PUBLIC SECTOR
Public v private sector pay: the well-chosen average - part 2
Recent newspaper reports claiming “public sector workers earn 7% more on average than their peers in the private sector” have prompted a furious debate about differences between public and private sector pay. The Guardian’s Ben Goldacre accused The Sunday Times of distorting and misusing ASHE earnings statistics. His conclusion was unequivocal: “This was one of the most statistically misleading front page stories I have seen in a long time”.
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Nigel Stanley, the TUC’s Head of Campaigns and Communications, has joined the attack. His central finding is that “median pay in the public sector is higher than in the private sector.” But he adds a number of important caveats:
1. There is nothing new about this finding - it goes back to at least 1984.
2. What it does not mean is that someone doing the same job in the public sector will receive more pay than if they were doing the same job in the private sector as “the two sectors are made up of different jobs”.
3. The pay gap is mainly due to the public sector employing a greater proportion of skilled people than the private sector.
4. This trend has accentuated over time as the public sector employs a greater proportion of graduates today than it did in the recent past.
5. Graduates in the public sector earn less than graduates in the private sector, while those with an educational level lower than A-levels are paid more in the public sector than in the private sector.
--> Meanwhile, Nigel Hawkes of Straight Statistics, a pressure group whose aim is to detect and expose the distortion and misuse of statistical information, has issued this statement: “The Sunday Times sought and was given permission to say that the figures had been validated by Straight Statistics. In the published version this was changed without permission to read that the analysis had been validated, a different matter.”
Hawkes, who had helped The Sunday Times reporter to locate the figures used for the comparison, has now, in the interests of transparency, published the memorandum sent to the newspaper.
Want to know more?
Nigel Stanley’s article appears on the TUC’s “Touchstone” blog - an “informal blog by TUC staff about policy issues that are in the news, or ought to be”. To read it online visit www.touchstoneblog.org.uk/2010/01/publicprivate-sector-pay-what-about-gender/.