Average civil servant earns less than a private sector worker

carolt

From 2008, but still relevant:

"On the lowest pay grade, civil servants at the Department for Work and Pensions are earning 13p above the minimum wage of £5.87 an hour. The government had to break its 2% norm to increase pay for watch assistants, who monitor shipping for the coastguard service, or it would have been open to prosecution for paying staff below the minimum wage."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/24/tradeunions-policy-nhs-schools


Clearly all terribly overpaid.

andykn

carolt wrote: »

From 2008, but still relevant:

"On the lowest pay grade, civil servants at the Department for Work and Pensions are earning 13p above the minimum wage of £5.87 an hour. The government had to break its 2% norm to increase pay for watch assistants, who monitor shipping for the coastguard service, or it would have been open to prosecution for paying staff below the minimum wage."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/24/tradeunions-policy-nhs-schools


Clearly all terribly overpaid.

And that's at least a semi skilled job too.

Old_Slaphead

carolt wrote: »

From 2008, but still relevant:

"On the lowest pay grade, civil servants at the Department for Work and Pensions are earning 13p above the minimum wage of £5.87 an hour. The government had to break its 2% norm to increase pay for watch assistants, who monitor shipping for the coastguard service, or it would have been open to prosecution for paying staff below the minimum wage."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/24/tradeunions-policy-nhs-schools


Clearly all terribly overpaid.

Depends what they do for the money (presumably it's fairly basic admin ??)

Rather interesting that the unions quote £5.87ph but the payscales I've taken from the PCS Union website seems to suggest the pay for the minimum grade is £6.80 rising to £7.48.

Add in a 20% taxpayer pension contribution and the bare minimum goes up to near £17,000 - a lot more than many office workers get paid (outside of the big cities anyway). Given all the other perks (ie pensions, flexitime, good holidays, sick pay, job security, retirement at 60 etc etc) that these jobs, get I don't think they fare that badly when compared to many factory, farm, hotel, retail workers, office staff etc who are on the minimum £5.80 without all the extras.

nb - not sure where Union official gets his figures from but lowest pay for Watch assistants is around £7ph (according to CS payscales)

perplexed.com

If you want to talk about fair wages for a fair days work (public or private sector) then let's do so. How exactly would you propose to establish just how much a public sector worker should be paid? If you say something like, it depends on what we can afford, well how much would that be then? If we have very little in the pot, generally should we pay public sector workers at all? Or only some? If so who? and how much?

sjaypink

Old_Slaphead wrote: »

Add in a 20% taxpayer pension contribution and the bare minimum goes up to near £17,000

Where do these figure come from? This must be an old system? I don't know anyone now who gets anywhere near that?

Andy_L

Thats a reasonable ball park figure for the value of the employers contributions in final salary pension schemes

andykn

Andy_L wrote: »

Thats a reasonable ball park figure for the value of the employers contributions in final salary pension schemes

Was, the Civil Service scheme is closed to new members.

Old_Slaphead

andykn wrote: »

Was, the Civil Service scheme is closed to new members.

No it's not. There's a new scheme for new employees that's SLIGHTLY less generous than the old scheme (but still requires overall contributions in the region of 25-30% of employees salary to fully fund)

Old_Slaphead

sjaypink wrote: »

Where do these figure come from? This must be an old system? I don't know anyone now who gets anywhere near that?

Nobody 'gets' that - that's the amount of money the taxpayer notionally will have to pay into the CS scheme (ie around 20% of payroll cost) to meet it's liabilities. As pensions are considered to be deferred salary it's only fair to add these onto current cost when comparing with others who don't receive such a benefit (ie virtually all of private sector nowerdays)

For a private individual to get the same pension as a CS they would need to pay around 25% of their salary each year into a private scheme

marklv

As always, it depends. Civil servants in admin/clerical roles are brutally underpaid when compared to the private sector. Salaries only become decent once you are in grade 7 and higher (i.e. upper middle management and above) and even then it helps if you are a professional specialist (i.e. lawyer, accountant, surveyor, IT geek), as you get quite a bit extra for it. At these more senior grades there is little difference from the private sector and in some cases the overall package may be better. But the only reason for this is that you simply cannot recruit specialists unless you pay them competitively. To say that civil servants are better paid overall than private sector employees is arrant nonsense.