It took roughly one day after the New South Wales election for conservative media groups to begin spreading fear about union power and public sector wage blowouts. But as labour market policy director, Greg Jericho writes in his Guardian Australia column these fears are massively overblown and also ignore the reality of how much workers have lost out over the past few years.

In NSW public-sector wages grew just 2.5% in 2022, well below private-sector wage growth in that state and massively below inflation which rose 7.6% in that state last year.

Public-sector wage caps were notionally introduced to get the budget back into surplus, but that was just a fib – once the budget returned to surplus the caps remained. The purpose of the wage caps has always been to drive down private-sector wage growth, a point made abundantly clear by former Treasurer Matt Kean when he told an audience at a Business NSW function that removing the public-sector wage cap would see their companies “competing for labour against the public service who were paying huge wage increases.”

But the reality is the wage cap not only keeps private-sector wages down it has smashed the living standard of public sector workers whose real wages are now more than 5% lower than they were 2 years ago.

The fear of wage rises must stop.