We all know about the teachers and train drivers, but apparently there are 100,000 civil servants in 124 government departments and quangos also on strike today – if anyone has noticed. It includes members of the PCS union employed at the DWP, National Highways, the Food Standards Agency and, er, the Risk Management Authority, Trade Remedies Authority, Council for the RFSAs and, of course, Bord na Gaidhlig. It is only thanks to their striking that many people will ever have heard of them.
Any workers wanting above-inflation pay rises will have to earn them through improved working practices
That is the point, of course, of ‘Walkout Wednesday’ – it allows trade unions who represent obscure government departments to stand with train drivers and teachers in an attempt to create the impression of a general strike. There is a very big difference, however, between now and the 1970s, when far more public sector workers were employed in jobs where people would actually notice if they didn’t turn up to work.
There is a danger, however, in unions joining together to create one big public sector strike: it draws attention to figures released by the ONS last week on slipping productivity within the public sector. Throughout these strikes, public sector unions have constantly drawn attention to a differential in pay rises between public and private sectors. ONS earnings figures show that in the year to November public sector earnings rose by 3.3 per cent and private sector earnings by 7.2 per cent. In both sectors that represented a real-terms fall, but much more so in the public sector.
The claim that public sector workers are thus getting a poor deal is undermined, however, by two factors. Firstly, if you just quote the figures for the past 12 months you miss out what happened during the pandemic, when private sector earnings collapsed but public sector earnings did not – most staff carried on collecting their full salaries even if few trains were running or few school lessons were being delivered (some schools were offering little teaching, even online). Private sector earnings are still recovering from the big dip during lockdowns.
The other factor is productivity. Are workers doing anything actually to earn a pay rise? This is where the figures become quite shocking. In the three years to the third quarter of 2022 (i.e. starting in 2019, before the pandemic) productivity per hour, across the whole economy, increased by 1.6 per cent and productivity per worker by a miserly 0.5 per cent (we seem to be working less).
But the low productivity problem is much worse in the public sector. The ONS also produces a figure – experimental, it says – for public sector productivity, which it says has plunged by a shocking 7.4 per cent over the same period. It fell by 1.3 percent in the third quarter of 2022 alone. Many people will have anecdotal tales which reflect the statistics: difficulties in getting driving licences, passports renewed and the like. No doubt there are exceptions, with some individuals working as hard, if not harder, than they have ever done. But there are far too many public functions which have ceased to work effectively.
If an economy cannot increase productivity then those who work within it cannot, as a whole, grow richer. They cannot keep enjoying above-inflation pay rises – or even pay rises which keep pace with inflation – if they are producing less year on year. In the 1970s, the then-Labour government reminded workers of this point again and again: pay rises must be paid for with productivity gains. It is a point which the government needs to repeat now: any workers who want above-inflation pay rises will have to earn them through improved working practices, resulting in higher productivity stands.
In the meantime, if real wages are falling in the public sector at the moment, that would appear merely to be consistent with the decline in how much each worker is producing.
Comments