With the Gardai, Teachers and Nurses all looking for an increase in pay recently, people in the private sector say they should also get pay rises.
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Patricia Callan, Director of the Small Firms Association, told Beat news that businesses in the South East aren't planning on giving pay increases like private sector workers in the Capital.
'No, there's no appetite amongst the business community to go back to those centralised bargaining deals, you won't be seeing a return to that.
Business' will continue to conduct their affairs at enterprise level and that is a much better method in terms of accounting for local differences and standard of living and also various sectoral issues so we certainly won't be moving away from that'
She added, "60% of our member companies who are all small companies will be giving a 2% pay rise this year. We expect it to be fairly similar next year. Now, that's all related to productivity because currently there is no inflation in the economy - we're actually in a deflationary period - so any pay rises have to be justified by productivity and improvements in the workplace".
