In your country, is the civil servant’s salary corrected automatically every year by some metric or does it work differently?

13 comments

1. For civil servants the raise gets negotiated between the government and the civil servants‘ union. It then has to be voted on by parliament. I think the raise negotiated by the union also influences the salaries of politicians, but I‘m not 100% sure of that.

2. The only salary corrected automatically every year by CPI (Consumer Price Index) is the pensions.

   Any other salary is subject to negotiations.

3. Ireland:
   A grouping of trade unions (ICTU) negotiate directly with Government on pay. The government can unilaterally reduce pay via use of powers granted in an emergency act (FEMA) enacted during the banking crisis.

4. UK public sector pay is a massive political football that various governments use to score points with the public. As such automatic pay rises are very much not on the table.

   Lots of parts of the public sector are covered by pay remit bodies. Thhe way that works is: the government says “this department has a budget increase for its paybill of 2%”. Then the independent pay remit body looks at private sector pay and budgetary constraint and says “we recommend a pay increase of 2%”. Then the unions get up in arms and point out that equivalent private sector pay has gone up by 4%, and after 18 months of negotiations we settle on 2%

5. In the UK, it’s… complex.

   Pay increases for health service staff and most teachers are determined by independent boards. The government then decides whether to accept the recommendation.

   Pay increases for local government staff are largely determined by the council, though tax spending constraints imposed by central government have some influence.

   I think pay rises for police and fire & rescue is largely determined by the force, but there are constraints applied by central government.

   Pay rises for actual civil servants in central government are dictated by the Treasury (finance ministry). It’s down to individual ministries how to implement it, but for most of the last 15 years, the increase to the overall pay bill has been capped at around 1%.

6. In Norway the unions in the private export oriented industry negotiate their salaries first and whatever they end up with is used as a norm for what workers in public and rest of private sector can get when they negotiate their salaries.

7. In Finland, salaries are mostly negotiated by trade unions with employers. These result in long and complex contracts that often include automatic long service raises. But, the base level is renegotiated every 2-3 years.

   When I worked at a university (in Finland these were state agencies), we had something like 11-14 different ranks and each rank had 10 levels, so the table had 110+ different salaries to choose from. The rank was determined at the start of the contract. The levels were supposed to be based on how challenging the work is, so it should have increased with experience and good performance, but this didn’t seem to be actually happening. Changing to a different job was the best way to improve your salary. Otherwise you got small 1% raises with the general contract and practically never a performance-based raise. Ending up in a wage trap was a constant hazard. Also, because of the large number of levels, the salary ranges of the ranks overlapped up to a hilarious degree.

8. The UK civil service salaries are within the purview of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to decide, as the responsible minister – no legislation or parliamentary input is required. Scotland has its own separate system for civil servants employed by the Scottish Government in its devolved departments.

9. France : we calculate civil servants wages based on a index point, which is supposed to follow the inflation. It’s been frozen for 15 years now, with only a 1.5% increase in 2023 because many civil servants would otherwise be paid under minimum wage!

10. Belgium: automatic indexation based upon inflation figures.

11. In The Netherlands every industry makes collectieve agreements regarding working conditions. Representantives of both employers and employees (unions) negotiate and make collective agreements called cao. There is a cao for civil servants. So salaries increases depends what is agreed in the cao.

    Every now and then both parties cant reach an agreement. So unions will call for strikes or other acts to persuade employers to agree with their terms.

12. Austrian civil servants negotiate via their trade union, just like (almost) every other sector. Almost every sector, as very very few have no union.

    Metal workers negotiate first and that generally sets the tone for all other union negotiations.

13. From what I understand of your question (and glimpsing at other comments here), the UK has a very complicated system.

    The different politicians will say “we are increasing armed forces pay by X%!” or “Our NHS are getting a 5% pay rise in the new financial year!” and then it becomes a big debating point between different parties as to where the ruling party are getting this money from VS if our emergency services and military, and civil servants deserve this sort of pay rise etc. It could, but doesn’t usually automatically follow inflation. If it did, an average soldiers pay would have gone up by about 300% since 2004, instead of 75%. That would never work though.

    It becomes a thing that can sway voters. Unions will get involved. It all gets confusing.