Impact has begun a campaign for a flat-rate pay increase to be included in any future national agreement. A study presented to delegates at the union conference showed most civil servants would benefit more from flat-rate increases than percentage-based pay rises.
If the cost of a 1 per cent increase for civil servants was converted into a flat rate, it would work out at £203 a year extra for everyone, said Mr Shay Cody, IMPACT deputy general secretary. If that 1 per cent was applied in the ordinary way a principal officer would earn an extra £408 a year, but a clerical officer as little as £81. If the first phase of a new agreement worked out at 2.5 per cent, this would be worth £10 a week if converted into flat-rate increases.
He told the union, most of whose members would be in the middle to higher PAYE income bracket, that Ireland had the highest rate of wage dispersal in the world. Citing an ESRI study from last year, he said this showed the top 10 per cent of Irish PAYE workers earned 4.5 times as much as the bottom 10 per cent. The next nearest highest wage dispersal rate was in the US, where the ratio was 4.3 to one. In Sweden the difference was only two to one.
Supporting the proposal, Mr Bill Colgan of the Bord Pleanala branch, said the trade union movement could hardly criticise the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, for favouring the highpaid in the Budget, when union members were doing precisely the same thing by voting for percentage-based pay deals.
IMPACT's general secretary, Mr Peter McLoone, said previous national agreements had done little for the low paid. Those on higher incomes must be prepared to make sacrifices to help the lower paid in future agreement.
If the union adopted this proposal it would lend credibility to the trade union campaign for any new agreement to include a significant flat-rate pay increase in negotiations on a new pay agreement. He said unions with large numbers of low-paid workers, such as SIPTU, would watch IMPACT's deliberations closely.