Begg admits no gain from last pay deal

WORKERS MADE no gain in living standards from the current national partnership deal because pay rises were nullified by the inflation rate, the general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) said yesterday.

David Begg was speaking days after Ictu announced it would hold a special conference next month to decide whether it should take part in new national pay talks.

"People didn't make anything on it, and we did expect . . . at the time that it looked like a good deal. It looked like it was going to be substantially ahead of inflation because at that time the forecasters from [the Department of] Finance to the ESRI to the Central Bank were all talking about inflation running at around 2.7 per cent," Mr Begg said.

"What happened after that was we had eight quarter-point increases from the European Central Bank on interest rates and that pushed up the rate of inflation very significantly.

"So it ended up that it just about balanced out, but people didn't make a real gain in terms of their standard of living as a result of it," he told RTÉ's This Week programme.

Mr Begg also said that in Ireland, as in the rest of the world, wage levels were diverging between higher and lower earners. This was a difficult trend to counter because it was a global problem and not one that Ireland had the capacity to reverse on its own.

He said they had tried "to load the increases somewhat more favourably for the lower paid" and to improve public services.

Mr Begg said a 100 per cent pay increase would not hugely improve people's lives "if they can't buy education or if they can't buy health services the way richer people can".