Sarah Levy
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard Sep 2010
Sarah Levy’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think it's very difficult in newspaper coverage to look in detail at the sort of issues that we're looking at.
It's a very complex area and not one that is easy to summarise.
What we've done here is we've looked at both gross pay and the employer's pension contribution.
Because a lot of people, if you ask them how much they earn, they're likely to quote you their gross pay.
But in fact, the employer pension contribution can be a very significant part of overall remuneration.
So we've put the two together, gross pay plus employer pension contributions, to create a measure called total reward.
OK, well, what we found was that if we look at all full-time employees, the basic conclusion is that the public sector is better off than the private sector.
But we then realised that, in fact, that was not really a like-for-like comparison because the total reward is made up of both gross pay and pension contributions from the employer, and for the private sector,
A large proportion, 57% of full-time jobs, don't actually have any pension contributions, whereas in the public sector that's only 10%.
So if we were to compare all...
full-time employees we would not be comparing like with like so what we then did was to exclude the people who don't have any pension contributions so that when we're comparing total reward we are getting closer to a like for like measure and we then found a completely different result which was that in fact the private sector was better off than the public sector
Well, I see them as two different issues.
I think there's an issue of lack of pension coverage in the private sector
But if we're trying to compare like for like, you can do it for gross pay, but if you're looking at gross pay plus employer pension contributions and you include a lot of zeros, it makes it very difficult to make that comparison.
If you think of sort of similar examples, if, for instance, we were wanting to give you an average value of people's homes, looking at homeownership, we probably wouldn't include all the people who rent their home and therefore have zero value of homeownership.
So we're trying to make a measure here which actually reflects what the composition of the two sectors is and compare like with like.
Well, this is a different area from the one I work in.
What I'm interested in is pensions, and from that perspective it seems to me that if we're going to compare like with like...
we need to compare the people who have this sort of coverage.
As I say, there is a separate issue, and that is that we've got 57% of full-time jobs in the private sector with no pension.
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