When the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions meets tomorrow to discuss the report of the benchmarking body, implementation will be top of its agenda.
The benchmarking report was the biggest exercise of its kind ever undertaken, the committee's chairman and IMPACT general secretary, Mr Peter McLoone, told a press conference called by the committee in Dublin yesterday.
"No other country in the world has subjected public sector pay to such rigorous inspection."
The outcome, he said, had vindicated the unions' view that public sector pay had fallen behind during the economic boom. He would have preferred if the parameters were narrower, but the body had a wide brief, he conceded.
The main challenge now was to get the body's recommendations implemented as soon as possible. The public services committee would be recommending tomorrow that the ICTU seek an early meeting with the Department of Finance to open discussions on implementation. There would be no definitive response from the public services committee until then, he said.
Dealing with the way the benchmarking body's recommendations were explicitly linked to modernisation and change, he commented: "This approach is nothing new as all pay rises under the last two national agreements have been explicitly linked to co-operation with modernisation and change." Structures already existed to establish, monitor and verify quality indicators across the public services, he insisted.
"No doubt some workers will be disappointed at the outcome - and some of the report's recommendations are puzzling," he said.
But the "unique institutional position" of the body made it difficult to deal with such problems. The benchmarking body, he explained was "a creature of the PPF" and had ceased to exist once the report was published: "It will not be possible to negotiate over the recommendations and there is no appeal mechanism built into the process."
Unions would have to deal with the report "in a new way", he warned, mindful that the Government was unlikely to allow them to accept parts of the report and reject others.
The body's recommendations were in addition to cumulative pay rises of between 18 and 21.5 per cent negotiated under the PPF, plus significant tax reductions, Mr McLoone added.
The public services committee's vice-chairman, Mr Dan Murphy, general secretary of the Public Service Executive Union, also took a pragmatic line. While the benchmarking process was not different, in principle, from the basic approach taken in the past, it did contain "important novel features".
The response from the unions demanded a collective approach which must take account of the negotiations on any successor to the PPF.
After the press conference, discussions focused on whether a new national deal would have to be concluded before the Government would agree to the "outstanding" 75 per cent, recommended by the benchmarking body.
Mr Mat Merrigan, national secretary of SIPTU, the union with the largest public sector membership, said the ICTU conference on September 10th would determine whether the trade union movement as a whole would agree to enter negotiations on a successor to the PPF. If it was decided not to, the public services committee would still be mandated to seek implementation of benchmarking, and would do so regardless.