Official figures show that average weekly earnings in the third quarter of 2009 were 0.8% lower than a year earlier.
The Central Statistics Office said the average weekly pay in Q3 2009 was €691.27, 0.8% lower than a year earlier.
In the private sector, the drop was 2.7% to €607.15. In the public sector, earnings rose 1.9% to €948.16, but this did not take the public sector pension levy into account. The levy was brought in in March 22009.
The weekly earnings of clerical, sales and service workers dropped by 3% over the year, with a 2.8% fall for production, transport, craft and other manual workers. But the drop was much smaller, at 0.2%, for managers and professionals.
The average number of paid hours in a week fell from 32.9 to 32 hours. But the CSO figures show that average hourly labour costs increased across all sectors by 2.1% to €25.14 an hour. The biggest increase was in the industrial sector, which the CSO blamed on high levels of redundancy payments.
