Testy debate on civil servants’ pay rise

A government bill proposing an across-the-board pay rise for public-sector workers got more pushback from opposition MPs on Monday, with the Disy party in particular looking determined to veto the legislation.

The House finance committee was continuing its discussion and review of the bill, which would grant employees in the broader public sector a 1.5 per cent wage increase – following a deal struck between the government and trade unions in July.

The proposed salary hike – which was to kick in as of October 1 – applies to salaries and pensions alike. The beneficiaries are all public-sector workers, whether full-time or part-time employees. This includes the police, the fire department, the military and public-school teachers. The increase also covers the judges and the attorney-general. But it does not apply to the president, ministers, MPs, mayors and other state officials.

In parliament, the head of the SEK trade union got into a heated exchange with Disy MP Harris Georgiades.

Andreas Elia, the union rep, called on MPs to sanction the prior agreement between the syndicates and the government. Otherwise they’d put at risk “the system of labour relations that has been in place for decades”.

But Disy’s Georgiades took umbrage, countering that parliament’s job is not to unquestioningly rubberstamp government decisions.

He noted that from 2017 to 2023 wages in the broader public sector have gone up by between 35 to 40 per cent, due to Cost of Living Allowance and the automatic annual increments.

The proposed 1.5 per cent increase now would be additional to that.

Georgiades also recalled that this promised hike comes after the government commissioned the International Monetary Fund to carry out a study on how to rationalise the public payroll in the long term.

Meanwhile the finance ministry’s permanent secretary urged lawmakers to approve the bill quickly. The wage hike’s fiscal footprint would be small, he noted. Moreover, under the deal hammered out in July, trade unions pledged not to seek any additional raise for 2025.

Grilled by MPs, a finance ministry functionary stated that during the 2020-2023 period the average monthly earnings of public-sector employees came to €2,360.

Some parliamentarians have taken issue with the fact that the 1.5 per cent increase will also apply to pensions, which clearly are unrelated to productivity.

The 1.5 per cent rise under debate is known as a ‘general increase’ – a fixed percentage increase that applies to all employees in the government and broader public sector. The last such general increase was granted 15 years ago.

But independently of this, public-sector workers also receive automatic annual pay increments, where the percentage increase depends on a person’s pay scale.