivocal. Students there don’t present the same issues of discipline. Groups are either small enough and motivated enough to be containable or are large enough (as in universities) to be essentially anonymous in interactions with lecturers. Tutorials are a little different and any lecturer worth their salt will work damn hard to get it right.
I think wages in third and fourth level are significantly inflated given the challenges of the positions, the contact hours and so on and should be equal to or near equivalent to 1st and 2nd level.
Now before this raises the ire of a whole bunch of lecturers, let me say that there are many exceptions. I’ve found for example that in some of the IT’s the work ethic is in general better and I think there’s an interesting discussion to be had about why that might be.
I think wages in third and fourth level are significantly inflated given the challenges of the positions, the contact hours and so on and should be equal to or near equivalent to 1st and 2nd level.
I wonder. It seem to be a common thread in introductory ‘organisation/strategy/etc’ classes in Trinity to set the students the task of defining the business objectives of the college as an exercise.
When they (inevitably) come back with lists about the educational role, they’re then disabused of that notion.
TCD as an institution regards teaching as a sideline to generate funds to pay the wages of researchers; it sees developing commercial inventions as its business. Given this worldview (not helped by the influx back into the Irish third-level of academics who’ve been exposed to the US system, ‘goodbye’ to the classics and the arts), I think regarding their staff as teachers first and foremost for pay purposes may be a mistake – at least in the universities.
[...] Well, perhaps it was on foot of an Irish Times piece on a Watson Wyatt poll, an international consultancy which in a survey of 7 countries and a 100 business people in Ireland and found data which I dealt with a week or two ago in this post: [...]