The agreement for federal and municipal employees provides for a salary increase of 1.4% for all employees on April 1, 2021 and a further increase of 1.8% in April 2022. The agreement runs until 21 December 2022. The wage increase in 2021 will be supported by a minimum of €50 per month, meaning the lowest-paid workers will see a 2.59% wage increase. In the meantime, from March 2021, healthcare staff will receive an additional payment of €70 per month, which will increase to €120 by 2022. Other payments for health and nurses are an increase in the intensive care allowance from €46.02 to €100 and an increase in the work allowance from €45 to €155. Nurses who work in facilities such as nursing homes will receive a monthly stipend of €25, while doctors will receive an additional €300 from March 2021. For this year, there will be a COVID-19 bonus payment of €600 for lower salary groups (1-8), €400 for averages (9-12) and €300 for peak salary (13-15). The weekly working hours of workers in the East will be reduced by 30 minutes in 2022 and by an additional 30 minutes on 1 January 2023 in order to finally bring them into line with workers in the Western regions. There is a similar change for hospital employees, but with an additional 30-minute reduction in 2025 to align with the 38.5-hour week in the West. There will be a vote of the members of Fórsa who will fall under the agreement. The union will decide whether the union supports the acceptance or rejection of the package. If the proposed agreement is passed, unions will not be able to make allegations of improvements in wages or working conditions that “increase costs” during the term of the agreement.

Childcare: private childcare facilities not covered by collective agreements – January 2021: 1.95% for teachers and staff; 2% for assistants; 2.5% for childminders On 27 October 2021, the autumn 2021 budget and expenditure review announced that public sector workers would receive “fair and affordable” wage increases between 2022/23 and 2024/25. The amount of the salary increase has not yet been decided. On average, the weekly earnings of municipal employees are 14.1% lower than those of similar private sector workers, after checking education, age, hours worked, government and year using a regression analysis (Table 3) (see methodological appendix for more details). The differences are much greater for municipal employees who do not have (-22.9%) or who are low (-16.6%) bargaining rights than for employees who have strong bargaining rights (-10.5%). The gap is even larger in Virginia (-29.9%) than in other states that, like Virginia, were not allowed to trade during this period. “Most importantly, the agreement paves the way for the security of wages and labour relations over the next two difficult years.” Organisations representing civil servants outside the Irish Confederation of Trade Unions – such as the Guard and the Defence Force – have complained that, despite previous government assurances that they would be involved, they have effectively been excluded from final negotiations on the new deal. In addition, measure blS for public service benefits is inflated because it includes amounts that repay or “amortize” unfunded retirement obligations related to previous employment. Thus, while employers` contributions to national and local pensions in the BLS data represented on average 16.3% of income based on employer contributions, the employers` share of the normal cost of local government pensions was only 6.5-10% of the payroll based on the schemes` own actuarial valuations (Aubry and Wandrei 2020).5 Unlike the BLS measure, includes depreciation payments, normal cost estimates include only the present value of future pension benefits that employees purchased in the current year.

Biennial cross-sectoral negotiations on the private sector are relevant to many public services. In recent negotiations, employers did not want to deviate from the 0.4% in addition to the compensation against inflation. However, there has been an increase in the national minimum wage from EUR 1625.72 to EUR 1702 in April 2022, with further increases planned for 2024 and 2026. Ultimately, public service agreements are accepted or rejected by the ICTU`s Public Service Committee (PSC), which represents all ICTU-affiliated unions with members of the public and public sectors. It decides by a weighted sum of the results of all union votes, which means that the voting strength of each union is determined by the number of members it has in the public and public sectors. In 2020, the union PUBLIC SECTOR PCS launched a petition on wages, highlighting the long-term decline in purchasing power resulting from wage freezes and increases under inflation. Approximately 900,000 of the 4.4 million public sector employees are covered by payroll review bodies. At the end of July 2020, the government confirmed that it would receive wage increases of between 2% and 3.1%. These include the Armed Forces, the Judiciary and Senior Officials (2%), police and prison staff in England and Wales (2.5%), doctors and dentists (2.8%) and teachers in England (3.1%). The regression model, which uses the natural logbook of weekly earnings as a dependent variable, is based on Allegretto and Mishel 2019 with some modifications. Since the public sector sample includes all occupations, not just teachers, the overall sample is not limited to workers with a bachelor`s degree or further education. Similarly, the interest rate differential is the difference in pay for all local government employees and not the difference in salary for teachers.

Similar to Allegretto and Mishel 2019, the analysis controls age, including a square, to capture diminishing experience returns; Level of education (less than high school, high school, some colleges, bachelor`s degree, graduate diploma); and the State. It also controls for the year and the number of hours worked, which varies even between full-time employees. Allegretto and Mishel do not control the hours worked to reassure critics who claim that teachers` weekly hours may be exaggerated. Although teachers, police officers and firefighters report working longer than full-time private sector employees, this does not apply to other local government employees, who tend to have slightly shorter working hours. Therefore, the omission of a measure of hours worked could lead to an exaggerated (non-conservative) measure of the wage penalty incurred by local government employees. This is an essential protection, as abolishing the labour cost regime would effectively mean that the majority of business cases would support outsourcing and lead to the privatisation of public services – on the basis of the minimum wage and low-level labour protection rights – regardless of the impact on the quality of service and the protection of workers. The pay gap between local authorities is largely due to the fall in wages of workers with a bachelor`s degree or higher education diploma (Table 3). Nationally, the gap is -23.0% for employees with a bachelor`s degree or more and statistically insignificant -0.6% for employees without a bachelor`s degree. In states with strong collective bargaining rights, workers without a bachelor`s degree actually earn 6.8% more than their private sector counterparts, largely because unions raise the wage floor for less educated workers. Without low-wage workers earning less than $15 an hour, the wages of workers without bachelor`s degrees in local governments in these states are slightly higher (2.9% higher) (not shown in the table). The practice and structure of collective bargaining varies considerably from country to country, as does the provision of public services, with the private and non-profit sectors playing an important role in some countries. This means that collective bargaining can be quite fragmented.

This overview focuses on the most important negotiations in each country, but the collective bargaining bulletin often includes details about negotiations in small sectors, subsectors, private companies and non-profit suppliers. “The agreement is fair, affordable and sustainable and recognizes the economic challenges the country is currently facing,” he said. This would be a two-year agreement that, if ratified, would run from 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2022. It`s shorter than usual, and if the deal is ratified, Fórsa expects negotiations on a successor deal to begin in early summer 2022. .