Data from the SARB show that real wages in the public sector grew faster than private wages since 2009. Interestingly, data from Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Employment Survey (QES) suggest the opposite. This partly reflects differences in how the public sector is defined: the entire community, social and personal services sector is included in the public sector in the QES, whereas the SARB excludes the non-government portion of this subsector, together with non-government transport, storage and communication services from the calculation. The QES also excludes the electricity sector from the calculation of the public sector, which the SARB includes. The SARB remuneration per worker also differs from that in the QES as it reports on the ratio of gross earnings to the number of employees for the quarter, while Stats SA publishes average monthly earnings for the middle month of the quarter.
