Public service trade unions said yesterday that the entire benchmarking process for determining the pay of public servants may have been damaged by the recent report of the benchmarking body. Martin Wall, Industry Correspondent, reports.
Speaking at a press conference after a meeting of the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, its chairman Peter McLoone said that the process needed to be looked at in the light of both the current report of the benchmarking body and the first such exercise five years ago.
He said unions had expressed "dismay and disappointment" that the vast majority of the 300,000 civil servants, nurses, gardaí, teachers, local authority and health service staff covered by the benchmarking process are to receive no pay increases.
"The feeling of many of the unions is that the report of the body may have done a lot of damage to the [ benchmarking] process," he said.
However, Mr McLoone said that he did not believe that social partnership itself was in trouble.
He said that the general secretaries of the various unions would now consult with their individual executives and meet again in a few weeks to decide on a collective approach towards the new national pay talks which he believed would begin at the end of February or March.
Mr McLoone said that the term industrial action had not been used at the meeting. He said that the union leaders had indicated that they would be talking to their executives and suggested that if any threat of industrial action was to surface it would emerge from these meetings.
Mr McLoone said that the benchmarking process had been painstakingly developed as an alternative to the previous system for determining public sector pay which was based on individual claims and relativities.
He said it had been difficult to get all the public sector unions to agree to become part of a single exercise and there was now concern that there would be difficulty in sustaining confidence in the process.
"There is concern we have damaged that confidence not just because of the report itself but because of the relentless criticism [ of the current and previous benchmarking process in 2002].
"We are going to work to ensure that we have an orderly system for determining public service pay going forward but we can't do that on our own. The Government needs to engage with this challenge," he said.
The Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) is to meet early next week to consider its response. The INO had agreed to take its case for a 10 per cent pay rise and other claims to the benchmarking body. However, the vast majority of nurses are to receive no increases. The INO said the body should have set out at the outset that its core demands were outside its terms of reference.