THE GENERAL secretary of the largest public service union has said that the benchmarking process for determining special pay awards for civil and public servants is "dead in the water".
Speaking in advance of Impact's biennial conference in Kilkenny, which starts today, Peter McLoone said that another benchmarking exercise of the type experienced earlier this year was not on and that unions and the Government should sit down to decide a new pay determination system for the future.
He said that such a pay determination system would "need to get a handle on how you deal with reform, restructuring and modernisation" as well as changes to which individual grades and categories are exposed as a result of developments in their particular sector.
He said that the two benchmarking exercises carried out in recent years confined themselves to comparing in a snapshot the pay of public servants with that of private sector workers.
Mr McLoone said that there was little by way of a mechanism for dealing with people who claimed that their job had changed fundamentally.
Most members of Impact received no increases in pay under the recent benchmarking process.
In a motion to be considered at the conference, the union's central executive says that the recent benchmarking body "undermined confidence in the fairness of the pay determination system and put future public service modernisation at risk by significantly changing its methodology to ensure zero increases for most public servants".
The motion says the union should seek a genuine review of the public service pay determination system as part of the social partnership talks.
The conference will also hear calls for Impact to develop its own proposals for public service reform which would be aimed at achieving "genuine high quality and equitable public services".
Mr McLoone said that for years staff had co-operated with the change and modernisation programmes put forward by management and the Government but found that this was not in line with the agenda of the average citizen.
He the modernisation programme represented "change for the sake of it". He said such changes were not proofed to ensure they would bring additional benefits to the public.
The conference will also consider a motion calling for a review of the Government's controversial decentralisation programme.
It will also discuss a motion from the boards and agencies branch calling for the risks experienced by public servants in implementing unpopular Government policies to be taken into account in future pay determination.
Taoiseach Brian Cowen is expected to speak on public sector reform in an address to the conference on Friday.