Analysis:Unions are angry that reviews widen pay gap between top and bottom, writes Martin Wall.
The benchmarking report has major implications not only for the forthcoming national pay talks but also for the Government's public service modernisation plans and for its pay determination policy as a whole.
The negotiation of a new national agreement was always going to be difficult.
Union leaders had already signalled that a deal would have to include issues such as their rights to represent workers in non-union companies and on improved standards for agency workers.
The unions have also pointed out that most of the rises under the current deal have been eroded by higher-than-expected inflation rates.
Employers, however, are opposed to new regulations governing agency workers and have stressed the need for pay moderation while Ministers have also called for wage restraint.
Now added to the mix will be anger on the part of most unions that their members have received no benchmarking increases, great unhappiness in some quarters over how the entire process was handled and a warning from some groups that the public sector modernisation programme is dead in the water unless some new mechanism is found to encourage participation by public service staff.
Last night the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions said that the new national pay talks will have to deliver pay increases "significantly above inflation".
"The Government and employers should be under no illusion. Failure to produce an acceptable deal will create a very real risk of rejection by the workers that have hitherto been the bedrock of social partnership," it warned.
Union leaders also signalled that they will seek to raise in the forthcoming talks the whole issue of the pay gap between top managers and middle and lower grades both in the private and increasingly in the public sector.
The CPSU, which represents lower grade civil servants, pointed out that over the last eight years secretaries general in government departments have received cumulative increases of 84 per cent while clerical officers received rises of 44 per cent.
Siptu said the trend in the private sector has been for the pay of top managers to increase much faster than those of other employees.
Unions have argued that this trend has recently spilled over into the public sector. All three Government pay reports this year, the review body on remuneration for Ministers and top officials, the Hay report on the commercial State sector and now the benchmarking document have recommended greater increases for those at the top.
The common trend for all three reports is that they examined the public sector vis-a-vis the private sector.
With this in mind, and given the arguments over the methodology used in producing yesterday's report, it would seem by no means certain that the unions will sign up for a third benchmarking exercise.
Benchmarking was devised in 2000 to get away from the tradition of pay relativities in the public sector whereby increases in one area led to knock-on claims in another.
Despite unhappiness in some areas all unions remained on board after the first report in 2002.
However, the attitude towards the process and how the body did its work appears to be hardening.
The AGSI, representing mid-ranking gardaí, said that benchmarking had lost all credibility, while other unions were highly critical that the body had changed its methodology.
Unions said that traditional comparisons between public and private sectors, including the first benchmarking exercise, had been at median earnings (mid-point of scales). However, the new report used weighted averages.
Impact, the largest public sector union, said that "many will conclude that the change was simply designed to minimise the pay awards".
The new report will also generate uncertainty about the Government's public sectior reforms. The unions argue that benchmarking has been the grease on the wheel of change in the past.
In the absence of such pay increases for most staff, the question now is what appetite will there be among public servants for further changes or will the Government have to bring forward some alternative method to encourage participation.