Pay increases for workers will provide the stimulus necessary to cement the economic recovery, SIPTU General President Jack O’Connor has said. Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics programme on Sunday (22nd March), O’Connor said: “We shouldn’t in the trade union movement, or in our society, be engaged in a debate which separates people who work in the public sector from people who work in the private sector.“What we need in the economy, more than anything else, given that we are in the early stages of a recovery is a pay increase for people. So we can reinforce the momentum of that recovery in the domestic economy.”He added that pay increases would “increase the capacity for a large proportion of our population to buy the things that they need, which in turn will address the problem in terms of (static) retail sales.”“We’re not talking about going back to circumstances where the banks and developers wrecked the economy,” he said. “We’re talking about increasing workers wages in circumstances where unit labour costs have fallen by 20% vis-à-vis those in the rest of the Eurozone.”To watch Jack O’Connor on The Week in Politics click here
Jack O’Connor calls for pay increases across the economy
