The executive committee of the union representing lower-paid clerical grades in the Civil Service has recommended that its members should reject the methodology used by the benchmarking body, which resulted in them receiving no pay increases.
The Civil, Public and Services Union is to ballot its 12,000 members in the Civil Service on proposals to seek "a fundamental review" of the approach taken by the benchmarking body in comparing public service jobs with the private sector and on how it assessed the value of public service pensions.
The executive of the union, at a meeting yesterday, found that the benchmarking report had been "fundamentally flawed because it bent the rules and moved the goalposts in order to come up with a zero award".
Informed sources said the union was proposing a review of the methodology adopted by the benchmarking body with a view to securing a changed outcome for its members. The CPSU executive committee also yesterday discussed industrial action in the wake of the benchmarking report but considered it was not necessary to take any decisions on this issue now.
The CPSU is understood to be the first of the various public service unions to formally consider, at executive level, the controversial findings of the benchmarking report. Other unions will follow suit over the coming weeks in advance of a meeting of the public services committee of the Ictu in early February.
Meanwhile, in a speech in Cork yesterday, the general secretary of Ictu, David Begg, criticised the secretive manner in which the pay and perks of top private sector bosses were determined.
He said that there had been "surprisingly little scrutiny of how salaries and perks are decided for top people in the private sector.
"The reality is that these decisions are made by board remuneration committees populated by a small cohort of people who pop up in other boards across the economy. There is little or no shareholder policing of this practice," he said. Mr Begg added that the increasing divergence in pay between the top and middle-to-lower income earners in the private sector had now been reflected onto the public service.
He said enrichment of the few at the expense of the many ultimately destroyed social cohesion and rotted the very fabric of society. Any upcoming national pay talks would have to address the key issues of the pay gap and proper pension provision "in a coherent, focused and strategic fashion", he said.
In a statement last night, the CPSU said its executive committee "reflected the anger and dismay of ordinary CPSU members that top managers are being handsomely rewarded for overseeing the public service modernisation programme while frontline staff who deliver the change and deliver the improved services to citizens were given a slap in the face".
The union also rejected the decision of the benchmarking body to calculate a 12 per cent value on public service pensions having set 8.5 per cent as the private sector rate."A pension could never be provided with 8.5 per cent of salary and the benchmarking report completely ignores the major reforms made to public service pensions in the 2001 pensions report," it stated.
