Published: 02 Oct 2014 11:42 GMT+02:00 
 
 The €99,000 salary offered to long-serving barbers at Italian parliament is “excessive”, a Rome barber who boasts the president as a client told The Local on Thursday. 
 
 Barbers who have worked at the Italian parliament and senate are facing a pay cut, under the government’s spending review. But even after their salaries are slashed by a hefty €37,000, long-serving state-employed barbers will still be able to earn up to €99,000 a year. 
 
 Across the city, a barber entrusted with Italy's most august scalp said even the reduced salary was over the top. 
 
 "It's excessive," barber Domenico Lotorto told The Local. 
 
 “They should earn the same as a normal worker there, with a salary based on the tariff from the national association of barbers,” he told The Local from his (privately-run) shop in central Rome. 
 
 As an early-morning customer stepped inside for his morning shave, just a stone’s throw from the Quirinale Palace, Lotorto said President Giorgio Napolitano is also a customer. 
 
 If the parliamentary system was applied to his work, he would more than qualify for the €99,000 salary. “I’ve breathed the air of a barber shop for 72 years!” said Lotorto proudly, having first stepped inside a barber’s at the age of six. 
 
 ‘Unjustified privileges’ 
 
 The parliamentary salaries have also been criticized by Italy’s civil servants union (Federazione Lavoratori Pubblici e Funzioni Pubblici, FLP). 
 
 Across the board salaries to parliamentary staff have been capped at €240,000, a move seen as “absolutely” justified by FLP. 
 
 The €99,000 offered to top barbers is however a sign that “unjustified privileges” will remain, Roberto Cefalo, spokesman for FLP, told The Local. 
 
 “But this is not the true Italian civil servant,” he said. “There are hundreds of thousands of people who work every day to guarantee security, services, justice and social support.” 
 
 Certain salaries may be too high, but Cefalo argued this is just one of many areas politicians needs to tackle. 
 
 The government must “transform the spending review into an opportunity for reform, not just a series of linear cuts that only hit workers,” Cefalo said. 
 
 When contacted by The Local, a spokesperson for the Italian parliament was not immediately available to comment on the salary cuts. 
 
 READ MORE: Italy's state barbers' pay trimmed...to €99,000 ||||| French President Francois Hollande’s hairdresser is paid a gross salary by the state of 9,895 euros, or $10,958, a month. 
 
 Just a third less than Hollande’s own salary, it is more than the gross monthly wage of a European Parliament member, which stands at about 8,213 euros, excluding expenses. The salary paid to the Socialist president’s coiffeur at the Elysee presidential palace was confirmed by the government after satirical magazine Canard Enchaine published details of the terms, including an image of his contract. 
 
 “Everyone needs their hair done, no?” Stephane Le Foll, the government spokesman, said after the weekly cabinet meeting at the Elysee Palace Wednesday in Paris. “I can understand people’s questions, I can understand their judgments. He’s not just anybody, that’s all.” 
 
 The hairdresser issue sits at odds with Hollande’s campaign promise in 2012 that he’d be a “normal” head of state in contrast with his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, who earned the label of the “bling-bling” president for his Ray-Ban sunglasses and fancy vacations. It also comes at a time when Hollande is seeking to push through a bill that would shrink workers’ benefits and make firings easier. 
 
 On Call 
 
 Hollande has only just been picking up a little support in the polls after being France’s most unpopular president in history. He will face re-election next year if he chooses to seek a second term. 
 
 Revelations about his hairdresser come two years after one of his closest aides, Aquilino Morelle, was forced to resign amid allegations of a conflict of interest and also because he reportedly used his Elysee office, overlooking the palace’s lawn, to have a shoe-shiner come in to brush his expensive leather shoes. 
 
 The hairdresser, whose contract requires him to be on call at all times, is being paid a salary that’s comparable to that of some of Hollande’s cabinet advisers. The president himself has a gross salary of 14,910 euros per month, excluding bonuses and perks. ||||| Not even in nursing—a field women dominate 10 to 1—are employees exempt from a gender-based pay gap that gives male workers better wages, sending male nurses home with anywhere from $3,800 to $17,000 more than women make every single year. 
 
 The amount varies among specialties, but male nurses make an average of about $5,000 more annually than women, according to a study published in The Journal of American Medicine Association on Tuesday. Nurse anesthetists have the widest gap and general hospital nurses the lowest, with orthopedics the only specialty that did not report inequity. 
 
 The report highlights longstanding concerns of inequality that have flummoxed nurses and supervisors alike—if a field hires women the vast majority of the time and women frequently advance to leadership roles, how is the pay gap still so wide? 
 
 “I can’t understand it,” Tish Kilfoyle, director of home care nursing at Hospice of the Western Reserve in Cleveland, told TakePart. “It’s just wrong.” 
 
 As someone who hires nurses on a daily basis, Kilfoyle is confident her staff is paid according to their education and experience. “We have a scale that we pay all our nurses the same on, and it’s all on nursing experience and years of experience,” she said. But that doesn’t mean she’s surprised that male nurses still make more on occasion. 
 
 The study combed through the salaries of more than 290,000 nurses over 25 years, determining that male nurses made more money every year from 1988 to 2013. They study’s authors have taken into consideration location, age, race, marital status, and children, yet still report that female nurse bring home less for the same work. And with registered nurses making an average salary of approximately $66,000, that translates to men earning about 8 percent more than women. 
 
 While evidence of a pay discrepancy between men and women is nothing new, the persistent gap in this female-dominated field is surprising. “You may think women have caught up or even might be ahead of men,” wrote study author Ulrike Muench, referencing that women make up the bulk of the workforce. “But we find that’s not the case.” 
 
 Kilfoyle thinks the pay gap might have something to do with trying to diversify staff and having to compete for a small number of hires. “In some agencies…you need to meet your quota. You need to have a certain number of female, male, and different nationalities. So is that a piece of it if there’s inequity? That’s possible.” 
 
 While the study did not explore the reasons behind the difference in pay, Muench offered a few explanations, including that women may leave the workforce temporarily to have children, men have stronger negotiating skills, and, of course, plain old gender discrimination. ||||| AFP 
 
 SHORT on the sides and thinning on top, French President Francois Hollande’s hair is kept perfectly groomed at a cost of almost 10,000 euros a month, the Canard Enchaine weekly reported Wednesday. 
 
 The unpopular leader’s hair has never been the topic of scrutiny, unlike other high-profile male politicians such as US presidential candidate Donald Trump or former London mayor Boris Johnson. 
 
 However the publication of the contract of his hairdresser, identified only as Olivier B., by the investigative newspaper had the French public bristling over such extravagant spending by a Socialist president. 
 
 “I can understand the questions, I can understand that there are judgments,” said government spokesman Stephane Le Foll, who confirmed the hairdresser’s steep salary of 9,895 euros ($14,460) a month. 
 
 “Everyone has their hair done, don’t they?” added Le Foll, his trademark thick grey mane flopping over his forehead. 
 
 ‘COIFFEURGATE’ 
 
 A politician with the far-right National Front (FN) referred to Hollande as “his majesty” on Twitter, while other users superimposed afros, mullets and other hairstyles on pictures of the president, to “help his hairdresser earn his salary”. 
 
 The hashtag #CoiffeurGate was trending on Twitter in France. Some Twitter users also suggested other balding candidates for the presidency in 2017, such as Alain Juppe of the opposition Republicans, could save taxpayers money. 
 
 An image of Hollande with a beanie photoshopped onto his head was captioned “budget cuts”. 
 
 Hollande himself earns an annual wage of 179,000 euros ($261,540) a year or 14,900 euros ($21,770) a month. 
 
 The Canard Enchaine reported that in addition to his salary, the hairdresser was entitled to a “housing allowance” and other “family benefits”. 
 
 He has been employed since 2012 and travels with the president on most of his foreign trips. 
 
 The hairdresser’s contract states that he must “maintain absolute secrecy about his work and any information he may have gathered both during and after his contract”. 
 
 Hollande’s former partner Valerie Trierweiler denied that the hairdresser had been brought in at her request, as two journalists claimed in a book published in April. 
 
 “Let’s be fair: F. Hollande was not aware of the hairdresser’s salary,” she said. 
 
 “I can attest to his anger when he learned it later,” she added. Trierweiler, a journalist, published a best-selling tell-all memoir of her relationship and breakup with Hollande, portraying the French leader as a cold-hearted egotist and champagne socialist, who was contemptuous of the “toothless” poor. 
 
 Hollande, who was elected in 2012, has always portrayed himself as “Mr Normal”, in stark contrast to his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy whose flashy lifestyle saw him dubbed “President Bling Bling”. 
 
 A series of political and personal scandals along with a moribund economy and stubborn unemployment levels have driven Hollande’s popularity rating to the lowest levels ever seen in Modern French history. 
 
 Critics on the left of his party accuse him of betraying Socialist ideals and costing up to business with a series of economic and labour reforms, despite stating during campaigning that the world of finance was his “enemy”. 
 
 Hollande has said he will decide by the end of the year whether to stand for re-election next year. He has said his decision will depend on his success in cutting unemployment. 
 
 Here’s how Twitter reacted: 
 
 10 000€/mois En même temps c'est une idée de gauche ça :travailler moins pour gagner plus ! #CoiffeurGate pic.twitter.com/1FQ41PxMkp — Clive (@CliveTwo) July 13, 2016 
 
 Les photos privées qui justifient le salaire du coiffeur de #Hollande sont enfin dévoilées #CoiffeurGate pic.twitter.com/6BgkpdJkkq — Sarkoziste #NS2017 (@Sarkoziste) July 13, 2016 
 
 Quand tu demandes légèrement dégarni sur les cotés #CoiffeurGate pic.twitter.com/wJKoflk0fD — Montreux Comedy (@MontreuxComedy) July 13, 2016 
 
 #CoiffeurGate 10000 € par mois la solution est là... pic.twitter.com/bRWr6EC54P — Laufra François (@laufra2330) July 13, 2016
– In Italy, the average nurse earns about $30,000 a year. A high school teacher typically brings home about the same, PayScale.com reports. The barbers who snip the hair of Italy's members of parliament? Well, they rake in just a bit more: $125,000 a year—and that's after a pay cut. Following a report last year that found barbers on the parliamentary payroll make up to $170,000 per year, they're being included in an "austerity drive," the BBC reports, citing Italian paper Quotidiano Libero. Apparently even barbers think the pay is a bit much, the Local reports. "It's excessive," says Domenico Lotorto, who claims Italian President Giorgio Napolitano is a customer at his private shop in Rome. "They should earn the same as a normal worker there, with a salary based on the tariff from the national association of barbers."