“Say it again, say it often: the public sector is less well-paid” says Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian. She can say it as often as she likes: but that doesn’t make it true.

Comparisons are difficult, why is why econometricians labour over them. Certainly the gross difference between median pay in the public and private sectors - £62 a week in favour of the public servants – give a false impression.
 
The reason is that on average the public sector has a higher proportion of skilled people than the private sector, so one would expect median pay to be higher. Proper comparisons try to correct for this.
One of the most comprehensive was published in August 2008 by Monojit Chatterji of the University of Dundee and Karen Mumford of the University of York.  It covered only male full-time employees.
 
It showed that among the highly skilled, the private sector has a small advantage in pay rates. Private sector employees in the managerial, professional and technical category earn more, for a given level of education and experience, than do their opposite numbers in the public sector. The data were for 2004, and the gap was small – so it is possible it may have changed since then.
 
Among the unskilled, the opposite is true. Public sector employees in the unskilled category earn significantly more than do their opposite numbers in private sector. And, contrary to Polly’s assertions, there are plenty of unskilled workers in the public sector. It represented (in 2004) 22 per cent of male full-time employment - but 28 per cent of the highly-skilled and 26 per cent of the unskilled. In other words it was over-represented at both ends of the occupational spectrum.
 
That’s to take no account of pensions. Polly quotes the familiar figure of an average public sector pension of £7,000, as if it’s tiny. That would be riches to many who have worked in the private sector and seen their pensions dissolve under the impact of Gordon Brown’s chancellorship, the stock market falls, and low annuity rates.