If we’re going to have a recession it must extend to the public sector. Corporations cannot be expected to take the strain while state employees are unscathed.

Yet public sector trade unions seem to think they should be compensated for the economic slowdown. Unison wants to re-open a three-year pay agreement for health workers just two months after signing it.

The union says it assumed inflation would be 2 per cent – the government target – but that it has already risen above 4 per cent and is heading for 5 per cent. The three-year pay agreement gives members 2.75 per cent for 2008, 2.54 per cent the following year and 2.5 per cent in 2010.

Local government workers in the same union have held a two-day strike (though the public can be forgiven for not noticing) to oppose a 2.45 per cent pay offer.

Of course nurses are struggling, but at least they have a job. Upto a million private-sector employees may be out of work by the end of the recession and receiving no pay rises. The public sector not only has job-security that private workers envy but privileged pension schemes.

It wouldn’t be a squeeze if people were not squeezed – but the pain must extend to the spending half of the economy as well as the wealth-creating side.

The government may choose to adopt a Keynesian policy of spending itself out of recession by initiating capital projects in the public sector, but that is not an excuse for inflating wages. Nor is it an excuse for taxing the private sector to finance public extravagance.

So far, the government is being firm, but with the political conference season looming, the unions – whose constituency is now largely only the public sector– are likely to remind Labour who provides the party funding. Gordon Brown must tell union members – his own supporters – of the need to share the pain.

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