SIPTU conference: Criticism by business leaders of the benchmarking pay awards to public servants was dismissed as misleading and disingenuous yesterday by the vice-president of SIPTU, Mr Jack O'Connor.
The campaign against the awards was partly about concealing the fact that we had the lowest company taxes and lowest level of employer social insurance contributions in Europe, he claimed.
Mr O'Connor is expected to become president of SIPTU, when Mr Des Geraghty retires in October.
Addressing the union's biennial conference in Galway, he said it was ironic that IBEC, the employers' body, had demanded renegotiation of the benchmarking awards, given its insistence on "compliance" measures in the current partnership programme, Sustaining Progress.
Pay rises averaging 8.9 per cent, in addition to basic increases, are to be paid to public servants on foot of the benchmarking body's recommendations. Productivity concessions by staff in return for the pay rises have been criticised by some commentators and politicians as vague and lacking any real changes in work practices.
Mr O'Connor said critics of the benchmarking process had been attempting to cause divisions between public and private sector workers since before the body's report was published.
All unionised workers, he said, had been due pay increases totalling 18.1 per cent during the term of the previous partnership programme, the PPF. CSO figures, however, showed that the actual hourly increase for workers in this period was 27.57 per cent.
This showed a significant gap had emerged between private and public sector pay rates during the latter years of the economic boom. "And those in the public service, who incidentally will not receive any pay increase at all this year, will not receive the full amount until 2005," he added.
It was also worth noting, he said, that when the Labour Court recently compared the pay rates of craft workers in the public and private sector, in a "totally transparent exercise", it found those in the public sector were more than 17 per cent behind.
"This is another detail which has been conveniently disregarded by right-wing commentators. It's about time that those who are so fond of the word 'transparency' started displaying some of it themselves in their presentation of the facts.
"The campaign against the benchmarking awards is not just about dividing worker against worker. It's also about concealing the fact that Ireland has the lowest company taxes in Europe and the lowest level of employer social insurance contributions in Europe, and a significantly lower level of current spending as a percentage of GDP than the European average."
While a number of commitments promised by the Government in Sustaining Progress had been met, it had shown a "clear disregard" for the pledges, emphasised by the decision to dismantle Aer Rianta and to "privatise Dublin Bus through franchising".
