The general secretary of the largest public sector trade union has has said that many members could wind up getting nothing at all from the forthcoming benchmarking report.
Peter McLoone of Impact has warned members to brace themselves for awards of "very low single figures" .
According to the union's internal newsletter Mr McLoone told Impact's consultative council that the forthcoming benchmarking report was likely to be very different from the first process which reported in 2002 and which awarded average increases of 8.9 per cent.
Mr McLoone said the current benchmarking body was expected to say that pay in the private sector had not increased as much as public service salaries over recent years. He also suggested in the article that the benchmarking body would place a substantial value on public service pensions compared with those in the private sector.
The benchmarking body is charged with assessing pay rates in the public sector by comparison with similar posts in the private sector. Increases awarded to public servants under benchmarking are in addition to those provided under national agreements.
In its submission to the benchmarking body last year, the Department of Finance suggested that it should withhold special pay increases if it did not believe that they were warranted.
The department said it was unaware of any clear evidence of significant upward drift in pay levels in the wider economy since 2002. It said a number of reports had indicated that public sector pay had moved ahead of that in the private sector.
Last month the review body on higher remuneration in the public sector, which examines top-level pay, recommended that salary scales should be discounted by 15 per cent to take account of the value of public sector pensions.
Public servants are set to get increases of some 5 per cent under the Towards 2016 national agreement next year in two tranches in March and September.