Analysis: Trade union leaders say benchmarking has delivered industrial peace, writes Chris Dooley, Industry and Employment Correspondent.

After months of standing quietly on the sidelines, public service unions yesterday entered the fray in the row over benchmarking.

Content until now to leave the debate to politicians, the unions finally decided it was time to publicly defend the deal made on behalf of their members.

What took them so long? Well, as IMPACT general secretary Mr Peter McLoone indicated yesterday, it wasn't really up to the unions to defend a process that was not of their making.

Benchmarking, he pointed out, was not a trade union invention. Nor had it come about as a result of trade union demands.

Rather, it was a product of a debate which had raged in the 1990s over the way pay levels were determined for the public service, and the number of disputes that ensued.

Under the old system of internal, cross-sectoral relativities, an increase secured by one group in the public service would inevitably trigger a pay rise by another.

Benchmarking, by linking public servants' pay rates with those of people doing comparable jobs in the private sector, was designed to get away from that.

If Mr McLoone, and his Public Service Executive Union counterpart Mr Dan Murphy, had one key message yesterday, it was that benchmarking has already delivered on this primary objective.

Not only that, they argued, but it has also provided industrial peace. This claim may be a little premature given that Sustaining Progress is only a few months old.

Nevertheless, the "no strike" provisions in that document, which are tied in to payment of the benchmarking increases, do lessen the likelihood of industrial action in the future.

If benchmarking did nothing else except eradicate the leap-frogging pay claims of the past, and bring industrial stability to the public sector, it might be considered cheap at the €1.1 billion annual price.

Critics, however, have focused not on these issues, but the increased productivity which public servants were supposed to concede in return for pay rises averaging 8.9 per cent.

The benchmarking body made it clear in its report last year that public servants should have to sign up to a programme of modernisation and change. "It is the firm expectation of the body that real outputs will be delivered," it said.

A document published by the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions yesterday set to spell out in detail just what those outputs are.

It listed longer health service opening hours, the holding of parent-teacher meetings outside school hours, an extension of lunchtime opening hours and new on-line facilities among the improved services.

Increased use of open recruitment, a six-month public sector pay freeze, industrial stability, increased flexibility and better financial management systems were also mentioned.

Selling some of these reforms as tangible improvements is a difficult job, Mr McLoone and Mr Murphy conceded. But behind the jargon are real improvements in services, they argue.

"Cross-functional working", for example, facilitates the streamlining of local government services, enabling local authorities to open more "one-stop shops" where customers can access all services.

These arguments did not convince Fine Gael's finance spokesman, Mr Richard Bruton, who issued a statement yesterday rejecting the ICTU's claims.

Mr Bruton, however, showed a less than clear understanding of how pay relativities in the public service worked.

The "parallel benchmarking" deal involving craft workers, publicised this week, exposed the fact that "the use of relativities to assess pay claims is alive and well in the public service", he claimed.

This is not the case. The craft workers' pay, which is to increase by 17 per cent, was benchmarked against that of workers in the private sector.

The Fine Gael politician is also guilty of a rush to judgement in declaring that benchmarking has delivered "no tangible benefits", given that the deal came into effect less than four months ago.

The reality is it may take some time before the public can judge whether benchmarking has delivered any real improvements in public services.

In the meantime, the debate will rage on.