In a press release last week the CIPD said that Government and public sector employers can undermine the case for strike action by better communicating the public sector benefits. This is certainly true. Some of the aguments for generous treatment, put forward by union leaders last week, were approaching level of reality of the Greek public sector workers.
But the import of the CIPD’s message applies in all sectors. Some organisations use total remuneration systems to get over the problem of staff not really understanding their full range of benefits but in most cases people are not aware of the full cost of their employment, nor of the real-life competitiveness of their package. In general it would be better if they were.
Of course getting the message across is not easy. Apart from the time and effort involved in collecting the facts it is difficult to strike the right balance between a) appearing to boast (possibly OK if you are absolutely sure you have something to boast about), b) not being believed (the gentleman doth protest too much) or c) confirming their suspicions that your package is, at best, just run of the mill (which is the right thing for many organisations – not everyone can be above average).
One of the hardest messages to get across, particularly in the case of professionally-qualified staff is the extent to which the pay of similarly qualified people varies as careers develop. There is a reasonable degree of consistency in the starting pay for newly qualified maths and science graduates and the Government’s plan to pay extra to recruit, into teaching, those with firsts in these subjects will probably be achievable. But 10 years on? The pay of the contempories of those graduates will vary widely. Some will have gone into City dealing rooms and get paid a fortune, others into industry but, for all sorts of reasons, never got much beyond their first promotion, some will be working in jobs that have no relation to their original qualification. But guess which end of that spectrum those teachers will want to be compared to.
