Michael Taft: It’s open season on public sector workers again. The Sunday Independent has a front-page shock-horror headline – €1bn pay rise bonanza for public sector. Other commentators and employers' spokespersons have been having their go's as well. But then there's Stephen Collins. Stephen has a statistic. You've been warned:
'According to the CSO, average weekly earnings in the Irish public sector are €912.84. This contrasts with average weekly earnings of €624.99 in the private sector, an astonishing gap in income.'
An astonishing gap in income? No, astonishing nonsense. Let’s go through this assertion with that most inconvenient of entities – facts.
Read the rest of this post over at Notes on the Front.
1 comment:
I made a slight mistake in quoting from the Irish Times article. The quote I used relates to the gap between Irish public and private sector pay. The quote I meant to paste in as follows: 'Average earnings in the British public service were €634 a week on the last available set of figures by contrast to €912 in Ireland.' Collins used the term 'astonishing gap in income' to refer to the gap between public and private earnings in Ireland. I will follow this up in a subsequent post. Suffice it to say, that is astonishing nonsense as well.
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