Men top pay rise league

They may even be provoked into a sarcastic snigger on being told that they are top of a pay rise league table of Northern Ireland’s 26 district council areas. The women in their lives will probably temper their scepticism with an element of suspicion as to where all that extra cash is going.

It’s all to do with what Mark Twain famously described as “lies, damned lies and statistics”.

Each April the statisticians take a sneak peak into the wage packets of one per cent of employees. The number crunchers then use the information to compile ASHE, the Annual Survey of Hourly Earnings.

As the survey is based on PAYE returns it does not include the salaries of a wide range of people from self-employed farmers, plumbers and electricians to business people and professionals such as solicitors and accountants.

The latest ASHE figures do indeed show that the median wage for a man in Fermanagh rose by 10.5 per cent in the year to April 2014.

The median figure is the one in the middle of a sequence of numbers and is seen as being less susceptible to distortion than a simple mean or average. Half of people earn more than the median wage and half earn less.

The median wage of the 9,000 men in full-time and part-time employment in Fermanagh last year was £355.40, before tax and other deductions.

Although that was 10.5 per cent more than the year before it still left them in 19th place out of 26 district council areas. The men of Cookstown were bottom, having seen their median wage drop by 27.5 per cent to £309.20. Top of the table were the men of Belfast on £479.10 a week.

As for Fermanagh’s 8,000 working women? Probably just as well their menfolk were bringing home that extra bacon because they were left languishing at the bottom of the their league table with a median wage of just £236.50 a week. The top female earners were working in Armagh for £348.90 a week.

The figures include both full-time and part-time employees.

A more detailed look at the statistics reveals that the 6,000 men in full-time employment in Fermanagh saw their median wage rise by 6.3 per cent to £415.30 a week. Men in full-time employment in Cookstown saw their median drop by 21 per cent to £342.60 and again left them bottom of the wages table. On top were the men of Belfast on £533.70 a week.

The survey does not give figures for the 4,000 women in full-time employment in Fermanagh. In Northern Ireland their median wage was down half a per cent to £444.40 in a table topped by the women of Newtownabbey, who saw their median rise by 30.4 per cent to £546.30 a week. Propping up the bottom of the table were the women of Dungannon, who saw their median fall by 23.1 per cent to £321.90 a week.

Nor are there figures for women working part-time in Fermanagh but the combined figures for the 6,000 men and women in part-time employment in the county show a rise of 1.2 per cent in the median wage to £121.20 a week. That put them in 16th place in the league table. Top were the part-time workers of Ballymena, whose median rose by 19.4 per cent to £192.90. Bottom were the part-time workers of Coleraine, whose median slumped by 16.5 per cent to £115.20 a week.

ASHE also shows that the estimated median gross weekly wage for both full-time and part-time employees in Northern Ireland in April 2014 was £358, down 2.2 per cent from £366 in 2013.

The equivalent earnings in the United Kingdom as a whole increased by 0.6 per cent over the same period.

The fall in median wage in Northern Ireland was experienced by full-time employees in both the public sector, where if was down by 0.4 per cent, and private sector, where it was down 0.9 per cent.

However, part-time median gross weekly earnings in the private sector increased by 5.8 per cent to £140 per week.

The GMB union has used the ASHE figures to attack government policy.

It said that when inflation is taken into account, workers in Northern Ireland have suffered a 17.7 per cent pay cut in the past six years.