Suddenly it seems everyone in business and government wants to see a considerable increase in teachers' salaries. The Business Council of Australia is leading the charge, calling for a doubling of the present top rates of $75,000 a year, which it says will give fresh impetus to growth. Doubtless a case will be put for financing this from one of the infrastructure funds into which excessive taxation collections are being siphoned.
The premium level of salary is designed to go only to the teachers who have the greatest merit. This intent represents a triumph of hope over experience.
All public sector increments started out as being merit based but the outcome has been an automatic shift up the scale except for those exhibiting grossly egregious behaviour.
Moreover, the council, in making the case for rewarding excellence, appears to have taken little account of market situations. There are a great many people involved in skilled and worthy work who don't get the rewards they and others consider they merit. Think of nurses, sewerage workers and top policy advisers within the public service.
In the case of teachers, one-third of senior schoolchildren are taught in non-government schools that have no wage cap. If demand for excellent teachers was outstripping supply or if outstanding teachers were demonstrably better than those who are simply superb or just pretty good, this would surely be reflected in private school teachers' salaries.
Yet the available evidence is that non-government school teachers earn little more than those in the public school system.
Though teaching is a valued profession, it has features that offer compensation for salary levels that at the peak are less than 40 per cent above those of the average full-time worker.
Among the offsetting benefits is the risk-free nature of the job: nobody is in any danger of being laid off. In addition, it has far more generous leave provisions than any other job. And for the ambitious there is also considerable scope for advancement within school and education administration. For these reasons, notwithstanding full employment, there appears to be no lack of new recruits to the profession. Shortages are confined to maths and science, which can be dealt with selectively.
Teachers are not the only public sector employees with claims to higher salaries. Similar pressures are always present regarding the salaries of senior public servants. The most successful business executives earn several times the $500,000 a year the most senior bureaucrats pick up. However, there are market checks on remuneration for business leaders. The firm's shareholders have a vested interest in ensuring they do not over-pay since this reduces their profits. The firm's owners, represented by the board of directors, have to weigh up the benefits of paying more for managerial talent against this loss of their own income.
Such determinations are far less easy to undertake in the case of public servants. Many point to private sector remuneration levels as evidence that they are underpaid. This is clearly not the case with teachers, where direct comparisons can be made with private sector employees.
Finding a yardstick against which to measure remuneration claims for senior public servants is not so easy.
If senior public servants had skills similar to captains of industry -- those they measure their claims against -- you would expect to see them offering their services to that better remunerated vocation.
Yet surprisingly few do or at least do so successfully. Those who leave the public sector and make careers in business with few exceptions are employed in consultancy or government relations roles. The latter would rarely command stratospheric salaries, while the former are small, not big businesses with very variable remuneration levels.
This suggests a different skill-set between senior public servants and top business managers, with no real correspondence between the two. It probably also means that we are over-paying senior executives in the public sector because their next best employment opportunities, as revealed by their continuance within the sector many claim to be grossly underpaying them, is another public sector job.
The lack of interaction between senior management in the private and public sectors also means paying senior mandarins more would not have an impact on remuneration of top private sector managers. By contrast, paying public school teachers more would automatically force up wages in private schools. This would require increased fees, a bonus for those such as Education Minister Julie Gillard, who makes no bones about her hostility to private education.
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