Public utility workers earning an average of €70,000 a year

THE 9,000 employees supplying the country with electricity, gas and water earned average weekly incomes of €1,347 in the final quarter of 2007. This stands equivalent to average gross incomes of more than €70,000 a year.

Public utility employees worked an average of 38.1 hours per week in the final quarter of last year, according to figures released yesterday by the Central Statistics Office.

The 2,300 managers, professionals and associate professionals working for public utilities were at the top of the pay pyramid, earning an average of almost €1,665 per week, equivalent to annual incomes of €86,574, in the final three months of 2007. This remuneration covered a contracted working week of 35 hours and average overtime of 0.4 hours.

Craft, production, transport and other manual workers in public utilities did not fare badly either. In the final quarter of 2007, some 3,800 public utility workers in these occupations earned gross pay of €1,442 for a 43.6-hour working week, including average overtime of 5.8 hours.

Employees in public utilities, relatively well insulated from foreign competition, command a significant wage premium over workers in similar jobs who are employed in those segments of the economy exposed to foreign competition.

Manual and craft workers in public utilities are earning more than twice as much as similar workers in manufacturing. Where manual and craft workers in public utilities were earning weekly pay packets of €1,442 in the final quarter of 2007, the 138,900 manual workers in manufacturing were making ends meet on average weekly earnings of just €624. The average hourly earnings commanded by manual workers in public utilities, at €33.06, were twice as high as the €16.35 hourly earnings of manual workers in manufacturing during the fourth quarter of 2007.

Moreover, managers and professional staff in public utilities are earning half as much again as similar top-level staff in manufacturing. In the final quarter of 2007, the hourly earnings of managers, professionals and associate professionals in public utilities averaged €47, some 58 per cent more than the average hourly earnings of €29.82 received by managers and other professional staff in manufacturing.

More generally, average hourly earnings for all 225,100 employees in manufacturing industry increased by 4.8 per cent in the year to the fourth quarter of 2007. The average level of prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index, was 4.8 per cent higher in the final quarter of 2007 than a year earlier. Thus, over the past year, increases in hourly earnings in manufacturing have marched in step with rising prices.

However, earnings growth in financial services eclipsed the pace of pay rises in manufacturing. Employees in the financial sector saw their average hourly earnings rise by 6.3 per cent between the fourth quarters of 2006 and 2007.

Moreover, the numbers at work in the financial sector continued to increase through 2007. By the final quarter of 2007, total employment in the financial intermediation stood at 85,100, an increase of 7,200 or 9.2 per cent on the numbers working in the financial services sector a year earlier.