Public sector pay needs "significant reforms" including an end to national strike balloting in the sector, according to a report from think tank the Policy Exchange. But its thinking has been dismissed by unions who say it should be "taken with a huge barrel of salt", according to today's Telegraph.
The report says that the typical public sector worker earns 24% more than a comparable private sector worker, or up to 43% more when pensions are taken into account. Only at the highest earning levels (more than £47,000 a year) do private sector workers earn more than their public sector counterparts.
The report is based on data from the Office for National Statistics. It says that in most areas of the country the gap between public and private sector employees' pay widened between 2008 and 2010, and that public sector pay would need to be frozen until 2018 before workers in private companies catch up.
Among the proposals put forward to "help the public sector retain jobs, become more efficient and better reward productive workers" are an end to national strike balloting, replacing the two-year pay freeze with a paybill freeze, and a reform of public sector pensions.
It suggests that national pay bargaining in the public sector "leads to staff shortages and high vacancy rates in areas where private sector pay is high". Ending national strike balloting would enable "local union officials to seek better deals than the national one could provide", following which "the national pay bargaining structure would being to unravel".
On the public sector pay freeze, Policy Exchange says that initiating a paybill freeze would give departments or local units a total amount for pay costs that "would allow different tradeoffs to be made between headcount reductions and pay in different regions and sectors".
Ignoring these issues "is likely to cost jobs and further reduce fairness in the labour market", the report concludes.
There is no doubt that workers in the public sector, many of whom are currently subject to a multi-year pay freeze and may also be at risk of redundancy, will not share the view that they are so overpaid compared with those in the private sector.
An end to 'national strike balloting' - what on earth do they mean?
An end to national pay bargaining I could understand, but the report does seem to be concerned with strike ballots.
The fact is that the law on strike ballots is the same for both public and private sectors. The ballot must be conducted based on the dispute that the union has with the employer. Where the employer is a large single organisation (whether a Government department or a large supermarket chain) then there is scope for a national ballot on strike action.
I suspect that what Policy Exchange wanted to say was that if there was an end to national bargaining then any disputes over pay would be local rather than national and that would lead to a requirement for local ballots.
That is still not right,however. A union can call a national strike over a local issue provided all those called out have the same employer and the union has met the requirements for an aggregate ballot under S.228A of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992.
Perhaps the Policy Exchange is concerned with national bargaining covering a large number of local employers. A teacher's pay deal, for example, can be a national issue. But there cannot just be one strike ballot. Each ballot would need to be conducted at the level of the individual employer. There is not one dispute, but many individual disputes - they just happen to be about the same thing, and coordinated by a national union. An end to national bargaining would prevent this because a dispute would be based on the local deal and would differ from employer to employer.
On that basis an end to national bargaining may well lead to a de facto end to national strikes (such as they are) - but you don't need to touch the law on strike ballots to achieve that.