Teacher, train driver, lecturer, civil servant — to which one would you award a pay rise? When these professions join a “national day of action” on February 1, they will present a united front.
In reality, they will probably be competing for the spoils. The cost to a cash-strapped government of raising public sector pay with inflation — let alone making up years of stagnant wages — is estimated to be £18 billion.
For more than a year, each union has been using data to present a compelling argument for their members to get a pay rise. Mick Whelan, general secretary of Aslef, the train drivers’ union, said the government’s latest pay offer — flatly rejected two weeks ago — represented “a 20 per cent cut”.
The numbers do not always stack up. Last week Dr Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that teachers had lost “24 per cent of their pay in real terms since 2010”. The truth is half that, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
“All British workers need a pay rise,” Mick Lynch, general secretary of the transport union RMT, claimed last year. The real question for employers and the government is: who needs one the most?
When you adjust for inflation, our wage growth can lag behind other rich countries. In real terms, average pay packets have barely grown since the financial crisis of 2008.
But plot the salaries of striking workers on a chart and it becomes clear that some have suffered more than others.
According to data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings — a sample of about 300,000 workers compiled by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) — it is public sector workers whose real wages have fallen most since 2011.
While the average private sector worker is paid roughly what they were 12 years ago, pay has fallen by 7 per cent for full-time nurses, 10 per cent for university lecturers and 13 per cent for teachers.
Those decreases in public sector pay are not replicated in many other countries. Since 2010, British primary school teachers have seen the biggest drop in pay in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development group of mostly rich countries. And while nurses’ pay has fallen here, their wages have grown above inflation in most other nations.
Pay in the public sector used to be much higher than the private sector. Why has the gap narrowed? Professor Alex Bryson at University College London, an expert on industrial action, says that pay review bodies — independent experts who recommend pay rises — have recently operated within the remit laid down to them by the government.
“Even if they think there might be grounds for considerably higher pay, that really falls beyond their remit as a pay review body,” he says. “It’s often more about how you divide up the pay that’s available.”
Another consideration, he says, is that we are not prepared to increase public spending in any drastic form. We expect a Scandinavian-style welfare state but want to fund it using American levels of taxation. Until that changes, public sector pay will likely stagnate further.
An uncomfortable truth may be that some public sector employers pay workers less because they can. Nursing, for example, is still viewed by some as a profession that people enter as “a calling”.
According to a 2020 study by researchers at Oxford Brookes University, this has consequences in the “huge amounts of goodwill” nurses are prepared to show, such as working beyond their paid hours in difficult conditions. The nurses’ strikes this winter, however, suggests some of that goodwill may be running out.
Not all public sector jobs have suffered from poor pay growth. Paramedics’ pay fell about 7 per cent in real terms between 2011 and 2017 — but an agreement reached in 2016 put their pay up a band. According to the Unison union, this represented the “additional clinical skills” and extra training paramedics were now expected to have. By April 2022, their pay was 4 per cent above 2011 levels.
While the gap between private and public sector pay may be closing, the gold-plated public sector pension remains strong. About 20 per cent of public sector remuneration now goes to pension contributions, compared with less than 8 per cent in the private sector. Factor this into teacher salaries and their pay shrinkage is considerably reduced.
Of the groups striking, train drivers — who work in the private sector — have had some of the best real-terms boosts in pay since 2011. The median wage of a full-time train driver is £59,000, according to the ONS, and has risen 8 per cent above inflation since 2011. Rail unions have “monopolised the supply of labour to the employer”, Bryson suggests, which may be key to their strength.
For all the noise, union mobilisation bears little relation to pay. At the apex of poor wages and low wage growth sits social care. And while four in five NHS workers are in a union, less than one in five care workers are.
While workforce shortages have pushed up salaries in sectors such as retail, the average full-time carer salary is £21,523, roughly what it was a decade ago. Dr Duncan Brown, principal associate at the Institute for Employment Studies, said: “Over the last decade they’ve had travel costs removed, pay progression removed, and their employers just aren’t getting funded enough by local authorities. It’s also difficult to unionise.”
If you don’t pay workers enough, nobody will want to do the job. Vacancies, and the effect of those gaps in the workforce, may be a key factor in determining who gets a pay rise. The NHS pay review body, after all, acknowledged that high vacancy rates can impact “staff morale, service delivery and patient care”. Yet Brown suggests the government seems less enthusiastic about tackling the 165,000 vacancies in social care.
There may not be enough money to give pay rises to everyone, but there is a surprisingly large amount of goodwill for striking workers, polling data suggests.
About 66 per cent of the public back nurses’ strikes, for example, compared with 28 per cent who oppose them.
Luke Tryl is the UK director of the More in Common think tank, and has been running focus groups on the cost of living crisis. “There is a feeling that we’re all in it together, which leads people to think striking is fair game — do what you need to do to get ahead,” he said.
There is a catch, though. “It wanes when you get to higher salaries. People get really angry when they hear about nurses struggling. But with railway workers, they say, ‘Don’t drivers get paid loads?’” More people are opposed to the RMT strikes (49 per cent) than support them (43 per cent).
With few workers getting anything near an inflation-beating pay rise, this year’s data will show one of the worst falls in living standards on record.
For some, it will see the gains of the past few years eroded to nothing; for others, it will send already deteriorating wages into freefall. And a word of warning to employers and governments: the professions most in need of a lift may not be those shouting the loudest.
