Benchmarking report could spark industrial action

THE bulk of lower ranking public sector workers will today be told they are to get little or no pay increases through benchmarking in what will spark threats of strike action and could spell the end of participation in the benchmarking process.

There is a general expectation only senior managers will be given notable awards and if that is the case the Civil, Public and Services Union predicts trouble not only for the benchmarking process but also for the Government.

It has blamed the failure to remunerate rank and file workers in the sector on the way the benchmarking process is run. The body bases its assessment of public sector pay on the equivalent grades in the private sector.

Eoin Ronayne of the services union said: “The difficulty we have here is that the benchmarking body report, no different to the Hay Report or the Higher Remuneration Report, track trends within the private sector and clearly there is something seriously wrong in the private sector where you have ordinary workers being left significantly behind on low salaries while senior managers award themselves significant sums of money and push way ahead in the stakes.” He said if, as expected, the benchmarking body does return zero increases, it spelt serious difficulties for the next round of pay talks.

“If partnership is not about bringing some equality into the pay structure in society, both public and private, then there is a problem,” he told RTÉ.

One of the groups likely to be the most militant in light of their allocation this afternoon is nurses. They called off their eight-week long work to rule believing they would secure more than €6,000 increases this time round. That looks highly unlikely and while they are not threatening to go back to the picket lines yet, they are proposing legal action as an alternative.

The minuscule increases which are being predicted for this afternoon will be all the more difficult for civil servants to stomach after it emerged yesterday the Government had sanctioned large pay increases for chief executives of commercial state bodies.

That means pay increases in the tens of thousands — ESB chief executive Padraig Walsh’s wage packet could rise to €494,700.