Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore today said today there was "no justification" for cutting the pay of low-income public sector workers.
His comments come after Taoiseach Brian Cowen yesterday signalled that pay reductions in the public sector could be back on the agenda for the Government as it attempts to deal with the budget deficit next year.
Speaking at the annual conference of the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) in Dublin yesterday, Mr Cowen said the Government had to look at “all of the options” that would minimise the impact of unavoidable spending reductions on public services and public service jobs.
However, this morning, Mr Gilmore said there was a big range of salaries in the public sector and that his party's proposal to cap the top level of pay was very different to somebody "on five or six hundred euros a week . . . they are already strapped attempting to make ends meet".
"We have to be very specific, some people are in a better position to take pain, and some are not in a position to take pain at all. . . . We need to be talking as a country about having a more equal regime in pay. There is a need and is scope for cutting pay of people who are paid very, very highly, but there is no case and no justification to cut the pay of people who are on the minimum wage and who are low incomes and can't afford it," he said on RTÉ's Morning Ireland.
"We have a very unequal society. We have a situation where in some enterprises, for example, you have chief executives and top people who are paid 20 or 30 times what the average worker in that employment is paid. Now you cannot just speak generally about pay as if somebody was paid the same. . .. you can cut and cap pay at the top as we have argued.
"If you're trying to get me to say that the Labour Party would support cutting the pay of people out doing the roads, who are nursing in our hospitals, we are not doing that, and we won't do that," Mr Gilmore said.
He refused to be drawn on a public-sector pay threshold that could be applied for implementing cuts. "What we have to do is replace the boom-and-bust economics, which got us into the problem in the first place, with a much more sustainable form of prosperity, with a much fairer society."
The Irish Small & Medium Enterprises Association (Isme) today called on the Government to implement "significant" wage cuts in the public sector in line with those in the private sector.
In a statement, Isme chief executive Mark Fielding said: “With negative inflation remaining at minus 5.9 per cent, the economy will never be in a better position to realign its cost base with that of our competitors.
"This includes the introduction of pay cuts across the economy. The private sector has already led the way by introducing significant pay cuts in all areas. These public sector reductions are required to reduce current expenditure, particularly with the exchequer figures in a mess and taxation levels at ‘tipping point’,” he said.
Yesterday, economist Colm McCarthy, author of the recent review on Government spending, told the IPA conference the State was bust and that cutbacks were unavoidable. Speaking after the conference, Mr McCarthy called for a new review of public sector pay and said a third benchmarking exercise should be free t recommend pay cuts where necessary.
