People Before Profit have criticised government plans to increase the salaries of 20 of the highest-paid managers of state bodies. This comes on top of the announcement that the new ‘Housing Tsar’ is to be paid €430,000
Minister Chambers today published a ‘Review of Remuneration of CEOs in Commercial State Bodies’, covering publicly owned companies such as RTÉ, the Irish National Stud, Horse Racing Ireland and Uisce Éireann (formerly Irish Water). The Minister also announced that the government has agreed to increase the salaries of 20 of these CEOs to be more in line with the ‘marked median’ for CEOs, but the final salaries are yet to be determined.
People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy criticised the plans saying:
“We have a government who are refusing to implement the promised increases to minimum wage workers, and yet is promising pay rises to some of the highest-paid managers in the state. There’s talk of the new ‘Housing Tsar’ getting €430k, and now dozens more managers to get salaries higher than the President of the United States to run things like Horse Racing Ireland, the National Stud or Uisce Éireann.
“This amounts to millions of euros on massive salaries for those at the very top, while the workers on the ground are told there’s no money for them. It is totally unfair. Rather than running water, public transport and postal services as private companies, aping the worst excesses and inequalities of big business, we should be running them as public services. It is workers and users of the service who should be in control, not overpaid government appointees.”
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Notes for journalists:
Government statement here: Minister Chambers says “A banded salary structure will be implemented for CEOs ranging from their current salary to the market median of the relevant band” i.e. salaries of those below ‘market median’ will get increases
Full report here: Page 24 of the report says that 20 of the CEOs fall into that category and so will get increases